Added geo to a NIF, but geo vanishes as soon as I fix a bad material path?

[notasquirrel]

Hi all,

 

Trying to get the Maya -> FO4 workflow down.  I started with one of Calyps' harness .nifs and added two geometries to it, along with two new materials and one new texture.  The geo I added that uses an existing texture (slinky red dress) works fine.  The other geo is behaving really weird, in that it will only show up in-game when it can't find its .BGSM material files.

 

Some notes:

• The problem geo has only diffuse and normal maps on it, no spec texture etc.  (Maybe that's relevant?)
• The texture is encoded DXT5 and has detail in the alpha channel.
• The meshes have the new CBBE boob physics on them.  So far they are working fine for me, as long I follow procedure to a 'T' and each NPC continues to wear only physics-enabled items on their chest.  (Limbs seem to not matter.)  I just finished converting all of Calyps' harnesses to add physics, and they all work including this problem NIF.  (They are subtle and somewhat stiff, but they're what we've got until people figure out the havok stuff.)
• I got the material on the problem mesh by (1) copying Materials\Clothes\Underwear\UnderwearF.BGSM, (2) modifying it to point to my texture and deleting the references to the other textures, (3) making a copy of the wet outfit material template it referenced, (4) adding a second more transparent diffuse texture to that material, and (5) linking the main material's 'wet' material to my copy of the 'wet outfit' template.
• Using ousnius' Material Editor 1.2, from Dec. 30th.
• Using NIFSkope 2.0.0-prealpha-4.
• BodySlide / Outfit Studio v3.1c (latest).
• Maya 2015, and I've got a few other outfits that this workflow churned out successfully.

 

1: First load:  Geo showed up pink, because I got a material path wrong.   But geo was there, on the mesh, rigged, animating just fine.  So I quit and fix the path using Material Editor, and do the same in the NIF using NIFSkope. 

 

2: Second load:  With the the material path fixed, the mesh vanished completely.  It doesn't even show in wireframe mode in FO4.

 

So I investigate in NIFSkope.  Weird...  It showed up perfectly before in NIFSkope, but when I load it up again it shows my diffuse colors with some a normal map from the game.  I think it's the normal map from the slinky red dress, which is the material on the block immediately above that mesh in nifSkope.

 

So I find some random normal map in the FO4 textures tree that's just a flat square with no detail, and apply that normal map in the material and in NIFSkope.  Object now looks correct in NIFSkope (weird that it didn't before) but is still missing completely in-game.

 

3, 4, 5, etc.:  Undies are still just not there in-game, no matter what.

 

Any ideas?  My best guess is either there's some weird thing I missed when copying over the material, or adding a texture for the wet material is bad, or maybe FO4 just can't do more than a certain number of tristrips in one NIF.

 

I've attached all the files.  (I think.)  The only thing not working in-game is the undies.

 

http://imgur.com/a/ahbwS

 

Rename the texture files, and nothing changes.

 

Rename the material files, and I get this again.

halp_its_broke.zip

[PrometheusV]

I think its the nifskope rootnode type that wont work with fo4 now. you have to make sure its bsfadenode and not nifnode if you export to nif

[graymare]

I can't seem to get the underwear that is in the game files to do *anything*. I might blame it on that material file now that you are hving this issue.

 

Any chance that there is a transparency node just making it invisible somewhere?

[notasquirrel]

I think its the nifskope rootnode type that wont work with fo4 now. you have to make sure its bsfadenode and not nifnode if you export to nif

 

Hmm.  OK.  Weird that all other .nifs I've checked are NiNodes.  I did a convert in Nifskope, we'll see if that does it.

 

EDIT:  No change, for me.  Oh well.  Is the bsfadenode thing a new deal for fallout 4 with the latest patch?  My .nifs are coming from Outfit Studio, via FBX import.

 

I can't seem to get the underwear that is in the game files to do *anything*. I might blame it on that material file now that you are hving this issue.

 

Any chance that there is a transparency node just making it invisible somewhere?

 

Sounds like trying a different material is a good idea too.  There is transparency on these, but there's also transparency on plenty of other things too...  Deleting the alpha property might be a good thing to try too.

 

I was trying to see if I could get clothes to become more transparent when wet.

[graymare]

 

 

I was trying to see if I could get clothes to become more transparent when wet.

 

 

I was planning on doing the same at some point.  Have been waiting 'til I (or one of the many more competent people than I) figure out how the "other than texture" maps actually work.

 

Please tell us if you figure it out.

[SlapMeSilly]

Ok, so first issue I see in your material file. You specified Alpha Blend Mode to be "Standard", change it to "Unknown".

 

Now the underwear won't be invisible completely. Not sure why FO4 is stupid like that but it is.

 

Next in the nif file on the NiAlphaProperty node, change flags to 4845 or 4877.  In my test below I made a pink file and had to also change the threshold to 0.

 

You may need to play with the opaqueness of the texture to get your result. I've included a pink recolor test. It's quite ugly on the back but maybe it's what you're trying to come up with.

 

Note: This still doesn't work in game, only the preview in Nifskope. Not sure where the rest of the issue lies.

 

Screenshots in nifskope

 

 

flags 4845

 

flags 4877

 

 

undiesPinkTest.dds

[SlapMeSilly]

It looks like for partial transparency you have to use bgem (effects) files. Think bloatfly wings.

 

In my limited testing it caused weird discoloration and glowing so I gave up and moved on.

[BringtheNoise]

If the updated engine is anything like Skyrim...

 

Then it can only handle one transparency for an area at a time.

I would highly suggest running the nif thru outfit studio and creating a zap slider to remove the unused area off of the harness mesh (to go along with the edited textures that remove sections of the outfit via texture).

 

Zap it down to just the harness bits and see if the panties then show up in game....

If it does then the game is probably unable to figure out transparency under a hidden but rendering vertex/poly area (which wouldn't surprise me since its just a 64bit update with some extra bells and whistles to Skyrim's engine).