BDA Texture Progress

I was hoping for a complete image of the Bioware Dragon, but they are either too elusive for me or non-existent outside of the studio. So, I found a couple images that covered most of the dragon and used the Pen tool in Photoshop to draw the rest in. From there, I erased most of the splatters that covered the image and pasted the finished dragon on the torso textures twice and matched them up along the seam (It required some skewing and masking). The dragon and its placement isn't perfect, but I'm happy with it.

I've stripped the armor's scene of everything but the new armor mesh. I'm thinking there's something wrong or missing in the hidden assets, so if I delete everything but what I made and import an existing Skyrim armor with the skeleton at the same time, I won't have the view-angle clipping. Should it fail, I may have to find someone who is better versed in 3ds Max and ask if they could do it for me.

Checking things off...or not

I finished the sticker and poster a couple days ago.

My Portal 2 map and Backstock work haven't had any progress lately. My desktop has failed to go to hybrid sleep twice (fade to black followed by a hang) and both times Steam has decided it needs to "update" Portal 2. "Update" meaning download all 6.6GB of content and completely replace all files.

I've tried moving all existing Portal 2 content to the download directory, but I didn't change the timestamps and a casual glance did not reveal a progress log. So, Steam proceeded to redownload everything.

Checking game cache integrity doesn't help either. It just says "1 file failed to validate" and continues downloading everything. Subsequent checks freeze and make Steam unusable ("Hey, Hey wait. Validation window is active, can't let you do that, Dave."), while it continues to download everything. I haven't checked after it finishes downloading. Mainly because I'm afraid it'll start downloading everything again.

Setting "Do not automatically update this game" once the download starts doesn't do anything (makes sense, but only if files are overwritten; they aren't until everything is downloaded). I've set it again and disabled cloud support to see if this download frenzy starts again.

I can start the Authoring Tools while the download is going, but once the download stops and file moving begins, things will get hairy (locked resources). It doesn't matter anyways because the game won't start. Well, it will in that it loads the intro video (completely ignoring the global -novid parameter set in Steam) and then crashes because it can't find the background image (materials/console/portal2_product2_widescreen.vtf). This crash isn't new as the Source Filmmaker couldn't handle this error when it came out, either (I haven't started it since).

You'd think Valve could, I don't know, have a default color to display should the background not exist. Maybe the error I see is the start and the game simply goes into catastrophic failure so fast, it can't show all the other errors (given the error box spam I've seen since Windows 98 SE, I doubt this is the case), but that doesn't explain why the game doesn't die until I acknowledge the missing background (suggesting there are no other errors to show).

Also, Steam is ignoring game activity. It used to stop downloading if I so much as started the Portal 2 Authoring tools. Now, it keeps downloading regardless of what I start (also confirmed with a friend's machine). Steam just sucks up all available bandwidth until it is sated.

Steam is still intermittently starting games other than what I double-clicked on. "Double click on Borderlands 2? Well, I'd better start Blade Symphony." I use the alphabetical list and don't recall it choosing a game after my choice alphabetically, just before.

Getting back to it

Took a nice break from developing anything and shot down enough Hyperion Loaders to sink a freighter or two. Now, I feel refreshed and ready to tackle my ToDo list:

• Make poster and stickers for a local business
• Make new Portal 2 map
• Detail Backstock maps
• Recreate more Dragon Age series weapons to Skyrim
• Work on BDA texture (if it's going to fail, it'd better look awesome)

BDA - Breaktime

Four days and I've gotten nowhere with the clipping issue. I've asked for help on the Nexus forums, but no one has replied and my thread was quickly shoved to the 4th or 5th page. I can't find anything online either. It's all "I forgot to select the armor for the BSDismember modifier. I'm an idiot. Lol!"

I can make it shift around randomly, but I cannot make it go away. I cannot use Skin Wrap on vanilla armor as it makes the issue appear, I am not going to recreate the entire armor from scratch in the hopes that some cosmic alignment will make it work, and I'm losing patience with weighting each vertex by hand.

I need a break from it. Probably a good long one.

BDA Progress 9 - Halted

Well, it seems no matter what I do, short of recreating the armor from scratch in a brand new file, the selective clipping persists.

I've tried the following:

• Using SkinWrap off of female_0 body with no modification
• Recreating BSDismemberModifier
• Having multiple sections in BSDismemberModifier
• Splitting armor up into multiple meshes
• Using dummy textures
• Using no textures (Nifskope only)
• Adding additional geometry to make backfacing elements match frontfacing (No simplified geometry on the back of elements; perfectly shaped)
• Changing the distance of affected elements from the main body of armor by a couple units (any more and it is floating)
• Manually matching weights for layered elements
• Copy/pasting LightingShaders from vanilla Skyrim armor
• Copy/pasting AlphaProperties from vanilla Skyrim armor (specifically, the Heavy Iron Armor with pauldrons)
• Not using Alpha Properties
• Switching between Editable Poly and Editable Mesh (with Skin and Dismember recreation)
• Detaching backfaces as separate elements
• Exporting to BSFadeNode (Skyrim crashed, but Nifskope still displayed the issue)
• Updating tangents in Nifskope
• Deleting the Skin Wrap Modifier and creating a new one
• Separating most of the elements into their own objects (only made more objects act up)
• Used a completely different computer with 3ds Max 2012 x64 to export
• Removing  and reinstalling a different version of the nif exporter
• Using 3ds Max 2011 x86 
• Running 3ds Max 2011 as administrator

This is seriously getting on my nerves. If I export only the mesh, no Skin or BSDismember modifiers, the clipping does not occur. But the moment I put a Skin Modifier on, the problem comes back. Any attempt to remedy this only moves the issue or makes it worse. It's the "holes in the boat" problem. No matter what you do, no matter how many holes you plug, you're going to sink.

So, my question is this: Why must every model I create that involves vertex weighting go wrong? The Bassrath-Kata bow refused to work until I repeated the same steps for the umpteenth time, the Leather Duster occasionally shoots a vertex off into the distance, the Blood Dragon Armor port has vertices bunching up regardless of where I weight them, and this Blood Dragon Armor remake changes z-order for no reason other than "screw you, author".

EDIT:

New development: If I export the belt and tassets, Nifskope refuses to render them or show to XYZ axis markers until I delete all BSDismemberSkinInstances in the file.

BDA Progress 8 - Export to Skyrim

Not a lot of activity since the New Year. I've been busy with various stuff around the house and what work I've done on the armor hasn't been noteworthy (unless you want to hear how I set the skin weights on vertices 10,001 and 5078).

-------------------------------

I'm doing animation tests in Skyrim (see my last post for why). So far, there have been a few issues with the armor.

The first issue is Skyrim clipping the armor when the pieces clipping with each other aren't even intersecting. The first image shows the back of the armor. Look at the distance between the plate and the tasset. Now, look at the second image. The rear tasset is clipping through the plate.

This only occurs if you zoom out from the armor. If you zoom in 1 or 2 notches away from going into first person, the clipping goes away. I've tried separating the elements further, but that doesn't help. I'll try setting skin weights to see if that'll fix it (the tasset's top isn't as influenced by the pelvis as the plate) and, should it not, adding an alpha property.

The second issue is pauldron position when in combat mode. They rise too far up and expose the shoulders too much. I raised them in 3ds Max to better clear the breastplate, but it looks like I'll have to drop them down a bit.

The third issue is also represented in the above 2 screenshots. The torso has no specular map. Cutting out the glowing pieces on the breastplate skews the UV map. I'll have to make the cuts and adjust those parts of the UV, but I might be stuck with more distortion/skewing than desired.

Once these issues are ironed out, I'll start on the female_1 body to get weight sliding working. I've also just realized I'm going to need 2-3 additional helmets per gender because of the different head shapes for the other races. Oh boy...

BDA Progress 7 - Weighting

Skin-wrapping the armor with the female_0 body produced a good base to start from. I'm going through each piece and assigning weights manually now.

The most annoying part is, as usual, the front and rear tassets (anything that covers both legs, actually). Both thigh bones' influences abruptly stop in the middle of each tasset (look at the front tasset, on the right of the image). This means when the legs move, each side of the tassets passes through the other (they flip inside out) and stretch only in the middle (instead of gradually across the entire surface).

3ds Max 2011 still doesn't show skin deformations properly. And, as always, it is only in quadrants 2 and 3 on the XY-grid; well, it is always worse there. Quadrants 1 and 4 only show slight jiggling. The thing is, this jiggling/undesired deformation only occurs in Max, never in game. The jiggling comes regardless of how many bones are influencing. So, I can have only a single bone influencing a single vertex but, once I move the bone, the vertex's position fluctuates wildly.

Skin weighting - Nailed it.

I'm probably going to need a 75/25 thigh/calf split on the poleyns (knees). 50/50 causes them to change size and, as you can see in the jump, separate from the wrap that is supposed to hold them in place.