New Hair Mesh Difficulties

[Evan555alpha]

Okay, long time, no see. Too busy making this damn mod. Anyway, I seem to have run in to an issue with a new mesh. I just can't seem to get it to export correctly from bodyslide. Something to do with skinning. Toggling that in NifSkope makes the mesh look perfect, however turning it on causes all kinds of funkyness. 

Spoiler

Note that that is the result of doing a supposed workaround to this issue, reloading a mesh with the bones that are active up, reimporting the exported mesh in to bodyslide, then exporting again. I tried to do that twice, and the second time did nothing.

 

The end goal with this hair, due to how long it is, is to have it rigged to the body, so that it follows the movement of the shoulders/back. The PonyHair01/02/03 bones are, to my knowledge, used by Crimes Against Nature to add hair physics to its models, which is also what I am trying to emulate. 

 

Are there any bones that I'm not meant to use for hair? Any that are required? Or am I just doing something wrong entirely?

 

Attached are two variants of the exported nif, and the obj used to create the model.

Hair.zip

[Blaze69]

So, I have never tinkered with FO4 nor do I know how it works, but I do know that in Skyrim if your mesh is rigged to bones that are not present in Bodyslide's reference skeleton (for example built-in HDT bones for hair or tails or the custom hair/head lagbones from the Skyrim Crimes Against Nature Skeletons), you get bugs like those after saving the nif from BS.

 

Are those PonyHairXX bones you mention from the default FO4 skeleton replacer (like XPMSE is for Skyrim), or are they exclusive to the custom CaN skeletons? If it's the latter, then that may be your problem.

[Evan555alpha]

Going through the RaceCustomizer BA2 archive, as well as the CaN BA2 archives, and seeing how I don't have any skeleton.nifs in meshes\actors\character\characterassets, I'm assuming that yes, these bones are exclusive to the CaN skeleton. Do you think this would be fixed by telling Bodyslide to use the CaN skeleton, if at all possible?

[Blaze69]

4 hours ago, Evan555alpha said:

Going through the RaceCustomizer BA2 archive, as well as the CaN BA2 archives, and seeing how I don't have any skeleton.nifs in meshes\actors\character\characterassets, I'm assuming that yes, these bones are exclusive to the CaN skeleton. Do you think this would be fixed by telling Bodyslide to use the CaN skeleton, if at all possible?

Huh... maybe? Theory says yes, but I don't know if using the CaN skeleton as a reference will have any other side effects. As long as it's not missing any bones the BS skeleton has/needs (like breast bones or whatever other fancy stuff FO4 has) and the main changes are the addition of head/hair related bones for CaN assets, I'd say there is no reason for it not to work, but I don't know for sure.

 

I'd say it's worth a try; at the very least it should prevent the PonyHair bones from breaking and causing the distortion on export, though we won't know if there are any other factors at play until we get rid of this specific bug.

[Evan555alpha]

Okay, so. Copying the CaN skeleton to BS's skeleton ref folder, telling it to use that skeleton, loading the hair mesh, deleting the PonyHair bones (but keeping the PonyHead_Skin one) and exporting results in two distinctive halves of the hair, as though half of the bones were translated on the z axis.This is better than before, where it was one distinctive half, and a clusterfuck of geometry. The difference appears to be the same difference in height that happens when both the hair and a body are imported in to Bodyslide. I'm going to tool around with the mesh in nifskope for a bit, and see if translating the higher bones down does something.

Spoiler