Need A Little Clarification About Hdt And Meshes

[KilltrocityMachine]

So, i've recently discovered my issue with importing skyrim nifs successfully (.nif has never worked properly for me since goddamn Oblivion) and decided i'd see what i could do with this HDT stuff. Bouncing Breasts and butts has been thoroughly covered, so i can move on. Cloaks, skirts and long jackets seem to be the next step.

Anyways, I took apart the test skirts uploaded here and now i have a few questions:

1) the test skirts have quite a few of their own bones. Bones that were not on the Female Skeleton that i use with HDT. Does this mean that "Havoced" bones can be made up on the fly? Could i conceivably make a long coat with unique havoc bones and not have to worry about the game crashing?

 

2) the skirts were using there own .XML files. To do this, do you just need to put the .XML file in the same folder as the mesh and name it the same? I'm sure there's a much more complicated process, but is that the gist?

 

3) if these are true, then with a little creativity, wouldn't it be possible to make clothing (and hair) with unique skeletons and havoc for various different things, like swaying sleeves, flippy skirts, full length havoc dresses, etc... instead of compounding it all into one massive skeleton?

I've seen unique clothing with free flowing ties and kimonoe sleeves and so on, but always thought they required there own skeleton that overwrote whatever you were using.

 

Truth be told, i know dick about animation or any form of havoc in 3ds Max. I mesh, rig, and texture. If i've solved my .nif problem, i could do that for skyrim. So i don't even know if this is a well know fact or an unachievable goal.

[blabba]

Your free to try experimenting with my stripped down 'generic' xml that I made using the latest XPMSE skeleton if you want.

 

Nexus:

http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/53903/?

 

LL:

http://www.loverslab.com/files/file/1051-generic-loincloth-movement-xml/

 

The trick for not compounding it into 1 massive skeleton is you make your own custom bone hierarchy in the scene in 3dsMax, and on nif export you uncheck 'flatten hierarchy' this in essence bakes your bones into the outfit's nif file. And this is how most HDT enabled outfits are made without requiring you to install some ginormous convoluted skeleton replacer.

 

If you can rig a mesh properly and have a similar loincloth type mesh you can use that xml and hook it into your rigged mesh to add physics to it without worrying about having to get and understand Havok Content tools and stuff (if you don't want to learn akk that stuff, if you do I suggest looking up canderes509 on youtube and follow his tutorials, he's known as canderes here and has tutroials posted here as well under the tuorial subforum)

 

(Your free to join the IRC orange button in my sig if you want to learn more in realtime...)