Working on MALE NUDE manekin replacer

[Guest]

I thought it would be a piece of cake.

 

1. unpack Skyrim bsa archives to get the manakin meshes, textures;

2. take a nude body mesh (i.g. malebody_0 Nudes - SundraconMeshes - Flaccid, uncircumsised, normal) as a replacer;

3. set a link to vanilla menekin textures in NifSkope

 

Ups, there it is, the UV-mapping problem: while the body looks as it should, the Penis NiTriShape looks wrong.

If I assign "manakinbodym" as a texture, I have this

 

In case I appoint "manakinhandm", it looks a bit better, though still ugly

 

 

Concerning I have no uv-mapping skills at all, I am stuck shamefully, and as always waiting for some kind soul to come and help me out.

 

P.S. Besides, I suspect there something else with those manekins (I don't know why are they called "manekins"), maybe a few additional difficulties. Cuz there we have two nifs of uknown designation (destination): manekin.nif and manekinN.nif. Or maybe they are simply two weights.

 

P.P.S. I wonder why don't we have a normaly-textured nude manekin replacer mod so far. There are a few nude replacers, all of them use bodyskin textures - that's a perversion, don't you find ?

[Acedia53]

Hey there,

 

This is actually something I did a couple of years ago myself. The reason the penis is black while using the body texture is because it's mapped to a blank part of the texture, and the reason it looks bad when mapped to the hand texture is because the texture is being stretched across it.

 

If you right click on the penis and go to Texture > Edit UV, you'll open a window that shows how exactly each face of the mesh is being mapped:

 

 

 

 

 

See how the white mesh outline is in a black section of the texture? That's why it was showing up wrong. To move this, you don't actually need to re-paint the entire UV map, you can simply manipulate the existing one a bit in NifSkope. So what happens when we move the UV map over the body? Control + A to select all faces of the mesh, and drag them over. Like this:

 

 

 

 

Well, that doesn't look much better, now does it? That's because the UV map is so small. A tiny part of the texture is being stretched across the entire mesh, so it looks very low resolution. To address this, we can scale the UV map up a bit. While all are highlighted, right click > Scale and translate selected. In the scaling factors X box, enter 2.5. Make sure the uniform scaling box is ticked to maintain proportionality. We now end up with this:

 

 

 

 

The texture now looks a lot better, but its placement is still a bit off. We can manipulate it at will until we find a position we're happy with. Use the Rotate Selected option to aid in placement, and experiment with different scalings, orientations and positions until you find one you're happy with:

 

 

 

 

And there we have it, an anatomically correct wooden mannequin model. Bonus picture using a custom mahogany texture:

 

 

 

 

 

With a polished specular map, it actually looks very good in game. I would show you, but I'm playing Enderal at the moment and couldn't find a mannequin anywhere. Anyway, hope this helps

[Guest]

Thank you so much. You've helped me a lot. It appeared to be quite simple 

Just wanna ask: there are two files there: "manekin" and "manekinN". They seem to have no difference...

[Acedia53]

Glad I could help

 

Are the manekin files you refer to *.nif files or *.dds files? If it is a *.nif, then I think manekinN would be related to a mod you have installed (although I can't imagine why if they are the same), as it is not found in Skyrim's data folder or any of the DLCs normally (or else it's an accidentally renamed copy of the mesh).

 

 

 

 

 

If they are *.dds files, you might be referring to manekinbodym.dds and manekinbodym_n.dds. The first is called the diffuse texture, which is what gives objects their colour and allows parts to be transparent, while the second is called the normal map, denoted by _n or _msn, and is what gives surfaces their "3D" appearance, like cracks, ripples or roughness on what would otherwise be a smooth surface, through a technology aptly called bump mapping. The normal map can also contribute to how shiny the surface of a mesh is, too. Other texture files you may come across would be _s for specular maps and _e for emissive maps, but the naming convention isn't always consistent.

 

(P.S. I think they called them "manekins" to make it easier for the developers to type consistently, because the correct spelling, "mannequin" is more prone to typos, but this is just a theory of mine).

[Guest]

Nice to meet such an eager-to-help person 

 

Very strange. I have the same picture as you do when in BSAopt. But after unpacking the number of files differs

 

Though it may have no sense to learn the truth. I should check manekin's appearence in game. Last time I was in game I've failed to do that - couldn't find it's ID. Only something connected with manekin's head. The second strange thing. I have some suspicions and have made some Tes5 editing. Gonna check it once again.

 

Listen (I am a bit confused on is it polite enough to use such an expression), here I have some probs with textures compatibility. I've been tried to work on Dante's player model (armor in fact) I've found on Internet, to combine it with other body mesh. Everything looks fine, except for the textures. This is the case I need some advice from an expert on those specularity maps and so on. If you are interested to have a look at these pics, it would be nice.

 

Alright, this is how it looks in NifSkope render:

You can notice those face and body textures are in need of adapting to each other, but it's not a fatal difference. The question is: am I able to make it by the means of NifSkope?

 

This is how a new "armor" looks in actor's container menu (Hjoromir is ready to try it on  ):

 

This is how it looks in game: 

Neck seam and wrong hands textures (it's not clearly visible).

 

Well, and here are the other three variants of how it looks in game:

The system seems not to be sure on what textures should it pick up. And I may say finaly it prefers the actor's (Hjoromir's in this particular case) textures, except for the hands. Such a mess 

[Guest]

OK   he is an NPC 

with no talking, no IE. Just standing around, headtracking me, and shifting from one foot to the other. God, I feel so sorry for him!!!

[Acedia53]

Firstly, sorry about the lateness of  the reply. I got caught up in a lot of real life issues and completely forgot about this. Did you end up making any progress in the end?

 

Regarding your most recent issue of a mannequin being an npc, this is actually very close to correct. In Skyrim, mannequins are not objects, but actually are npcs with a strict AI script that freezes them in place. Similar to how you can give a follower weapons and armour, the mannequin will equip what you give it. You may be familiar with mods that "fix" wandering mannequins that would sometimes have moved to a different part of the room when you load in. Having not worked with them myself (and not quite having the time to look today) I can't say what the problem is, except that your mannequin has not been frozen properly and thus is behaving like a blank npc with no schedule or dialogue.

 

Regarding the Dante replacer armour, the neck seam is a well-known issue with many body/ texture replacers because the textures at the edge of the neck mesh don't blend into the edge of the head mesh, creating this line that's quite difficult to hide, even in the vanilla game. You can also see this at the wrists and ankle. A similar effect is created at Dante's upper thighs due to a seam created in the UV map, so the upper leg edge texture is imperfectly blended with the edge of the groin area texture.

 

As for the texture affair going on in your variants picture, I'm not 100% sure what's going on in the first picture without checking the mesh myself, although offhand it is similar to symptoms of incorrect emissive settings. Your changes fixed it nicely in the second image, before the game selects the normal male skin texture in image 3; does the game flick between these different options, or is one permanent? I've had this trouble before, when attempting to fix the forsworn boots to have a higher poly toe mesh. I couldn't separate that foot texture from the one the character used. Sadly, I never managed to fix that issue (I dodged the problem by making many edits to my body replacer textures and making my own foot replacer instead) so I'm not sure if I can help