I hadn’t intended on writing a Part 8 to this series, but after setting down the blog and starting the journey over from scratch, let me tell you: it took only an hour or two this time.

I imported the fresh mesh to edit, flattened the chest out again, and this time edited the UV map. It had been a while since I’d done a UV map, so I lingered on that part getting the texture to flow smoothly again. It didn’t require much tweaking because it had only deformed slightly.

When I was done, I went through the process to export it. For a while there I had some trouble getting Blender to import a clean skeleton- for some reason it kept importing a dirty skeleton no matter how many times I closed it out. Either way, I got it working again, and exported my Plate Take 2 mesh.

It worked perfectly! Well, almost perfectly. The ankles and wrists no longer were intensely huge. I tried the mesh out in Skyrim, running, jumping, and walking, with a few other poses, and it- hmm. It was doing that stretching clipping on that flappy skirt thing the plate armor has.

I knew what the problem was. The bone weights were off, so I went back and redid the mesh a little bit so the weight painting wasn’t so red- I created a smooth transition along the flappy thing. Exported, and tested it out. It was better, but there was still something wrong with it…

To have a basis of comparison, I exited Skyrim and removed the edited mesh. Then I loaded it back up and watched how the default plate armor moved. That was when I realized, “Of course! The plate armor had all those extra bones on its skeleton.” The flap had been assigned to an entirely different set of bones. I should have realized it earlier because I had this exact same problem in modding for another game.

It was easily fixed, actually. I went back into Blender, deleted all of the vertex groups, deleted the skeleton I had imported, and started the bone weight copy again, but this time with the original nordplatef. I copied the bone weights, and then imported a clean skeleton from nordplatef instead of femalebody.

I exported the whole kaboodle and plopped it into the data folder.

It worked (mostly) perfectly.

Satisfied, I started back, ready for another good night’s sleep.

There is some clipping at the wrists and ankles, especially if you’re wearing a non-steel plate bracer and armor, but I noticed that was a problem on the original mesh when I was doing my research. I’ve never seen any character in game wear anything but a full set of plate armor,  however, so I’m wondering how worthwhile it will be to fix what the default mesh had wrong with it.

There’s a few bone weights I want to adjust for a more smooth flop to the skirt bone before I start working on retexturing this thing, but that is as it stands at this moment, and my adventure, for the moment, is done.