What had gone wrong!? I was stumped. Everything should (theoretically) worked!
Maybe it was because I’d accidentally moved the mesh when editing it… or maybe I screwed up a setting or something along the way.
By this time, however, I was tired, night was falling, and my stomach rumbled with hunger. It was time to set up camp.
Day 3
Yes, three damn days, whole days, of wrestling with this bucket of Bethesda. I took the morning off to finish writing up these posts you’ve been enjoying over the past several days, going over the steps one by one to make sure I had everything down…
Incidentally, I think I may know what had happened.
In the last post, I wrote how the Wiki Tutorial said to change BP_TORSO, BP_LEFTLEG and BP_RIGHTARM to certain values under the BSDismemberment. Okay, it’s not really Dismemberment, but it might as well be. Thank the architects I had been writing this, otherwise I may not have opened up the unedited, original nif file and discovered that the steel plate armor didn’t use those values. It used SBP_32_BODY, SBP_34_FOREARMS, and…. SBP_38_CALVES.
Plus, in the BSLightingShaderProperty, there were two extra textures than the tutorial said was needed: textures\cubemaps\QuickSkyDark_e.dds and \textures\armor\nordplate\NordPlateF_m.dds. I thought might be the reason why the armor was showing up black in the game.
Also, while reading the tutorial I had missed where it said to make sure that each body part flag under BSDismemberSkinInstance had both PF_EDITOR_VISIBLE and PF_START_NET_BONESET enabled. Only the calves partition had that second one.
I also checked the SF flags as they described and fixed them to look more like the ones in the tutorial’s picture
BSLightingShaderProperty settings for the armour.”
I saved this one as “step 5” and went to try it out in game. I also refresh the texture file, in case something had happened to it.
Hah! Looking MUCH better! But…
Oh no… oh wait…
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH
Obviously it wasn’t a problem with the export process.
I loaded up Blender again and imported the blender ready nif I had created in the beginning. It was true… somehow the sleeves and greaves had gotten extended. Also, there was some bone weight issues with stretching while walking. Nothing that I couldn’t handle there, I had done bone weights before when modding for Oblivion/Sims 2 and things like that. No, it was the extra long arms and legs I was worried about…
At this point, I said “Screw it,” and decided to start from scratch. That meant I had to go back and flatten out the chest plate again, but hey, I didn’t really want to even try fixing this.
Heading home in defeat was somewhat disappointing, but at least it was working, and at least I knew how to do it now, and that, my fellows, was the whole point of the journey.