Blood Dragon Armor - Adding light

The second beta version is released with the new textures and skin weights. It looks a lot better now.

Riding on the high of the release, I delved into the Creation Kit to figure out how to add a light to the armor. Why? It glows, so shouldn't that glow have some effect on the world?

It took a while, but I figured it out and, in the process, found my next video tutorial.

I had wanted a spotlight with a low fov to simulate the light coming from the visor, but I couldn't rotate the light at all. Everything I tried just wouldn't work and I did not understand the Quaternion rotation the Interpolator node had. I did change the rotation value by entering random numbers, but that had no visible effect on the light's orientation. I guess I'm stuck with an omnidirectional light.

Nif exporter being a pain

I made a few changes to the Blood Dragon Armor's skin weights to address issues I had with the initial weighting. Now, the upperarms don't raise several polygons on the breasts and the stomach plate isn't awkwardly deforming. But there's a hitch: The _0 model is losing vertices upon export. These same changes, when applied to the _1 model don't change the vertices on export.

So, what's going on? Initially, I thought it was because I moved the belt away from the main body to reduce selection scope. Not doing that, however, did not prevent the vertex disappearance. Next, I thought the breastplate was to blame. Once I shifted the weights around and exported, the vertices disappeared upon export.

The vertex count did not change in 3ds Max and, considering the vertex count changes upon export into .nif for whatever proprietary reason, I assumed the exporter was to blame. Now, the _1 did not lose vertices, which led me to believe the issue was spacing. The _1 model's vertices are too spread out to be hit by the welding.

_0 model: 10740 vertices

_1 model: 10740 vertices

 To test this, I tried changing the weld parameter's precision when exporting the _1 mesh. Values ranged from blank spaces to 0 to 0.0 all the way to 0.000000. No change. When applied to the _0 mesh, though, every single value had no effect on the lost vertices.

Both exported. _0 missing 2 vertices

The only solution I can think of to prevent this is to weld the vertices of every element. This would require making the _1 model for a third time. Why? The welding would change both the vertex count and vertex numbering with no guarantee the same exact operations will produce the same count and numbering on the _1 model. I think.

Edit:

Welded every single vertex within .01 units on both models. Still getting the 2 missing vertices.

Edit:

After deleting elements until the discrepancy stopped, I've found the pauldrons are where the vertices go missing. Now I get to either a) leave them slightly messed up or b) separate them into a third component of the armor and fix their weights.

BDA Textures

I've been focusing heavily on the Blood Dragon Armor's textures for the past few days. Mainly the torso. In the beta release, I completely forgot the knee pad details (text, dots, and triangles) and the texture itself looks terrible in daylight.

The armor is really washed out and the details aren't that visible. Sure, it looks awesome at night, but looking good half the time isn't ideal.

If you look back at the development shots I posted of the armor, you'll probably notice the slew of smoothing groups I created for each component. Those groups produced the "details" that distinguished one piece from another. An example being the plating around the visor on the helmet.

I set these groups up to help me see what the model would look like before I started texturing. I thought they would be enough to convey the same message when placed in game. That's not to say they don't help, but small lighting changes can't always compete with the normal and specular maps which produce much stronger effects.

Now, I have the original textures for reference, but they aren't that great. I mean, they look good in game, but when you look at them directly, they're very noisy with very faint scratches that are obscured by said noise. I look at these textures and go, "Well now what?"

Since I generate the normal and specular maps from the diffuse and rarely make major modifications, my initial texture was flawed from the get-go. While I do have separate groups for each of the texture types, I kept them somewhat similar. Increased contrast here, toned down details there, but nothing dramatic.

To solve my texture problem, I've decided to go to the root of my texture and start again. I've added a lot of shading/hightlights/scratches/grunge, increased the visibility of details (what used to be 20% opacity is now 50%), increased the strength of the noise, and cleaned up the dragon's jagged appearance. The specular map has contrast increased twice (100 followed by 30 or so) and a higher brightness to compensate. The normal map now covers every piece of armor instead of un-modelled details.

New diffuse vs old diffuse

That's a bit better

BDA Beta release on Skyrim Workshop

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=127060429

So far, there haven't been any new issues reported. Then again, it's only been a couple days since release.

Given the silence, I'm off to try and make the armor fit the _1 body better. The clipping may never go away, but I want to reduce it as much as possible.

BDA - Almost there

Got the weight scaling sorted. Kind of. The glowing bits had their skin weights reset for some reason. Also, it turns out order matters when it comes to named nodes in the nif. So, when exporting, you need to select multiple pieces in the same order for _0 as you do _1 and vice versa.

I'm tweaking the textures now

The glow should probably be brighter and more saturated

I think I'm going to tweak the skin weights some more. The side plates clipping into the thighs bugs me. There's also the annoyance of the _1 proportions making it nigh impossible for the pauldrons and gardbraces to not clip through each other. There's a happy medium around here somewhere.

Edit:
907MB for the source textures...yikes. The torso's source is 500MB.
When exported to dds, the textures come to 61.8MB. This is what I get for using 2048x2048 and 2048x4096 textures. I do believe a half-res version will be required.

BDA - Putting it all together

I finished the preliminary textures for all the armor pieces (diffuse, specular, normal, and glow). However, they're a bit too clean and don't quite look right. I was going to work on dirtying them up, but I ran into yet another issue with the armor.

The issue? The same .nif that produced this:

Is now, months later, producing this:

The torso is way too dark.

I made a backup of the .nif while I was trying to get rid of that viewangle clipping issue (still not fixed). So, aside from a name change and a defrag, the file hasn't changed at all since that first screenshot. No amount of fiddling with the first "working" .nif makes it light up normally (despite what http://wiki.tesnexus.com/index.php/Skyrim_common_mod_issues tells me).

I tried exporting to a new file and got this:

The glowing polygons all move with the body, but the main torso won't.

The skin modifiers work in 3ds Max, but when I export, only the glowing polygons work. Exporting just the main torso doesn't work at all. It'll only show the t-pose. Even after fixing up the body partitions, vertex color flags, UV set number (4097), Unknown flag (8 -> 0 and vice versa), Has Normals flag, using existing LightingShaderProperties, and Updating Tangents, nothing works.

I can import the nif into 3ds Max and it'll deform. If I re-export it from there, the model moves with animations, but is permanently black. No manner of tweaking fixes it.

I've already installed and reinstalled different versions of the NIF exporter and, from the initial viewangle clipping problem, even tried a completely different machine and version of 3ds Max.

I'm pretty sure both are deforming

If anyone, anywhere, knows why this is happening, please, I implore you, tell me why. Tell me what critical thing I am missing that causes me so much grief whenever I try to weight a model for export to Skyrim.

The Bassrath-Kata Bow, the Duster, and now, the Blood Dragon Armor set. None have gone smoothly.
The Bow resolved itself with a bit of fuss, the Duster still has random polygons shoot off into oblivion, and the Blood Dragon Armor won't let me export the torso properly. The boots, helmet, and gloves exported like a charm, but the torso? No no no no, can't have that now, can we?

Edit:

My export settings:

Second Edit:
The T-pose issue: SLSF1_Skinned became unchecked. "..."
Still no idea what's going on with the viewangle clipping or why the Duster randomly spazzes.

BDA Texture Progress 2

I've added the tarnish and scratches to the torso's diffuse texture. I'm working on the normal and specular maps now. Up next, the helmet, gloves, and boots.

I've reached a decision on the armor's skinning woes: I'm going to release it, broken. I can't find a solution to the problem, haven't found the same problem online, and SoMuchMorpher only produces the "You must specify at least one bone" error whose only solution so far has been "Lol. After I looked at it, I figured out what was wrong. :D" as a YouTube comment from a year ago.

Reasoning: I'm going to crowd-source finding a solution to this problem. I haven't made enough noise on my own, so having however many people downloading, using, and pointing out the problem should help. If it works, I'll know why the problem occurred in the first place. If it doesn't, at least I'll have released another armor mod.