Symon

4 hours ago, Aria said:

They should really just drop the whole rpg act and do what they inteded to do in the first place, another copy of cod, because they are going to end up there anyway, wich is pretty obvious from all the dumbing down and removing even the few rpg parts their games had.

Never a truer word spoken.

No matter how good (or otherwise) the game is as a shooter, it's difficult for me to see FO4 as an RPG. Then again, I find Skyrim similarly lacking in the RPG elements I look for so who am I say?

I imagine Beth think all those console players as their true market segment these days, not old school 'has beens' like me.

Look for anything by Slof and/or Kikai. Make sure you use Roberts V5 as a male body replacer.

9 hours ago, Coopervane said:

Why is this suddenly such a hard to understand argument? It certainly wasen't a year ago when everyone and their Dog was complaining about how annoying it is to mod Skyrim.

How many games using the engine have you played and/or modded for?

Off the too of my head, modded for: 6 and played another 2 in addition.

19 hours ago, Coopervane said:

Gamebryo was just not created for this, it was created with things like RTS games in mind.

Point of information!

You are confusing Bethesda's game engine with Gamebryo, which is purely 3D meshes with extensions. See all those *BS* nodes in a Nif? They are Bethesda custom nodes.

The oldest game a recall using the engine is Startrek Bridge Commander - not 'RTS'. (3.x.x.x nifs). Circa 2001 we had Morrowind and Freedom Force. Not RTS and 4.0.0.2 Nifs.

I can understand your frustration but that is everything to do with Bethesda and nothing to do with Gamebryo.

A partial list:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Gamebryo_engine_games

21 hours ago, Aria said:

Well considering that in one of the interviews with obsidian they hinted (or said? cant remember now) that it was a pain in the ass to work with gamebryo, they would probably run for the hills if they had to work with that shite again.

I recall it.

IIRC, they hinted that it was Bethesda and the Fallout assets they had been given access to that they criticized.

This is not the same as Gamebryo, which is just an SDK. Remember, other games and companies manage to use it and produce less bugs.

I've improved the mount and dismount animations and am searching for Idle animations for the pony.

Still unsure about combat animations, getup and swimming animations.

At the moment my thoughts are to forestall these by making the mount essential, unable to swim and prone to run away.

Does anyone know of a kick animation for a human that I can use for a pony? They obviously can't punch anyone.

Some screenshots:

This is progressing nicely.

The Pony Girl has eyes now (creatures often need eye bones), I just need to tune the positioning.

I've come to a conclusion the animation warper has a mild bug when trying to use the 'Exact Bone Names' functions. Inconvenient - looks like time to break out the hex editor.

Still, despite this I have an Idle that has the Rider in a sitting pose.

Looks like getting the rider to equip a crop upon mounting is oddly tricky.

Motion seems to be smooth when riding.

Time for some screenshots soon.

Oh, does anyone have any suggestions for random pony girl idles for when at rest? (Bear in mind her arms are restrained).

It was June when I posted a rough idea of what I thought were the steps. This morning with a deep sigh, I started.

1. Create the Mesh in Nifskope by adding the required mesh parts to the body of your choice. e.g. head, body carriage clothes etc.

Trivial and done.

2. Rename the skeleton to the convention used by ridable horses/creatures i.e Bip02

Trivial with a Hex editor and done.

3. Add the required extra nodes for riding.

Nifskope: Done

4. Setup scripts to adjust the player ride animation to sitting types when mounting/unmounting.

This is the tricky one. Half-done with the animation warper and a trivial spell to summon a pony girl and carriage.

Currently the player can mount, dismount and ride in the pony carriage. OK, Face down, in the ride pose and facing backwards! Other than that works a treat.

Getting the player upright and facing forwards should be easy enough. What I then want to do (probably the hardest part) is to change the horse riding 'stance' to a sitting one appropriate for a chair and perhaps have the rider lash the pony girls ass as well as grip the reigns.

Then it's just a matter of body and clothing variations, oh and Stallion Slaves as well of course. I have the male pony outfit already.

As I said, the required steps are available on the CS wiki.

http://cs.elderscrolls.com/index.php?title=Making_Ridable_Creatures

(Use the wiki!)

Glad I was able to help.

IIRC, 10 posts and you'll be able to posts links and attachments. It's to help prevent spambots.

Comments and suggestions welcome.

If you are writing your own script to invoke an idle and then remove it, DON'T use tokens and pickidle. Pickidle is easily broken by other animation mods.

Use PlayIdle instead. It was introduced in OBSE20 and is superior in almost every way.

It seems to contain two head meshes.

I suspect that will work very badly and look worse when converted.

I'd suggest trying to find matches in Oblivion. There are plenty of heads/hairs available.

Nicely done!

It's not often I'm moved to back-port an FO:NV item to FO3!

You'll inflate my ego too much!

Anyway, just to prove lack of divinity, I've corrected a minor typo (possibly the results of a cut'n'paste error).

Converting Skyrim meshes to Oblivion

Introduction

This is a guide to converting Skyrim meshes to Oblivion meshes, retaining the UVMapping and using the Skyrim textures. It is aimed at people who are experienced with both Nifskope and Blender and uses Gerra6's stand-alone 'Convert Pose' Tool. As always there are no screenshots, in part because I despise them and in part because if you need screenshots, you are probably not conformable enough in either Nifskope or Blender to accomplish this. If you aren't familiar with how a Nif Should look for Oblivion, this procedure probably isn't for you.

A) Before you begin, think about what you need to convert and what Skyrim textures you will want to retain.

1. If the gloves, boots or any other geometry are nothing special, you'll be better served by using other Oblivion assets. In which case you may not need those meshes or the corresponding textures.
2. Work out what you'll call the textures in Oblivion. A detail texture named texture_d.dds becomes texture.dds; normal maps usually don't need renaming and glow maps should be renamed from texture_em.dds (or similar) to texture_g.dds. Note that Skyrim uses some textures (cubemaps for example) that Oblivion does not so ignore these. You might also find when you get a mesh in game that some glow textures look very poor in the Oblivion engine so just discard them.
3. Decide on the Oblivion body type you will convert the mesh to use. Some will work better than others depending on the Skyrim mesh and whether you'll convert the 0 or 1 version of the mesh.
4. Think about the slots you want the Oblivion mesh to use. Some are obvious but in some cases you might put a collar in the necklace slot or it might be better to ultimately combine it with the upperbody meshes.
    

Sanitize the mesh:

1. Sanitize the mesh in Nifskope as always. Remove any bogus nodes, combine properties and crop to branch if required.

2. Remove any nodes you do not wish/need to convert such as Skyrim bodies or collision meshes.
3. Save this nif under a new name, such as meshop.nif (Oblivion Prep).
    

C) Use Convert Pose to prepare the mesh:

1. Run Convert Pose.bat

2. Click File -> Target Options -> and select either the File(s) or the folder that you want to process

3. Click Game -> and select the game that you want to convert from and to. Game->Skyrim Pose To ->.Oblivion Pose.
4. Click OK.
    

The tool will automatically convert the mesh pose to be compatible with the selected game. It usually does a pretty good job of this but you may need to make some extra adjustments in Blender after importing it.

D) Prepare the converted mesh for import into blender 2.49b

1. Open the T-Posed NIF in NIFSkope

2. Delete ALL nodes, except for the Sceneroot, NiTriShape and NiTriShapeData nodes. This retains the geometry and the UVMap. Running remove bogus nodes again after removing the NiSkinInstance Node will speed this up by shedding the bones. You can retain some other nodes such as NiAlphaProperty if you find it helpful.

3. Go to View -> Block List -> Show Blocks in List

4. In the NiHeader node, change "User Version" from 12 to 11.

5. Change "User Version 2" from 83 to 34.

6. Save the NIF - now it's ready for import into blender
    

E) Import to Blender.

1. First import a suitable Oblivion body or partial body mesh in one layer. You may wish to join mesh pieces to assist in Bone weight copying.

2. Import the converted Skyrim mesh that you prepared. (It is often useful to import into another layer and move the import between layers to inspect it with the body or without at need). Then select each mesh piece and remove vertex doubles as there can be a lot of these.
    

F) Make mesh adjustments.

1. Unless you are very lucky, you will need to adjust the imported mesh. Moving it on the Y and/or Z axis is very common. Rescaling the entire mesh slightly may also be advised. You may find you want to slightly rotate the mesh on the X axis. Most tedious of all you may often need to adjust vertex positions slightly, probably using proportional editing.
    

G) Re-weight

1. Select the mesh of the Skyrim armour/clothing (right-click and do make sure all vertices are selected) and also select (using shift-right click) the corresponding body mesh of the oblivion body (e.g. for a shirt select the upper body)

2. With the 2 meshes now selected, go to Object -> Scripts -> Bone Weight Copy

3. Choose a quality of 3, press the 'update selected' button and then start the copy.

4. Repeat for every piece of the Skyrim mesh. This may take a while, possibly hours so be patient.
    

H) Assign the textures to the Skyrim mesh

In object mode for each Skyrim mesh:

1. Under Link and Materials, you may need to delete spurious materials. Hit the Delete button if you see "1 Mat 1" or similar text. Continue pressing Delete until there are no more materials.

2. Press the "New" button to create a new material

3. Select the "Shading” tabs by pressing F5.

4. At the far right, under "Texture", press the "Add New" button.

5. Select the "Map Input" tab and choose the "UV" button, and enter "UVTex" in the text box

6. Press F6 to go to the "Texture Buttons" panel and Choose "Image" for Texture Type from the dropdown.

7. Press the "Load" button and choose a texture file from your oblivion Data\Textures directory for this Skyrim mesh (you may wish to copy the Skyrim textures for your meshes to the oblivion Data\Textures beforehand or choose a temp texture and adjust in Nifskope)
    

I) Final export

1. Select all the Skyrim meshes and import the Oblivion skeleton from the Oblivion body mesh, parenting selected. Press <ctrl-A> and select 'scale and rotation to ob data'. Then export the mesh as normal for Oblivion.
    

Final notes.

It's not uncommon to spot some clipping when you actually try the converted mesh in game. I inspect it in NifSkope before having a suitable character wear it in game and then cavort about in third person. You'll often spot some clipping or other imperfection so just re-import the Oblivion Nif back into Blender and start fixing things as you would normally.

You may also need to use Gerra6's tools or Blender to redo the weighting of rigid objects or problematic geometry such as collars. I've found Gerra6's mesh-rigger script can do a significantly better job on anything that meets the chin than the vanilla-blender bone weight copy.

Watch out for over-sized textures.

Credits

Gerra6 for his tools and scripts

kosukosu1 for the initial notes on how to do this.

While there does seem to be more new stuff for Morrowind than Oblivion these days, it doesn't seem that there is much for Skyrim that isn't just very similar to stuff available in Oblivion for years.

I went looking for stuff that was different and apart from parts of "Trapped in Rubber" and "Devious Devices" I couldn't find that much that was truly that unique.

How may pairs of over-tight knickers or too-small bras do you need?

Is there a mod for a working mirror in Oblivion? Or at least point me in the direction of houses that have good mirror models...

Not that I'm aware of. The game doesn't support it.
 

The thing to do is to weight paint by copying!

The Skyrim -> Oblivion conversion retains the UV mapping so all you have to do is:

Sanitize the mesh in NifSkope, change the pose by script, import to blender, scale and adjust the geometry, re-weight, re-attach the skyrim texture and export.

(Edit UVMapping not weight painting)

Odd you should mention this because I have been doing some Skyrim -> Oblivion conversions (Trapped in Rubber and similar) and started about to month ago to composite the various advice along with my own findings into a document.

Ive been using Gerra6's tools for the pose conversion and Blender to weight and adjust the geometry to fit the chosen Oblivion body.

One texture issue than CAN cause a CTD is a missing normal map.

I've actually seen an NPC who's outfit included 'metal.dds' but there was no corresponding 'metal_n.dds' produce a CTD almost every time they came to be rendered.

Worth checking that all the textures used by characters in the IMD have viable normal maps!

Having made two functional ASX menus for Oblivion, this is a good introduction.

A few useful resources (for Oblivion but I suspect much of it may be generally applicable)

http://cs.elderscrolls.com/index.php?title=Category:Oblivion_XML

The MenuQue plugin documentation (http://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/32200/?)

and this actual demo of using some of the above! (http://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/45877/?)

To expand on some of the questions raised with answers from the wiki:-

There is a discussion if Id, Locus and Stackingtype here: http://cs.elderscrolls.com/index.php?title=Property_Element

You can name the value (which is a ref) anything you like.

The actual value is a float. It's in the Docs for AddActorValues.

Menuque isn't required unless you want to display the value (except:If the `Show In Menu' box is checked, the current value of the AV will be displayed in-game in the `Misc Stats' tab.) in a custom menu.

It's a very useful addon to AddActorValues. For example you could display a value returned by AAV as text.

This is a seriously ambitious project.

You've both identified BlockHead as an essential plugin for this project. (I agree)

Can I suggest you Look at AddActorValues and MenuQue as two more plugins that might help?

My advice would be to avoid tokens whenever possible. Sometimes there is no option, but they are often used when not needed and the results can be clunky.