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).

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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...