Difference between revisions of "User talk:DavidJCobb/Tutorials/Editing NIFs"

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* Vanilla Orc hairs for women are modeled ''terribly.'' You'd expect the non-hairline NIF to contain the bulk of the hair and the hairline NIF to just have the parts that need to blend; in practice, ''both'' NIFs contain the bulk of the hair, and the hairline NIFs' bulk actually covers the non-hairline meshes. This wouldn't be a problem except that while most of the hairline meshes are therefore opaque, vertex alpha blending is enabled for the whole meshes, and that blending prevents EffectShaders from affecting them. I'm working on a fix to go in my "tweaks" mod, wherein I edit the hairline NIFs and split the meshes.
* Vanilla Orc hairs for women are modeled ''terribly.'' You'd expect the non-hairline NIF to contain the bulk of the hair and the hairline NIF to just have the parts that need to blend; in practice, ''both'' NIFs contain the bulk of the hair, and the hairline NIFs' bulk actually covers the non-hairline meshes. This wouldn't be a problem except that while most of the hairline meshes are therefore opaque, vertex alpha blending is enabled for the whole meshes, and that blending prevents EffectShaders from affecting them. I'm working on a fix to go in my "tweaks" mod, wherein I edit the hairline NIFs and split the meshes.
** Hair tutorials claim that changing the "flags" on the NiAlphaProperty will fix EffectShaders. This is misleading. The "flags" aren't a bitmask; they're actually the entire set of alpha settings. Moreover, it's really only ''one'' flag inside of that data that has an effect, and it's the flag to force one-bit alpha with a threshold (as opposed to a smooth blend, which is what the textures are designed for). So no. That's not a fix.
** Hair tutorials claim that changing the "flags" on the NiAlphaProperty will fix EffectShaders. This is misleading. The "flags" aren't a bitmask; they're actually the entire set of alpha settings. Moreover, it's really only ''one'' flag inside of that data that has an effect, and it's the flag to force one-bit alpha with a threshold (as opposed to a smooth blend, which is what the textures are designed for). So no. That's not a fix.
*** Testing also indicates that shaders don't ''necessarily'' apply reliably even if that flag is set.
* Test case is female Orc hair 05 since that's what I was using on my character at the time.
* Test case is female Orc hair 05 since that's what I was using on my character at the time.


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** Rotations on the skeleton head node will likely be wrong; copy the original values from your prior NIF
** Rotations on the skeleton head node will likely be wrong; copy the original values from your prior NIF
** NiSkinData bone lists will have bad transforms on the head bone; set translation to zero and rotation to the inverse of the skeleton node's rotation
** NiSkinData bone lists will have bad transforms on the head bone; set translation to zero and rotation to the inverse of the skeleton node's rotation
*** The bounding spheres will need to be corrected as well. NifSkope should preview each node's bounding sphere as a grey circle: it should encompass all vertices associated with that node. The values from your original NIF will make a good starting point, and may not even need further editing.
** As with the Blender 2.49b-only process, Fallout 3 bone names are in use. Change them back to SBP_31_HAIR.
** As with the Blender 2.49b-only process, Fallout 3 bone names are in use. Change them back to SBP_31_HAIR.
** Vertex colors may (only sometimes??) be exported incorrectly (converted to all white), and this is significant in that it will cause you to lose your alpha even with a NiAlphaProperty. I'm not sure how to address this at this time.
** Vertex colors may (only sometimes??) be exported incorrectly (converted to all white), and this is significant in that it will cause you to lose your alpha even with a NiAlphaProperty. I'm not sure how to address this at this time.
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