Current Projects: Leather Hat and Duster

A while back, I decided I'd try my hand at making 3d models of actual objects (and stuffing them into Skyrim). So, what better than to grab whatever is near me. In this case, I chose my hat.

Front view

I took several reference photos, put them up on reference cards in 3ds Max and had at it. It was a bit awkward using photo references and, in the end, I wound up making a slightly different shape and opted for Septims instead of buffalo coins.

The result. Hat, not swords.

An issue with the hat is it is tilted too far forward. On human female heads, it looks okay, but on human male heads it is a bit too close. The main issue I'm concerned about is it doesn't cover the seam when only the top part of my character's hair is covered. The hair is removed in a jagged line that shows bald spots in some places whereas others have hair under the hat. There's yet another issue regarding lighting. For some weird reason, the hat lights up but light still passes through it.

After making the hat, I figured I might as well make clothes to go with it. This was further reinforced when someone commented on the hat when I released the Vigilance Longsword on the Skyrim Workshop. So, I downloaded a 3ds Max Garment Maker tutorial from iwkya1's YouTube channel (I've followed a few of his tutorials before) and went straight to making a leather duster. Specifically, the one I have in my room.

However, I didn't use references this time around. Instead, I copied the layout of the tutorial and made my own modifications as I was watching. From there, it was a day of tweaking seams, collision, and cloth properties to get what I wanted.

The result:

I don't have a shirt or pants to go with this, so the player is currently hollow. There's also an issue with the SoMuchMorpher tool not assigning graduated bone weights; meaning the fabric gets ripped during animations (Example: The tail moves like two pieces of cardboard instead of stretching over an area like fabric).

The duster is a single sided model, so I had to use the SF_DoubleSided shader flag in Nifskope. There is an issue with the model seeing through itself. I removed the unnecessary alpha properties I put on it, but the issue persists in the inventory view. For a doublesided model reference, open up the Emperor's clothes (meshes\clothes\emperor\emperoroutfitf_0.nif) and look at the node structure.

I got the invisible mesh error when I tried to import the duster. A combination of purging all bones (both Skyrim's imported skeleton and SoMuchMorpher's) from the scene, deleting all the morpher's modifiers, and copying a working LightingShaderProperty from another mod into the reexported .nif resulted in an error thrown by the Creation Kit, a clear sign the models will show (for me at least). I find that if I'm not getting an error, something is wrong with my nif. Yet, if I get an error, all is well. Go figure.

I've since raised the collar to cover up the empty space resulting from the game hiding the body mesh. If you load the human references from the character assets folder (head, body, hands, underwear, and feet), you can see where those empty spaces will show up.

I still have to come up with a shirt and pants (they had denim back then, didn't they? :P ) and correct all the erroneous bone weights. Needless to say, I have my work cutout for me.