Category Archives: Tutorial

Games, TES: Skyrim, Tutorial

NPC Editing: Fixing the Gray Face Bug

Leave a comment

So you might have noticed the guy in the banner that pops up sometimes. The one that wears the tartan hood. He’s a follower I’ve been working on and I’ll say, it’s a pain in the butt to get the gray face bug fixed on a custom NPC.I created his face in the chargen and exported it the normal way using spf charactername in the console. Then I imported it through the NPC editor in the CK.(For the record, I have RaceMenu and Enhanced Character Edit installed, and I think his face port went juts fine using the SPF export straight from the game. He doesn’t look particularly different from how he did as a PC, but the real test will come if I disable the chargen mods.)

Everything looked pretty good, but I had a problem when it came to viewing him in the game proper, and that was the gray face. Googling around, I came across several scattered forum posts and the wiki, so I read up on it.

It’s because the CK doesn’t generate the head mesh for the NPC automatically. You have to do it yourself by selecting the NPC in the Item window, not the NPC edit window.

Selecting the NPC and hitting CRTL-F4 will generate the meshes and textures that will properly display the NPC in game without the pale look and neck seam.

But wait! Some of the tutorials don’t really specify the conditions where CK will actually export the darn things. I found this out from a forum post I’ve since lost, but anyway. For some reason, the CK won’t generate the files when you have the NPC selected through the ALL category in the CK, especially if you’re like me and tend to use the filter a lot in order to cut down on wild edits and just being about to find the right entry. The best bet is to go to where the NPC is listed normally, say if your character was a Nord, it would be in NordRace.

So select them, and CTRL-F4. CK will inform you it will start generating the files. Give it a bit. It will have a popup that says “done” when it is done, and it might take a bit depending on if you have multiple NPCs selected. Make sure that any previously generated files for your NPC are deleted if you are updating the face files! I’ve had the CK actually act like it’s exporting, but it really didn’t because the files were already there. You can tell when it does this: there will be a slight pause when it is actually generating, but when it isn’t the DONE popup will appear almost immediately.

A word of warning:

I have tried this successfully several times for my NPC, right up until I started giving him his custom hair.

Custom hair on an NPC requires a bit more involved work, and for this NPC I used Vie Male Hair Pack, which comes in a BSA and ESP respectively and is a pretty awesome addition for guys. They look a bit punkish but some ‘dos can also be used for Celtic NPCs like my guy up there. (Also, if you download it, remember to check for the password because Vie uses a secured archive.)

Following the ESM conversion method to get the hair listed in the CK so I could give it to my NPC, I also had to unpack the BSA file before the CK would generate the proper head mesh and textures, otherwise it gave me errors whenever I tried to view the hair in the NPC preview and it also gave me errors while generating the NPC meshes. In fact, prior to unpacking it wouldn’t even display the hairs in preview mode. There was the BSA archive right there! I have no problems with Apachii’s hairs but Apachii also provides an ESM out of the box… but I have no idea what’s going on there and will have to research further.

Anyway. Unpacking the BSA did the trick and made working meshes.

I believe when it couldn’t find the hair meshes in the loose files, it generated an NPC face mesh without the hair. He still had the gray face bug in this instance because in game he had the hair, but according to the CK he didn’t and that caused the generated face files to not match up.

It seems like any time the face files and the NPC do not match up, the gray face bug occurs as well.

After the CK finally found the loose hair meshes, and generated the face files properly with custom hair, he didn’t have the gray face bug.

Lastly, if you ever make an mod with an NPC, do not forget to generate the face files and include them with the proper file pathing in your zip file.

The files you can find in Data\meshes\actors\character\FaceGenData\FaceGeom\YOUR PLUGIN.esp\

and Data\textures\actors\character\facegendata\facetint\YOUR PLUGIN.esp\

Any time you make an edit to your NPC’s looks, you should generate a new face file.

You’d think this is something the CK would do on its own once you were done editing the guy, right?

I still have some testing to do to see if I can get things working fine with the BSA and ESP.

Games, TES: Skyrim, Tutorial

How to Create a Crafting Recipe

Leave a comment

Crafting recipes are an important part of an armor mod, or useful tools for other types. Here’s a quick how-to on how to create one. Note that tempering items will be covered in another tutorial.

The basic steps, before we go into detail.

  1. Create recipe
  2. Decide what it produces
  3. Decide materials it requires
  4. Choose to make the recipe disappear when you don’t have the materials.
  5. Save.

 

Creating your recipe

 

  • Create your recipe: duplicate an existing one or create one from scratch.Before you can do anything, you first must create a new recipe. You can find recipes in the Object Window > Constructable Object.
    Image1
    You can find all crafting recipes and tempering recipes under this section. Tempering is a little bit different, so we want the recipes. I find it easiest looking for a recipe that’s fairly close to what my finished recipe will be. For instance, if I wanted to have an item that required five iron ingot and be workable from forges, I’d probably choose one of the iron armor or weapon items.

Image2

  • Give your new recipe a unique identifier, something like RecipeNameOfModItem.
    Personally, I usually go by the default naming scheme, especially if I’m doing a big crafting project, but ifs up to you if you want your recipes to display all together or with similar times.Image5
  • Choose your required items.
    Image6
    The required item list is where all the items you need to craft the recipe is located. You can add a new requirement by right-clicking in the Required Item List and selecting New. Highlight the new addition. To change the default item, use the drop down menu to the right and find the item you want. Change the number required just below.
  • Change the created object.
  • Image8
    You can also change the number of items created just below. It’s fairly straightforward.
  • If you want this recipe to be creatable from another option, like the alchemy table, change the workbench keyword.
    Image9

 

Making a recipe appear only when you have the right materials

Next, consider adding conditions to the recipe that hide it in the crafting menu until you have the items required for making it. This reduces clutter in the crafting menu, especially since so many crafting mods don’t do this, resulting in very cluttered crafting categories. If this is an option you wish to implement, consider adding an in-game book listing all of the recipes that are available in your mod for easier discovery and use. 
Image10

  • Look below where it says “Match conditions” and right-click, add new.
  • Change the condition function to GetItemCount
  • Click the button where it says INVALID. That’s the function info. Click it and select one of the required items in the recipe.
    Image13
  • The Comparison menu has a list of “greater than” “less than” “equal to” et ctr items. What you’ll want is the “Equal to or greater than” function.
  • Change the value to the number of items you want in your inventory before the recipe will show up.
    Image14

You can customize this so you can have your recipe show up when you have only one of the required items or only show up until you have all of the required materials and are ready to create it. Add more conditions for each item.

And that’s it! Stay tuned for Tempered items.

Games, TES: Skyrim, Tutorial

My Random Notes on Skyrim Mesh Editing

Leave a comment

Well, I haven’t had much luck fixing that worldspace of mine with it’s LOD, and I have been doing my homework on it. I still don’t know what did it, but I did manage to get that weird floating cell ala Salvadore Dali to disappear, but I had to restore the ESP file from my back up. ALWAYS a good practice to save your changes in small steps in separate files. The LOD didn’t really work though something shows up, and there’s that whole lack of water thing. Anyway, I will write up a post all about that later, for now, here’s a few consolidated notes to remember from my meshing endeavors earlier last month, courtesy of everything I did wrong.

When you’re exporting an armor with parts like the Steel Plate Cuirass that use bones that is not present in the base body mesh, you should add the proper bones and bone weights before exporting. A skirt part that is supposed to move independently of the legs will show up as attached to either one leg or the other or both and will have awkward stretching.

If you’re editing an existing armor, it’s perfectly all right to use the bone weights from the original vanilla mesh if you haven’t changed things significantly. Likewise, it’s all right to use the skeleton from the original mesh as long as you import a clean one. I’ve tested both.

If you edit an existing mesh, don’t forget to check the texture and adjust the UV mapping if it’s needed.

If you’re running the Nifscripts and wind up with the wrong skin partitions or multiple BP_TORSOs, check to make sure that you do not have any overlapping assignments in the faces. If you have two BP_TORSOs and both BP_RIGHTARM and BP_LEFTLEG and the latter both have the correct assignments, and the BP_TORSO is split between the two, it’s fine. Just rename both BP_TORSOs to the correct Skyrim body value. Alternatively, try fixing the Nifscript to allow 22 bones instead of 18.

For non-armor meshes: If you get an error on importing into Blender, open up your NifSkope again and delete the value Blender reports as incompatible. You may have to re-add that value when you export.

While trying to import an arrow mesh into Blender, I discovered it wouldn’t import another property not mentioned in many tutorials: BSEffectShaderProperty.

Games, TES: Skyrim, Tutorial

World Spaces and Height Maps

Leave a comment

So the first thing to do when starting a new mod with new locations and world spaces is to start creating those new locations. At least, that is what I’ve gathered so far in my research. For a decent mod, you’ll of course want to have a proper navmesh, and the only way to do that is to have an ESM file containing your spaces. It’s easier to create the basics of what you need and navmesh it, convert it to ESM, and then clutter and create your scripted scenes in an esp file companion.

So that’s what I’ve started with. For my mod, I’m creating a new world space. Two, actually, and both are islands.

The quickest and easiest method for terrain generation of any sort is to create a “height map.” If you’ve been to school, you probably know what one is. In the odd occurrence where you haven’t, a height map is an image of an area or locale with gradients in hue or shade depicting whether something is higher or lower in relation to other spots on the map.

To create and convert a height map into a form you can use in Skyirm, I highly recommend the tutorial from the good people at Hoddminir. It’s what I’ve been using to generate the height map for my island world. A long time ago, I used to create world spaces for Oblivion using a height map. This is actually a lot more easy.

You may have to fiddle around with the settings to get exactly what you want, and I had difficulty when the tutorial spoke of adjusting the height map for import into TESAnnwyn. I created several versions of my height map until I came out with something I was satisfied with. My advice, when lowering the brightness on your TIF file, is to take the eyedropper tool and click on the lightest part of your map, and then adjust the brightness until it falls within the acceptable range that Skyrim can handle. It will tell you in the color panel what gray % your highest area will be. Be warned, however, that at 76% it will generate as the highest possible mountain and if you don’t have a smooth enough gradient, it WILL create rips in the space-time continuum, as below:

hilarious

If you have a small island, like mine, what I would do (and actually had to, with this height map) was reduce the contrast until the landmass fell between 92% at the highest and 97% just before water level. It created a pretty good world.

bviere

Imagf1

 

I tried it with 95% to 98% and got a much smaller island.

smallerisland

Helpful Tip: If you preview your new world space in the Creation Kit, as I did, you may notice that it will only render a few amount of cells at a time. Provided that you aren’t running anything else, and that your world space is barren like the ones above, you can click File> Preferences > Misc Tab and change the “Grids to Load” from 5 to any number between that and 20. You may want to stick with 11 or 13 if your computer is lower end, but I have had success using 20 grids before. Don’t use this on larger, populated world spaces like Tamriel unless you’re absolutely sure you want to crash.

Now, LOD generation is provng to be much more difficult. My first attempt at setting up for LOD via the first method described in the tutorial was… interesting. I loaded it up in Skyrim, and coc’d my way into the world space, and found myself surrounded by water on all sides.

Oops.

Apparently, by following the tutorial, it somehow raised the water level… to… some really… really… epic depths. I had to toggle god mode on, take the water walking boots off, and swim down for three minutes straight before I hit the top of the mountain on my island. For a while I thought there wasn’t going to be a bottom.

It turns out I had forgotten to add the – before 14000.0000 for the default water height and LOD water height. I adjusted that to the right value.

TESV 2013-05-31 23-31-24-39

 

Flipping eggs.

Oh well, at least I’m ready for the next step: Creating LOD.

Using the CK, I loaded up the esp file and went to World> World Lod and started generating. Of course, it has crashed at least once and I am wondering if it plans on crashing again. Either way, this process is taking far too long for my taste. I think, for future world spaces I may use, I’ll probably populate it before generating the LOD.

bizzareworld

 

What the ever loving….

….

 

Okay, yeah, that looks like a Salvadore Dali.

I have no idea how this happened.

map

Well, at least the map is working. Sort of.

Back to the drawing board.

Games, TES: Skyrim, Tutorial

Tips for Creating an Effective Skyrim Modding Workspace

Leave a comment

Creating a mod for Skyrim, Oblivion, or just about any other game can be a very messy, file-littering process. There was a time where I used to use the desktop for working space, and it worked well enough, except when I had to clean it off due to overcrowding. I often couldn’t remember what files were for what, and sometimes accidentally deleted files I otherwise needed.skyfold1

In order to have a functioning place on your computer, it’s wiser to create a hold-all folder where you store shortcuts to the tools you use and the folders you store your working files in. While writing the Adventuring in the Nif series, I came up with my simple, elegant solution, where before I usually stored project folders haphazardly and tool shortcuts on my desktop. “Why didn’t you read up on how to organize your working files?” Well, I tend to rely more on myself when I want to come up with something I’m comfortable with. I’m sure other people have come up with something similar. Anyway, I want to share this, because it’s useful.

skyfold3

  • Create a folder. You can place it anywhere.
    Personally, I prefer just creating it right on the desktop for ease of access, but you can have it someplace like C:\ or in your documents folder. If you place it somewhere, make sure you create a shortcut linking to it, and place it on the desktop if you want easy access to it.
  • Gather all the shortcuts to the tools you use, and place them in the folder. Here’s an example of the tools I have in mine.skyfold4
  • Next, find your Skyrim folder, the one where it holds the EXE and Data folders. Create a shortcut to it and place it in your tool folder.You’ll want quick access to this during the course of your work, in order to test, get files to edit, and generally manage your mod folder if you don’t use a mod manager. I’ve labeled mine “Skyrim DATA” to differentiate the two Skyrim folders.
  • Hunt down the other Skyrim folder. skyfold5It should be in a place like “My Documents\My Games\Skyrim,” but different systems may have this placed elsewhere. It is the one that contains your Skyrim.ini and SkyrimPrefs.ini, along with your saves and any Papyrus logs you generate.
  • Next, if you already have projects scattered around or some place you stored your projects, just move them to the modding folder unless it would otherwskyfold6ise be inconvenient. I prefer keeping all my projects in one place and don’t keep them stored in my Skyrim Data folder because I may lose them that way. Instead, I copy the files into the data folder for testing. When using the Creation Kit, this isn’t always possible to do. For things like ESP files ,you have to keep them in the Data folder to edit, but because you have a direct link to the Data folder, it shouldn’t be too hard copying the ESP and backing it up sequentially in the project folder.
  • Whatever extracted BSA files you have, for meshes or textures or sound files, place the folders in  the main modding tools folder for easy access. Keep them there in case you need a fresh copy.In the picture above. I have a folder dedicated to the female human body assets because I was using them a lot during my de-boobification of the steel plate project. A copy of the original nifs are in there, along with Blender-ready import versions, so I don’t have to go back and do it again any time I need a new skeleton or copy bone weights. As you can see, I subdivided the body into the _0 and _1 into import ready files, and created a set of .blend files of femalebody_0 with feet, hands, and head for future armor creating. The original, unedited nifs went into the original folder.

That should be about it for creating a good working folder. If you noticed, I had all my tool shortcuts renamed. This is for quick selecting, so I didn’t have to stop and think about what program I wanted to open. If I wanted to edit the nif meshes, I’d just find where it said nif editing and click. The other reason is sometimes I don’t use a tool very often and may have to try and remember what it does. This is especially useful if you take six months off and come back to realize you can’t remember what BSAextractervariety#400 you were using and liked better.

Now, you probably want a good list of programs to use. No problem.

  • Audacity – Sound recording and editing
  • BOSS – More of a general thing if you have a lot of mods. Orders mods to lessen conflicts and CTDS.
  • Creation Kit – only available through Steam.
  • Paint.NET – Has native DDS support with automatic mipmap generation. My choice in texture editing because I can’t stand GIMP and both GIMP and Photoshop require plugins.
  • TES5Edit – Cleans plugins of “dirty” edits. If you’ve ever edited something by mistake or accidentally hit OK when you should have hit CANCEL, clean it with this. Useful for general purposes if you mod your Skyrim a lot.
  • Blender 2.49b – Required for mesh editing. Nif importing scripts do not support other versions.
  • Nifscripts for Blender – If you plan on editing nifs, you’ll need the Python programs listed there as well. DO NOT download the most recent versions, use only the versions listed as required on that page.
  • NifSkope – For creating import ready and Skyrim ready nifs.
  • BSAopt– BSA extractor to extract the default files.

As for that last one, that’s the one I prefer over the other BSA extractors, but there a lot of different BSA extractors out there. Try one you may like better.

This may be specific to Skyrim, but I’m sure you could use the same principles when creating mods for other games. You just need to know what tools to download, and what folders you need to edit. Happy modding!