whats custom about this? you already get this item ingame....

@xodiac
textures are 512s
didnt count polies but from the topology id say its between 800-1500 again, some with less some with more...

Not in your game you don't.

Why change formats when you are already familiar and know how to effectively work with the format you have been using for the past 10 years? Thanks to NifSkope, it is the easiest file to work with in nearly all game modding.

Its not Gamebryo. Gamebryo was the RENDERER, not the damn engine. They scrapped the renderer, thus eliminating ANY gamebryo from the engine. Gamebryo is GONE. Notice its not on the game box. If they still were using Gamebryo, they would have to put the name on the box.

From a technical standpoint, the ID5 would be worse for the kind of open worlds that TES games consist of.

Hello,

Actually, you can import the models and skeletons into 3dsmax with the latest niftools if you change User Version to 11 and User Version 2 to 34 in the NiHeader. You'll need to delete BSLightingShaderProperty from the nif or else the importer will complain. I haven't tried exporting yet, may be able to export with Civ4 tools as well.

Best regards,
RX31

yup. exporting works from max as well. (not with civ4 though, it's the same as trying to convert from ob to F3 version issues, and for mesh data there is no point, and now the animation format has changed, makes civ4 pretty much not useful now)

you have to export as a F3 nif and do some nifskoping, but the skin instances are working. I've got some issues to work out with it still, but yeah I had a rigged mesh in there already.
I was doing a bit of a work around way, which is not really necessary apparently, I'm going to try the other way and see if it is better.

Yup other work flow is better than mine:

Mini tut:

1: Delete all the crap in the skeleton.nif that isn't F3 stuff, I just wiped those 2 trees at the bottom, leaving the regular skeleton data and the bones themselves. Change user versions 1&2 to 11 and 34. save.

2: Import into max. Make outfit. skin. add dismember. Export as a F3 nif.

3: Open in nifskope. In this order: In the Nitrishape block details change the num of properities to 0. THEN change the user versions from F3 to Skyrim versions.

4: Open a skyrim nif, copy branch your NitriShape and paste into the root node. steal one of the shader blocks and hook it up to your nitrishape in property link 1. change Unknown Short 1 to 0. change anything in the BSDismemberSkinInstance partitions to match what ever it is.. or not.

5: Profit. http://www.skyrimnexus.com/imageshare/images/209926-1321960294.jpg#

I did it slightly differently than that, I actually unlinked the dismember block from my nitrishape before pasting, pasted it separtely, and linked it back up on the other side.

Now I THINK you can actually just export from max and just fiddle with the data in nifskope and no need to copy pasta anything, the only thing that is goofy is the BSLightingShaderProperty, which is the only thing I really needed to use from a vaniila nif.

Mostly unrelated to TESSnip but for those willing to try it:
http://niftools.sourceforge.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=3178

cool finds guys
good work!

posted the last two posts in the first post

http://s66.photobucket.com/albums/h271/Phittte/DaedricSkyrim.jpg I've got a question though...my normal maps don't seem to do anything in Skyrim. I've never modded for Fallout 3 (at least not model related), is there anything special I need to do? I tried to update tangent space, but I guess that's not needed anymore since there is no tangent space block anymore and I couldn't find any difference after updating it either. I put the diffuse and normal map paths in the texture property (like in Beth nifs), so that shouldn't be the problem.

Also, how can I set things like 'gloss', that were part of the material property in Oblivion (which also doesn't exist anymore)?

Hope you don't mind me asking here, but has anyone heard anything on some Blender 2.5+ Nif scripts?

In Oblivion normal maps were automatically used and had to be named the same as the texture. In FO3 the the normal map is specified within each mesh for each texture. The settings have been there since Oblivion they just weren't used until FO3.

Hay Phitt Glad to see that stuff in Skyrim. I heard somewhere that Skyrim uses object space normal maps for some things. I might be totally wrong though.

In Fallout 3 and Skyrim the normal map is part of the BSShaderTextureSet (Second texture, diffuse being the first) which hangs off of BSShaderProperty derived properties. Typically Bethesda uses BSLightingShaderProperty which is new for Skyrim. The BsShaderProperty looks like its going the pain in the neck for this release. Tangents and Binormals are explicitly part of the NiTriShapeData or NiTriStripData I believe. So updating the tangent space should still be in theory a reasonable thing to do. They also have nixed the NiMaterialProperty which seems reasonable since its useless most of the time in previous games.

I'm guessing gloss is part of the BSShaderProperty or BSLightingShaderProperty and someone has to anolyze it and find it. Mostly likely waiting for TESCS to be released assuming it still has some debugging capabilities for objects like it used to.

could also be that gloss is now completely regulated by the normal alpha channel, never saw a use for it in the materialproperty anyway tbh, the mat property was only useful if you didnt want to use glow maps (for performance reasons for example) and could make the whole object glow in some colour

I already added the normal map path to the texture properties, but I think I found the problem. The tangents and binormals blocks in the TriShapeData block were grayed out in my nif, seems like updating tangent space in Nifskope doesn't work for FO3 nifs. I reexported them from max and tangents and binormals are there. Will have to update the nif.


It is annoying that Sheogorad was never completed since it took so much time to make all this stuff, so at least I want to port the better tilesets/meshes I made to Skyrim asap. I won't start another Sheogorad for Skyrim, but a few nice dungeon mods and modders resources would be great I guess, especially so close after Skyrim's release when the modding scene is still very active.



I'm looking for the gloss value, not the emissive color. The gloss determined whether the specular map showed a wet or a dry light reflection. For example skeletons had a gloss value of 4 and looked very dry, metal usually had a gloss of 10, while Ayleid ruins with their wet look had a gloss of 60. I think the sewer tileset had even more gloss so it looked really wet.

You must tick the has normals to yes to get any of the tangent vector fields up. and the num of UV sets to 4097. then the spell will work.

The material is probably in the unknown floats in the BSLightingshaderProperty, Gloss might be the 3rd one down, I have limitedly tested these so it's wide open....

They're just not being generated at all, even if I have it checked. Just the Tangent vectors, no normal or binormals. It's like I didn't check it... but I was sure it was checked just now when I made an export.

2010 x64 version, FWIW.

Also from the looks of it, only the body skin meshes seem to be using object space normals instead of tanspace. I did a quick look at some of the Steel Plate normals, and they look like tanspace normals.

In any case, for whatever reason, my attempt to apply a skin modifier fix for the female steel plate meshes didn't work. I tried splicing in the NiTriShapeData and BSDismemberSkinInstance blocks into the existing mesh... It seems that the pivot point is the same coordinates as the head bone. In either case, if I just splice it in as-is, or do transform > apply, it doesn't appear in-game. The game launches, but the mesh doesn't render.

don't do this. copy the entire nitrishape don't replace data blocks because it doesn't work and currently breaks UVs. and I wouldn't apply transforms to skinned meshes. And forget what nifskope, if the mesh is wrongly positioned after messing about, check ingame, I had a similar issue in a dud workflow I was experimenting with had the mesh at the characters feet... even though in nifskope it was somewhere else, it's probably Skin Transform in the niskindata being zeroed like max always seems to do...

With UV sets set to 4097 it works, thanks!

And the third unknown float indeed seems to control the gloss. Lower values for a more dry effect, higher values for a wet effect. I've found nifs with a value of 667, so I assume the range could be something like 0-1000. Didn't see much of a difference between 200 and 1000 though (in Oblivion it was hard to tell the difference between 20 and 100 as well, so I guess it's the same system only with one digit added). Beth used 20-80 for metal as far as I could see, 200-667 for slightly wet looking stuff like cave/dungeon walls.

EDIT: http://s66.photobucket.com/albums/h271/Phittte/DaedricSkyrim2.jpg

EDIT2: Now I'd like to add collision to the mesh. I've seen that Skyrim nifs use a bhkCompressedMeshShape under the Mopp shape. Does regular Mopp collision (with bhkPackedNiTriStripsShape) still work and/or is there a way to export collision as a bhkCompressedMeshShape (in case Fallout used the same)?

EDIT3: When I try to add a regular packed shape to a Skyrim nif it says 'unkown block' and deletes the subshapes. So I guess that doesn't work.

On export I noticed that it seems to be generating TanSpace data like it did for Oblivion, in a completely separate property for each mesh piece instead of in the NiTri*Data property. Needs to be corrected...

EDIT: Just tried direct copy fo the entire NiTri and then replacing the BSLightingShaderProperty... still nothing. Even after I did the regeneration of the full TanSpace that Phitt did.

Is it because it's a rigged mesh? Are those components not functional yet?

Bump, with another issue... (How'd this thread get buried anyway?)

I've decided to move on to giving the Skyforge steel weapons a shinier texture set.

I've made up the new sword textures.

I've duplicated both copies of the steel sword and renamed it "skyforgesteelsword.nif". (regular and 1stperson).

I've redirected the textures in both to the new Skyforge pair in NIFSkope.

I've altered the MODL subrecord in the sword to point to the new skyforge steel sword in TESSnip.

I've checked and doublechecked that it's set to load and is last in load order.

...And yet it's still the old steel sword.. What's up?

I'm checking with a brand-new console-added sword instead of my improved and enchanted out the wazoo swords.

EDIT: Did a straight-up replace of the steel model, and it loads, so it's not a NIF or texture problem, the issue is in the plugin.

I'll be making stabs at the LightingEffectShader today too, if you come up with anything solid, let me know which name field you've found it in. Right now that block is a mess from my decode, there's a bunch of extra floats at the end that as far as I could tell, were only present based on the first int of the block, it didn't seem quite right. I found a couple of things last night that are very wrong too.

2) CompressedMeshShape is brand-new, it was a major PitA to work out, and it will probably be a while until we understand it better for exports on that block. I've never really 'gotten' collision, but I'd first look and see how it compares to a PackedStripsShape.

3) That's no good, I don't recall any problems there, did you add that block with NifSkope? After my nif.xml updates, corwin made some corrections and ensured that 5 games worth of .nifs would still load properly before releasing his. I've merged that into mine, i'm just in the middle of a pc swap, so I'm not totally up and running yet.

@MadCat221: The exporters start a new shape for each material by design, unless you're talking about something else.

I've never seen this happen tbh. The tangent space block getting exported from max in a F3 version nif. Export settings?

and there are a couple data edits to make to get the copy trishapes and skin to work. Most notably in the dismember partition and that unknown in set to zero in the nitrishapedata block. It definitely works for rigged stuff
http://www.skyrimnexus.com/imageshare/images/209926-1321994973.jpg

Also, can we decide on a thread for these conversations? The overarching chat dies in the main threads, and picks up random "i can't search forums" threads, and it's getting annoying to keep up with what's what.

Also, I'm chatting on IRC: Freenode at #niftools and Whatnet at #Oblivionmods