Skyrim Tape Gag WIP

[tfjohnson]

Hey LL, first time posting.

 

So for the past couple weeks I've been playing around with blender 2.78.  I'm at the point where I can do some basic modeling and tried to make a tape gag since it hasn't been done yet.  I've got the mesh itself to a place where I'm happy with it but I've run into the problem of getting the mesh from blender into Skyrim. I've tried finding guides on how to do it, but I can't seem to find a one on exporting armor/clothing meshes to Skyrim using blender 2.78. Any help at all would be greatly appreciated. Here are screenshots of the work and once I've got something that can be used in game I will happily share it.

[Hæretic]

I know there is some Niftools beta stuff out there that should work with blender versions past 2.49b but I have never get it to work and I am not sure it's even supposed to work.

I would recommend use 2.49b for export. The way I do it is just exporting the files from a newer blender version to .3ds format or something like that, then Import it to 2.49b, set material stuff and weighting and then export it into .nif format. Or I just work directly in 2.49b which is also okay most of the time.

 

Try it with the 2.49b tutorials and if you have problems at any point of the export I can probably help you. Just quote my post and I will be notified.

 

Oh, and in blender, select your mesh, go into edit mode, press "W", and click "Set Smooth" from the dropdown. You have to do this in blender before export or otherwise, your mesh will be rendered "Solid" in skyrim.

[Alunder]

I had a similar problem with Blender some time ago and I would recommend Autodesk 3DS Max 2012 with nif plugins updated and installed properly. One thing I know is that some newer versions of Autodesk or maybe Blender may have compatibility issues in this import/export options, because of the nifskope plugin, so you have to see if the plugin is already available, compatible with the program version and installed in the correct directory. Some are executable and install automatically, try to review this, reinstall the Blender if necessary or try Autodesk is a good choice too. With the tutorials on youtube it is quite easy to learn the basics in it. 

[caocaothedeciever]

Great work so far- do you plan on keeping the lips quite so obvious through the gag, or to make it a bit less so?

[Feliks]

I had a similar problem with Blender some time ago and I would recommend Autodesk 3DS Max 2012 with nif plugins updated and installed properly. One thing I know is that some newer versions of Autodesk or maybe Blender may have compatibility issues in this import/export options, because of the nifskope plugin, so you have to see if the plugin is already available, compatible with the program version and installed in the correct directory. Some are executable and install automatically, try to review this, reinstall the Blender if necessary or try Autodesk is a good choice too. With the tutorials on youtube it is quite easy to learn the basics in it. 

 

While I agree with your advice it is unfortunately impossible for anyone to get a new legal copy of 3DS Max 2012. Autodesk only keeps the last 3 versions (so in this case I think the newest is 2014) and I haven't been able to find a functioning set of Nif plugins for anything newer than 2012.

[tfjohnson]

I know there is some Niftools beta stuff out there that should work with blender versions past 2.49b but I have never get it to work and I am not sure it's even supposed to work.

I would recommend use 2.49b for export. The way I do it is just exporting the files from a newer blender version to .3ds format or something like that, then Import it to 2.49b, set material stuff and weighting and then export it into .nif format. Or I just work directly in 2.49b which is also okay most of the time.

 

Try it with the 2.49b tutorials and if you have problems at any point of the export I can probably help you. Just quote my post and I will be notified.

 

Oh, and in blender, select your mesh, go into edit mode, press "W", and click "Set Smooth" from the dropdown. You have to do this in blender before export or otherwise, your mesh will be rendered "Solid" in skyrim.

Thanks for the advice.  Most of the guides I found were about 2.49b but I thought I would be able to get away with using 2.78 exclusively. I'm kind of buried with college work atm but when I have some free time I'll get 2.49b installed as soon as I can.

 

I had a similar problem with Blender some time ago and I would recommend Autodesk 3DS Max 2012 with nif plugins updated and installed properly. One thing I know is that some newer versions of Autodesk or maybe Blender may have compatibility issues in this import/export options, because of the nifskope plugin, so you have to see if the plugin is already available, compatible with the program version and installed in the correct directory. Some are executable and install automatically, try to review this, reinstall the Blender if necessary or try Autodesk is a good choice too. With the tutorials on youtube it is quite easy to learn the basics in it. 

I tried looking into 3ds Max and even got the demo version of the 2017 version.  Unfortunately, every time I tried to start it up the graphic would show up for a second before crashing. I'm already comfortable with blender, plus it's free which works well with my poor college student lifestyle.  

 

Great work so far- do you plan on keeping the lips quite so obvious through the gag, or to make it a bit less so?

Thank you. Personally, I prefer smoother gags. The lips showing is a result of having blender shape the gag to the femalehead shape, as opposed to me having to manually do it and taking forever. In the end, I'll probably go with a smoother gag, then you could add text to the texture and not have it look weird, but I'm open to suggestions. I want to get the export part down first and get what I have into the game before I start worrying about variants.

 

Huge fan of your deviantart gallery btw.

[caocaothedeciever]

 

 

Great work so far- do you plan on keeping the lips quite so obvious through the gag, or to make it a bit less so?

Thank you. Personally, I prefer smoother gags. The lips showing is a result of having blender shape the gag to the female head shape, as opposed to me having to manually do it and taking forever. In the end, I'll probably go with a smoother gag, then you could add text to the texture and not have it look weird, but I'm open to suggestions. I want to get the export part down first and get what I have into the game before I start worrying about variants.

 

Huge fan of your deviantart gallery btw.

 

 

 

Well that is awesome!  Thank you so much, it's the first time I've found any of my DA followers here on LL ha ha ha.  Cheers ^^

 

I think going with the smoother gags is a better idea- because you're right about having people being able to put text or pics on it.  It'd be a lot of fun that way and who knows if you ever manage to make it so you can do layered gags .

[tfjohnson]

I know there is some Niftools beta stuff out there that should work with blender versions past 2.49b but I have never get it to work and I am not sure it's even supposed to work.

I would recommend use 2.49b for export. The way I do it is just exporting the files from a newer blender version to .3ds format or something like that, then Import it to 2.49b, set material stuff and weighting and then export it into .nif format. Or I just work directly in 2.49b which is also okay most of the time.

 

Try it with the 2.49b tutorials and if you have problems at any point of the export I can probably help you. Just quote my post and I will be notified.

 

Oh, and in blender, select your mesh, go into edit mode, press "W", and click "Set Smooth" from the dropdown. You have to do this in blender before export or otherwise, your mesh will be rendered "Solid" in skyrim.

 

So mini-ish update of what's going on. I got 2.49b and the nifscripts plugin in working and spent most of the day working on trying to get this exported (I smoothed out the mesh and exported a 3ds from 2.78)...then I hit a wall. I've been following this guide http://wiki.tesnexus.com/index.php/Creating_an_armour_for_Skyrim._Part_1 as closely as I could but I messed up at some point. I was able to follow the blender portion well enough (I think) but the part where the guide loses me is when it's talking about getting rid of the scene root in nifskope. I've got three children objects and I don't know which I'm supposed to delete or if I'm even supposed to have that many to begin with. If I touch the 12 (NPC head) or the 1 (Duct Tape) the gag moves out of position. I know something is wrong but I don't know specifically what it is.

 

This is what my scene root/children looks like

 

This is after I deleted everything.

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Hæretic]

You can skip that part if the NiTriShape is a direct child of SceneRoot. Your nif always needs a root node and sometimes blender does mess this up by adding the SceneRoot node on top of an already existing root node. 

Assuming you already set the NiHeader to the Skyrim settings, next thing will probably be deleting material data, you can install my Modified Niftools export Script if you want to skip that part too. This isn't a lot of work if you are doing it a few times but it gets really annoying after while...

Then you can either inject a BSLightingShaderProperty or you can just copy&paste one from an existing armor that has properties you like and change the paths of the BSShaderTextureSets to your texture paths.

When that part is done you just need to set the partition of the BSDismemberSkinInstance to the number your armor reference is using (For Gags 44 is commonly used).

Now your nif should work in game.

[tfjohnson]

You can skip that part if the NiTriShape is a direct child of SceneRoot. Your nif always needs a root node and sometimes blender does mess this up by adding the SceneRoot node on top of an already existing root node. 

Assuming you already set the NiHeader to the Skyrim settings, next thing will probably be deleting material data, you can install my Modified Niftools export Script if you want to skip that part too. This isn't a lot of work if you are doing it a few times but it gets really annoying after while...

Then you can either inject a BSLightingShaderProperty or you can just copy&paste one from an existing armor that has properties you like and change the paths of the BSShaderTextureSets to your texture paths.

When that part is done you just need to set the partition of the BSDismemberSkinInstance to the number your armor reference is using (For Gags 44 is commonly used).

Now your nif should work in game.

Ok, first off that export script is awesome. Second I ran into some things. I have a feeling that some of the problems are coming from the guide using a bodyslot item instead of one that's going on the head like I'm trying to make. So when it's talking about editing bodyparts for the dismemberment data I'm just kind of guessing what has to be done for a head item. So I exported the nif from blender, put it into nifskope to make the edits and I had some questions about what is happening. Do I need to have femalehead.nif and NPC Spine2? I'm asking because I took a look at gags from other mods (Dasha's gag and the ballgag from devious devices) and noticed that the only things that are there is the NPC Head and the gag mesh.

There's also a line connected to my tapegag NiTriShape along the Y axis that is not present on the other nifs.

 

I also copied the BSLightingShaderProperty from Dasha's harness gag (if that matters)

 

In the guide it says the Num UV Sets should be 4097 but on my end Num UV Sets is greyed out and BS Num UV Sets has the information. Does that matter, or is it functionally the same thing?

 

I tried to make an item in game with my nif but I got MODELS: Could not find model tapegag.nif error. From what I tried to find out on my own I think it's more of a directory thing but I'm not entirely sure.

 

I really appreciate you taking the time to help me with this.

[Hæretic]

In the tutorial look below the part you highlighted in your second pic. It says something like "this only has to be done for body parts", so you don't need to do this for normal items. There is no such thing as a body slot item, all items use body slots (partitions), the guide is just a little confusing if you ask me. 

No, you don't need the head mesh, in fact, you should delete it. The spine2 node can be deleted if your gag isn't weighted to it, only nodes that your meshes are actually using need to be present in the nif. My guess is either you weighted the gag to spine2 or the head mesh is weighted to it so blender exported it along with it.

If it still doesn't work please upload your nif here so I can take a look at it, it's much easier to spot errors for me if I can look inside the nif.

 

About the connected node "line", extend the NiTriShape of your gag and check if there is another node inside there somehow that shouldn't?

 

[tfjohnson]

In the tutorial look below the part you highlighted in your second pic. It says something like "this only has to be done for body parts", so you don't need to do this for normal items. There is no such thing as a body slot item, all items use body slots (partitions), the guide is just a little confusing if you ask me. 

No, you don't need the head mesh, in fact, you should delete it. The spine2 node can be deleted if your gag isn't weighted to it, only nodes that your meshes are actually using need to be present in the nif. My guess is either you weighted the gag to spine2 or the head mesh is weighted to it so blender exported it along with it.

If it still doesn't work please upload your nif here so I can take a look at it, it's much easier to spot errors for me if I can look inside the nif.

 

About the connected node "line", extend the NiTriShape of your gag and check if there is another node inside there somehow that shouldn't?

 

That last post really helped and I was able to fix the problems with the nif. Also I figured out why that "line" was there in my NiTriShape, I forgot to zero the object's position and rotation in 2.78 before exporting it to 2.49b. Which leads to...

 

Getting the nif into the game. Which is awesome.

 

Now I need to get the textures to show up (even though I have silverTape.dds...unless it's case sensitive) I just changed the case to match the name of the texture file in nifskope and now it's telling me I need a normal map, so I'm going to go find a tutorial on youtube.  Also I'm going to need to tweak the mesh so it fits to other head shapes because as of now it only lines up with the default femalehead (it's kind of hard to see since I only took a front screen shot but the sides don't even touch my char's head and the clipping with the top of the gag) My guess is I'm going to have to redo the mesh but use a cube instead of a plane (to fill gaps between the gag and head) or cut off the sides off the gag so it only covers the front of the mouth instead of the mouth+cheeks.

 

Here's the nif

tapeGag.nif

[Sharkness Monster]

Glad to see a mod like this coming along

[tfjohnson]

In the tutorial look below the part you highlighted in your second pic. It says something like "this only has to be done for body parts", so you don't need to do this for normal items. There is no such thing as a body slot item, all items use body slots (partitions), the guide is just a little confusing if you ask me. 

No, you don't need the head mesh, in fact, you should delete it. The spine2 node can be deleted if your gag isn't weighted to it, only nodes that your meshes are actually using need to be present in the nif. My guess is either you weighted the gag to spine2 or the head mesh is weighted to it so blender exported it along with it.

If it still doesn't work please upload your nif here so I can take a look at it, it's much easier to spot errors for me if I can look inside the nif.

 

About the connected node "line", extend the NiTriShape of your gag and check if there is another node inside there somehow that shouldn't?

Hey all. Sorry of the lack of work on this, my course work for college picked up and I didn't have much free time to work on this. Since my summer break started I've been able to get some more work done of this mod.

 

I opted to go with a smaller gag that's a "block" so it (hopefully) fits better with more head shapes. Also I was able to smooth out the gag so the lips are less pronounced.

 

Now for the sucky part. I tried to get it in game but when I equip it on my char it causes her head to become invisible except for the gag. I've tried starting the import over from the start again, following the guide step by step in case I missed something but I have no clue where the problem is. The confusing part is I was able to get the older mesh into the game.

 

Here is the mod file. There's more I'm going to add later on like a proper world model and a read me. Also the only requirement is the Skyrim.esm (at least for right now)

Tape Gag.zip

 

[Valgo]

Nice, always prefered cloth or tape gags over ballgags.

[tfjohnson]

Nice, always prefered cloth or tape gags over ballgags.

 I agree. I love layered gags. I'd like to make more gags down the line, but I figured its better to start small and get a simple tape gag into the game before moving on to more complicated stuff.

 

[Malkon]

Apologies for the thread necro, but was there any plans to finish this? You seemed fairly close.

[tfjohnson]

Apologies for the thread necro, but was there any plans to finish this? You seemed fairly close.

 

I would love to be able to finish it but I have absolutely no clue on how to get the item working in game. I was able to edit an existing mesh and get that working but it was by accident and I have now clue what I did. The main problem I'm having is the only software that is available now that can import into skyrim is blender 2.49b. There's too many steps involved with 2.49b and I'm not experienced so if something goes wrong I won't know until I try to get the item in game and when it doesn't work, I don't know where I messed up. The niftools available for the blender 2.7+ can't export meshes as nif due some problem with armature support needing to be fixed (I forget what the actual error was I think it's " 'nif object has no attribute 'get_object_matrix' ") I tried getting 3ds max because I found a comprehensive tutorial on youtube, but the only version that works is 2013 which I'd have to pay for since autodesk only offers access to the last 3 versions.

 

Sorry if it came off as bitchy. I'm just frustrated because I'm figuring out how to do the modeling and made some neat stuff that I'd like to see in game, but I can't get any of it out of blender. I know there is a way to make it work, it just feels like all the avenues are closed off to me.

[Malkon]

No apology required, I understand that it would be frustrating for you.  but thanks for the quick response and clearing the situation up for me.  Hopefully one day you find a resolution.

[ninjatone]

Dude, you were SO CLOSE. Here, I fixed it (attached).

 

The issue wasn't so much blender probably as the slot you chose in both the NIF and the Creation Kit: Slot 30, or the thing that replaces the entire character's head.

 

All I had to do here was change the slot to 44 in both the NIF and the CK -- it's the mouth slot, used in some other gag mods -- and Voila! Functional tape gag.

 

Of course, I had to decrease my character's mouth depth way down in RaceMenu to avoid clipping, but that's a different story. Nice work on this!

Tape Gag.zip

[tfjohnson]

On 2/23/2018 at 11:10 PM, ninjatone said:

Dude, you were SO CLOSE. Here, I fixed it (attached).

 

The issue wasn't so much blender probably as the slot you chose in both the NIF and the Creation Kit: Slot 30, or the thing that replaces the entire character's head.

 

All I had to do here was change the slot to 44 in both the NIF and the CK -- it's the mouth slot, used in some other gag mods -- and Voila! Functional tape gag.

 

Of course, I had to decrease my character's mouth depth way down in RaceMenu to avoid clipping, but that's a different story. Nice work on this!

Tape Gag.zip

Oh my god, to be that close and have no idea! Thank you so much, I was going stir crazy as I must have recreated that nif over 6 times trying to figure out where I screwed up lol. When I finally have some free time I'll have to try working on some other things, as I feel like there aren't nearly enough gags in skyrim.  I'm in the process of trying to get my hands on a copy of 3ds max 2012 but it's nice to know I can fall back to blender if I'm unable to do so!  Thank you again.   

[bleeb]

Looks like the last zip link isn't working. Does anyone still have the files to use this gag?