Hi,

I am relatively new to modding in Fallout, so of course I decide to start with something complex.

I am attempting to start from the Type 3 mesh:
1) modify it in 3DS Max and ZBrush (this part is basically done already),
2) re-export it as a NIF into Nifscope, and
3) get the newly modified character model into the New Vegas game as a body replacer.

Right now I just want to know how to get a body replacer working. Eventually I want to learn to make a new race, and faction, and use the body only with that, but right now I am trying to keep it simple.

I have basically gotten a mesh that looks the way I want it, but I am having a cer-azy time trying to get it through Nifscope and into the NV game. The first time I tried it in-game, it caused a CTD, and the second time I tried it, I got a body replacer that made affected characters look like an abstract painting, with a normal-looking head but the body was a mass of criss-crossing planes--basically a big steaming pile.

I have tried to follow some tuts I have found online, but most of these are either Blender-specific (I'm using 3DS Max), or they don't go into much detail about what actual settings I need to use for exporting a character model from 3DS Max to Nifscope, and what I actually do with the NIF once I'm in Nifscope.

Any help/info/resources anyone can help me with would be much appreciated.

Thanks,
secretmantra

If you set the scene and mesh up correctly for export, you do not need to do anything in nifskope to get rigged meshes to work correctly in Fallout. they export staright from max to a correctly working nif.

The only thing you will need to do for a body is enable the skin shader, and maybe set up alpha flags so the meatcaps on your mesh are the same as the ones in vanilla, but it's hardly necessary. the only other thing you will probabaly want to do is update tangent space. basically just fix a couple loose ends.

I suspect you haven't actually rigged it. as you made no mention of that. As you have not actually described your mesh set up or export process, not posted a nif, I cannot tell what you are doing incorrectly.

Hi Ghogiel, and thanks for the response.

Where/how can I upload a.NIF for you to check out? I would be happy to do that, but am a novice at this sort of thing.

You are correct that I did not rig the model.

It appeared to me that the .NIF I imported into Max had a full rig already, so I was attempting to use what was already there (from Dimon99's Type 3 mesh), modify it in ZBrush, reexport the lowpoly mesh and an accompanying normals map, and replace the original for export into the game. This kind of process seems like it should be a workable solution (especially since I have not yet learned to rig--maybe I just need to bite the bullet and learn that now, but I was hoping to put it off for a while).

Anyway, one thing occurred to me might be a problem with my workflow. The original mesh I imported into Max had seams in it that split wide open when I tried to subdivide the exported mesh in ZBrush. To fix this problem, I had welded all of the verts before working on it in ZBrush (which resolved the issue for working on a highpoly version of the mesh), but it seems like this may be causing some havoc in Max, with the way the mesh's skin and dismemberment modifiers were applying to it when I reapplied those to the newly modified lowpoly mesh.

Do you think finding where the original seams were, and cutting those back open, will fix the issue? I am over my head here, as I have never before worked with rigging, or with dismemberment.

Thanks,
secretmantra

cutting the seams back in probably won't help, you are just messing with the vertex order and the orginal skin will probably be any where from a little messed to spaghetti Os messed up.


basically you might be able to keep the rigging intact going into and out of ZB. I have a lot of tricks up my sleeve for that kinda thing.

to give you a rough idea,

Import the skeleton.nif and type3.nif, there is a weld seams tick box in the import dialog. that'll take care of your split edges.

under the skin modifier, i would add an editable poly modifier (this makes editing easier and because skin and skin utilities doesn't work very well with editable mesh)
right click that modifier, collapse to.

now i would use skin utilies to make a clone that I can import the vertex weights back from. hide the cloned mesh

i would kill the skin on the original mesh. Quad it< subD won't work on triangles.

I will then add a new skin modifier, add the bones, and import skin weights from the cloned mesh. and perhaps go back in under the skin modifier and add in some edge loops to make sculpting easier< ZB will prefer even square quads rather than any longer thinner rectangle shaped ones.

phew.

if you have goZ hooked up you should be able to get the mesh in and out of ZB without reordering the vertex numbers, and the skin shouldn't be messed up.
If not then you will have to do some rigging. but maybe you can do things like- once the mesh is imported into ZB, store a morph target, then sculpt, then when you are done, you can probably export the mesh you sculpted and a version from the morph target< and they will have the same vertex order, now you can import the skin weights from that earlier clone onto the morph target and simply copy/paste the skin modifier from that onto the sculpted one with the new shape.

of course this doesn't help you now you have already sculpted it into a new shape. And yeah, go learn to use the skin modifier. it's easy.

@Ghogiel
Thanks for your detailed response. I appreciate someone with some knowledge willing to share.

I will try out your suggestions and report back on what I have after that. I'll likely have some more questions, as a lot of this is unfamiliar territory for me.

Peace,
secretmantra

Sigh. I am so frustrated.

In the effort to try to understand what will work, I have stripped down my process to simply:

1) Import a previously working Type 3 .NIF into 3DS Max.
2) Don't edit anything. Export a .NIF from 3DS Max.
3) Import the .NIF into Nifscope, and save over the original working .NIF, in the Fallout NV data folder.
4) Test if it works in-game.

And I am getting the same bug as I did before. Characters with that mesh look like a Picasso painting.

Can someone explain how I can get a working mesh into 3DS Max and back into the game? This seems like it shouldn't be this hard.

Well, seeing as how I am getting no more replies, I'll just have to keep trying things and see if I can get it working on my own.

Next thing--I'm going to try opening the NIF I want to mod in Nifscope, and export only the mesh I want to change, as an OBJ to Max, then modify that in Max, import back into Nifscope, and go from there. I'll report back on my progress, in case there are any others out there who care or are trying anything similar.

I work with Blender, so I cannot help you much with the actual 3DS settings. In Blender, there are certain settings you need to apply to the import and export process so the model imports-exports correctly. If your characters look like Picasso paintings, your skeleton and mesh is not rigged properly.

Can you post a picture of the .nif block list?

Ghogiel mentioned importing skeleton.nif, did you do this part as well?

Sure I could post a pic. Do you mean the list as it appears in Nifscope? Should I open all of the subdirectories (there's quite a few)?

problem 1: vertices in nifs are often not welded -> you get holes if you subD in ZB -> you need to weld before exporting as *.obj -> the skinning/rigging gets lost and messed

->>>solution:

simply weld, export, modify in ZB, use skin wrap modifier in max to get back skinning

I did import the skeleton.nif. What's interesting is that everything looks "normal" inside of Nifscope, but the minute I try to look at it in-game, Picasso.

As a follow-up to let everyone know what I tried tonight:

1) I opened the working (fully rigged) NIF in Nifscope.
2) Exported JUST THE MESH from Nifscope, as an OBJ.
3) Opened the OBJ in Max, made minor alterations to the shapes (enough to be identifiable as changes later).
4) Exported out from Max as a NIF.
5) Opened 2 copies of Nifscope, one with the working NIF, one with the newly exported modified NIF.
6) Copied ONLY THE MESH DATA from the new modified NIF.
7) Pasted over ONLY the MESH DATA in the currently working NIF.
8) Saved out and tested it in the Geck.
9) Picasso.

I appreciate any help anyone can provide. I have stated already that I do not yet know how to rig. If anyone knows of a decent resource for me to learn how, I will work on it.

Thanks,
secretmantra

Your first point about verts brings up a question I had--is it necessary for some reason for there to be seams between sections of the mesh for a character model? I'm just curious--it seems a strange way of working for me.

For using the skin wrap modifier: How does that process work? What I was trying before, was to just copy-and-paste the skin modifier from the working "Arms01" mesh onto my newly modified mesh from ZB. Obviously that didn't work. Can you tell me how to do the skin wrap?

Thanks.

If you are going to use nifSkope and copy and paste over the NiTriShapeData from one .nif to another, you need to make sure the bones are aligned to the same parts, and that you have the same number of bones, under BSDismemberSkinInstance.

Here's a link that explains the process.
http://www.tesnexus.com/articles/article.php?id=248

But again, it is easier to get your armor/body edited from the 3D program (at least in Blender).

Thanks for the advice, SystemShock. I am really seeing that my main problem is likely the attachment of the bones to the mesh in Max.

I am going to attempt to just bite the bullet and figure out how to reattach the bones to the mesh. We'll see how it goes ... If anyone knows of any super tuts out there for that stage of the process, I'd be extremely grateful for the help.

I'll report back on my progress as soon as I have any. ;^)

Thanks all,
secretmantra

max has a wonderful skinning tutorial build in already dude... youtube has some tutorials too

of course you get "picasso" if you dont skin your model, how is the game supposed to understand how the model has to behave in accordance to your bones if you dont?
either do as i suggested and use the skin wrap, skin it manually or forget about the whole thing

best method is to use the skin wrap in combination with a vanilla bodymesh that is already skinned and then weight certain areas which seem to make trouble by hand, the vanilla body is not perfectly skinned anyway,
if you speak german i can link you to the wonderful "WIP" thread of Growlf who is doing that since oblivion came out and still aint finished with his "perfect" body >.< ...the skinning is looking good tho

another thing you might wanna consider is that you should definately get used to skinning in general before you attempt to create a body replacer, animations deform meshes in all kinds of wonky ways and hence you need to create a model that conforms with those deformations, for example do you need more polygons on the kneepad than in the kneepit simply because the kneepad stretches if the knee bends whilst the kneepit simply contracts, thats stuff not even the vanilla bodies took care of but is utterly important if you dont want your model to look like crap during animations

@seams
if you mean those green seams, yes they are necessary, they simply define the texture mapping, has nothing to do with the skinning tho, its important on how the model interprets the texture, a model can not be unwrapped (turned into 2d) if you dont make some cuts
if you mean the splitting of objetcs into elements, thats more of a work ethos and makes modelling etc easier
if you mean that the head is a different object than the arms, the chest or the lower body, that has other reasons, one being that they use different textures, another having to do with the visibility in 1st person,etc

@skin wrap
-you add a skin wrap to you unskinned model
-click on add
-select the model from which you want the skinning applied to your unskinned model
-check: "blend" and "weight all vertices"
-click on "make skin"
-delete the skin wrap modifier
thats however more or less only useful for stuff that is soft, rigid objects are better skinned by hand, for example if you have an armor that has metal plates and an underlayer which is made of cloth, you use the skin wrap to weight the soft parts and then manually assign weights to the rigid parts
skin wrap however is damn useful to create a solid base for body replacers as those are 100% soft

OK, so I have some good news. I now have figured out how to simply import a working NIF into Max, make very minor modifications in there, re-export a NIF and use it in the game.

The mesh was definitely attaching to the bones already, so that wasn't my issue--although I can definitely see I will be needing to learn more about skinning as I go.

I found that I needed to stop Max from welding the verts during export (which is on by default, to a value of 0.0100--I changed that to 0.0000). This one setting appears to be what was giving me the Picasso effect.

Now that I have a working export process, my next problem will be figuring out how to add more robust changes to the mesh and reexport without breaking it. I'm going to try this in incremental stages, trying more and more complexity of changes and seeing what I can get away with. An initial test I did to try my original ZBrush-modified mesh ended in a CTD, so I know that one is a problem. Sigh, this is pain-staking work.

Hehe--I see Jaysus has replied as I type this. Thanks for the response. I guess I used the wrong word, as seams refer to the texture mapping. What I meant was there were some unconnected verts in the original mesh I was working from--"open" edges, if you get my drift. I was just wondering if there were some functional purpose to leaving those in there.

Thanks for your advice. I am definitely taking on learning rigging and skinning, but it is going slowly right now, as I get a vision for how all of these parts fit together.

yes and no depending. Nifs do not have smoothing groups. Those hard edges where 2 groups meet are always split when exported, duplicating the verts at export.

but UV seams at import are also converted to split seams. But just tick the weld vertices in the import dialog and they well be welded. You will still encounter face normals being messed up. it's just a little annoying. a couple mins looking at the mesh in nifskope without textures and you can usually easily identify where the groups should be, and set them back up manually.

also mind that nifs turn all quads into tris, i tend to turn em back into quads if i modify meshes for easier visuals (can get confusing otherwise)...

open edges, just what ghogiel said, annoying tbh, they appear on texture and smoothing seams, sometimes even at other places for some reason, in theory you shouldnt have open edges apart from texture seams if you import a body as it is just one smoothing group but somehow it still gets split

btw, you can modify skinned meshes without redoing the skinning aspect, just dont delete or add vertices, you can move elements, vertices, polygons, etc without touching the skin modifier, very useful if you just want to make those boobs bigger or those thighs skinnier or want to add smoothing cause that seems to get lost on import sometimes, just click on the mesh in the modifier stack, select your sub level and work with it

The vast majority of meshes in FO3/FONV that I've looked at all seem to have one full-mesh smoothing group. The normals were baked with that in mind. Just look at the plasma rifle's, you can visibly see bowing in the normal maps that you don't see at all on the actual mesh.

Also... "starting simple" with a "Body Replacer" does not compute with me... :confused: You have to deal with full body rigging, making it look right and not have the freaky bending humerus bone that Type3 seems to have, or the weird armpits that Exnem's had. There's also lining up the wrist and neck seams to contend with, and also pelt mapping an entire body's worth of texture.

IMO, starting simple would be making a melee weapon of some sort, they don't get much simpler than that with this game's model setups.

I agree with MadCat. Start with a melee weapon first (the first model I made for OB was a dagger) or something similar. Still, what you're trying to do isn't that difficult (unless you want to morph certain areas which could cause some weird distortion in the mesh when it starts moving) but it can certainly seem difficult if you just started out with 3D modeling.

If you work with editable poly, the skin modifier is designed so that if you do add and remove verts, the skin is updated. This does not work well with editable mesh. So nearly always convert to edit poly. Plus editable mesh is pretty crap in comparison anyway.


Not really. Body meshes sure, but nearly, if not every gun weapon has a strategic hard edge to counter shading errors somewhere on it. Including plasma rifles. Quite a few outfit meshes do as well. The idea is to use them to avoid shading errors, as baking can only do so much.

well if i import a nif that has a skin modifier its always an editable mesh and you cant just turn it into a poly without loosing the skin modfier, but maybe i overlooked some import setting here

@editable mesh
i had meshes where an editable poly vertex weld didnt weld all vertices but it did as an editable mesh, not sure why but its one of the reasons i wouldnt forget about editable meshes completely

@smoothing
the normal map doesnt define the smoothing of an object, if a mesh has a hard edge you need to split the smooth group there, no way aorund it and basicly all meshes have that at one point or another except maybe bodies, that applies to vanilla meshes too
normal maps can hide some of these errors but theyre more or less there to create structure and add groves, not to smooth stuff, if you have shading errors your mesh svcks
normals are not baked with smoothing groups anyway as most people nower days do that in zbrush or mudbox where you simply have millions of polies and dont need smoothing at all

and btw, nifs have smoothing groups too, tho i must admit i didnt find their setting in nifskope yet simply because i didnt bother, its not of use anyway if youd know how to modify em in nifskope..., if nifs didnt have smoothing groups how would the mesh suddenly have em if you import it in max?

@start small
yes i agree, try yourself doimg some of the easier stuff first, create a hat, a bandoleer, a scarf, whatever, somin thats easier to manipulate and test or do your testing on the body but dare you release it before its looking good

@unwrapping, unwrapping a whole body is totally not hard at all, can only be annoying to draw those seams between fingers and toes but otherwise its much easier than you might think

@neck and hand seams, simply dont modify em...

The bake source made in ZBrush may not have smoothing affect the end normal map. but the normals on the original/end result mesh (which are affected by smoothing groups) do.

I have actually looked at some of these, mainly in my working on Plasma Rifles Awesomefied. For the longest time, the back cap of the plasma rifle looked indented way back when I did this for FO3. I discovered it was because the normals were split along the edge of the back cap when they should have been merged. After I fixed that, the back cap of the plasma rifle displayed properly.

It's the only logical explanation as to why there is bowing on the normal maps. If the surface in question was flat smoothing-wise, How did the N-map bake cause a bow in the map? Why doesn't this bowing show up in-game on the vanilla mesh? Why don't I see a hard edge?

Smoothing groups and surface normals matter when baking normal maps from meshes. They matter in displaying normal maps.

There may be nooks and crannies where I haven't noticed hard edges, but many of the meshes I looked at have largely merged normals, and bowing in several affected parts of their normal maps.

You could simply use the skin wrap modifier. It's a body/organic and pretty much in the same proportion/size. You don't even have to know how to skin. Save all the headache of going about preserving the skin modifier.
Merge all verts, quadrify it, use it as your base mesh and sculpt to your liking.