NIF help wanted! Options

[Lena Wolf]

Hello everyone,

I have a NIF problem and I can't figure out how to solve it. Also, I have very little understanding of how NIFs work, which probably doesn't help. So I am looking for help - either in explanations or in actual fixing the model, please!

I am making a companion out of Geralt of Rivia using the Classic Witcher mod. The author made models of Geralt's armour very similar to Witcher 2, and they look great in principle. They look absolutely fine in Nifskope, but in the CS Geralt has an arm problem.

I am only interested in two models from that mod: Raven.nif (the cuirass) and KMgauntlet.nif (the gauntlets) - they are shown in the screenshot. My suspicion is that some nodes on the armour are not connected to the appropriate skeleton nodes, but I don't know how to fix it!

The armour does work in-game, but I am uneasy because clearly there's an issue. I worry that it might be introducing instabilities.

So, is there a kind soul out there who can either fix them for me or teach me how to fix them? Please? Pretty please?

I only have Nifskope, no Blender, that's because I have no clue about model making... I do scripts, not graphics... I figured out doing textures with GIMP, but meshes - that's mostly beyond me.

[ghastley]

I'm looking, but I haven't seen anything yet that makes sense of that screenshot.

On the Raven.nif, the UpperArmTwist bones are missing from the NiSkinInstance of the sleeves, but that should not be enough to cause that much distortion. I wondered if the skeleton had a changed bone order, which would weight the skin to the wrong bones, but that would only get fixed in game if a different skeleton was used.

I haven't pulled it into Blender yet, but I'll report when I have.

This post has been edited by ghastley: Apr 16 2022, 02:23 PM

[Lena Wolf]

Ghastley, thank you so much! It's supposed to be for the normal human skeleton. The Rivian race that he defined for Geralt is based on re-textured Imperial. He gave him an amulet for the tail slot (in the race definition!) but removing it makes no difference to how the CS shows the armour.

This post has been edited by Lena Wolf: Apr 16 2022, 09:16 AM

[ghastley]

Nothing odd shows up in blender either, beyond the lack of weighting to the twist bones, which is permissible. If it's good in game, the problem my be in the CS, not the mesh. I haven't installed the Oblivion CS on my new machine, as it has no optical drive to load from. That means I can't attempt to reproduce that issue.

[Lena Wolf]

Ghastley, thanks so much for looking into this! If there's nothing fundamentally wrong with it, I'm just going to ignore the CS behaviour. But now that you checked it, I can do it in good conscience.

[Lena Wolf]

I solved this mystery! Geralt with an arm problem

There was nothing wrong with the NIF. The problem was with the normal maps of the texture! The _n.dds files.

It's been a while and in the meantime I learned a thing or two about textures in Oblivion, so decided to revisit these pieces. I had to abandon quite a few models from the original mod because they just wouldn't show at all. May be transparent people is the latest fad, but Geralt wanted some substance... But all of that was because of defective normal maps.

Thought I'd post this just in case someone else comes across similar weirdness.

[ghastley]

I need more detail than that. I am familiar with the “skinned” flag in the texture determining whether the garment gets weighted to the skeleton at all, and flags turning on and off entire maps, but nothing that would relate to individual bones. The symptoms in the images were of bones being ignored, and so parts of the outfit didn’t follow them. This would have to turn that Skinned flag from a simple on-off switch to a gradated map, which I would then expect to have less jagged results.

tl;dr what did you change?

[Lena Wolf]

Oh good, you remembered!

I did not change anything in the NIFs at all. I don't even know what those flags are, etc. No, I worked exclusively with the textures. Imported the DDS file into GIMP and generated new normal maps, that is, the corresponding _n.dds files. GIMP has a plugin for that.

So, once the _n.dds files were recreated, I opened the preview in the CS, and the armour looked perfectly normal!

Note that it always looked normal in game, the problem was only in the CS. It appears that the game engine is able to handle some errors. But some of the other armour wasn't showing at all (invisible), both in the CS and in game. And that too was due to invalid normal maps.

The uncorrected version of the mod with all the meshes and textures is here (AFK mods). I shall soon be updating it with the new versions, but I can send you a preview if you are itching to see what's changed.

And yes, it is extremely weird, that bone deformation. But it was fixed with normal maps. I was actually trying to fix the invisible bits, I knew that was a normal map problem, and this fixed accidentally as well. Not complaining here!