NifSkope Question - Op1, Op2, & Op3

[varenne]

I've been working with gerra6's standalone tools recently and have some very basic questions concerning specifically Op1, Op2 and Op3.

 

So far I have found it far easier and productive to work with separate female upper and lower bodies, yet I often see what seems to be duplication of these specific bones in either the upper or lower bodies.

 

Case in point is my preferred upper and lower for HGEC H-cup and LL Lower body. The upper body has, Op1 & Op2. The lower body also has Op2 & Op3.

 

So is this an acceptable practice to have this duplication of bones across these two meshes, or should I remove the duplicate in one of them? I'm now wondering if this may be the root cause of some in-game mesh oddities too. How does Oblivion handle these duplicate bones, whether it is the core body, an armor or clothing item?

 

I'm simply trying to perfect my core female body meshes for use in lattices for armor/clothes conversion. If I start with something that is potentially defective or not of standard best practice, that I assume could affect my desired conversion work. Yes? (The goal is to extend existing sets of armor & clothes for HGEC H-cup/LL Bottoms and add BBB/BB where none exists.)

 

I've tried comparing my two preferred meshes to others, yet I see no consistency; this duplication of Op2 & Op3 occurs in other body sets I've reviewed; DMRA, HFB Body, etc.

 

[Symon]

The engine should cull redundant nodes.

Inspection in Nifskope shows many meshes have redundant bones (lower bodies with fingers) and all sorts of flock. Nifskopes sanitation options are a good way to clean these up. I have tutorials in the relent forum section on how to proceed.

 

 

[movomo]

Good luck! The bones in the equipment nif file are simply to indicate which bones to follow when some kf animation is played. Simple as that, and don't think about it more for now. Your skeleton has all the needed bones - op1,2,3.

Well, it is somewhat strange that the lowerbody mesh has Op2 vertex groups , as Op3 bones are generally used for bbbutts movement, but nothing to worry about it anyway, if you have used the body so far with no problem. They are not duplicates. It just means 'some' portion of the lowerbody(probably butts) moves at the same time as 'some' portion of the upperbody(most certainly boobs).

For example, your upperbody mesh probably has the bip01 pelvis, as well as the lowerbody. The pelvis bone mainly governs the movement of the thigh~waist region, and your waist is smoothly connected to the butts.

I havent tried the stand alone version of the converter myself, but my recommendation is not to generate the lattices for the upper/lower body separately. It may be ok if the lattice is very good.. but may cause prominent gap between the upper/lower part of the end result, especially if you are using UV search and the lowerbody mesh to convert is not exactly HGEC.

[varenne]

Thanks to you both for the feedback and input.

 

"Nifskopes sanitation options", I assume you are referring to the spells I use both manually and on save. I'll look for the tutorials as I'm no expert when it comes to NifSkope; I can always learn more.

 

I have run all of my separate meshes through Seam Mender; female foot, hand, lower body, upper body, plus made total mesh composites also.

 

And any resulting seam gaps can again be run back through Seam Mender. Already tested that and it is hit or miss till I get just the right settings for the tool.

[Imperfection]

Try Spell / Optimize / Remove Bogus Nodes in nifskope. I use it all the time making clothing parts from full models, this removes all bone nodes not refrenced in the remaining mesh. There generally is no problem having the extra bones there but it can shrink file size by 1-2K per model. This is not part of the normal auto sanatation functions.

 

Hope this is what your looking for

 

[gerra6]

Mesh Rigger will also eliminate excess nodes, unless 'Preserve Skeleton Structure' is enabled.

[varenne]

Yeah, I'm working out my repeated steps to form a production process to get some conversions done. Remove bogus nodes is definitely one I make sure to use every time.

 

Now that I'm also using Mesh Rigger in my conversion/build processes those excess nodes will be one less thing to be concerned with.

 

 

I think my immediate conclusion is I will start by eliminating the extra Op2 in the lower body mesh, and do the same in future lower body meshes that I convert. Mesh Rigger should take care of most of that, I'm just going to review to make sure it does. What I'm aiming for is consistency, something that up to now has been somewhat lacking, IMO.

 

 

I'm still not completely convinced that armor/clothing conversions are best done as a 'whole body'; maybe I just haven't fully grokked it yet. The biggest challenge in that approach (that I'm experiencing) is finding a complete core body (foot, hand, lower & upper body) the target items were based on. With Seam Mender now available, I'm also less concerned about seam misalignment after running my Clothing Conversion process, on two separate items.

[gregathit]

With some of the old meshes that had bouncing butts the OP bones were used to "bounce" the butt.  Hopefully that is not what you are dealing with as that system is pretty awful with most animations.  

 

What I typically did was put an outfit together in nifskope (all parts) and then imported it into blender.  Then deleted the bones and went from there.  The "old" lattice generator worked better with a whole body at one time than in pieces.  I haven't had enough time to play with any of Gerra6's shiny new toys.  I am SOOOOO looking forward to the time that I can.  Work is just kicking my ass right now........

[varenne]

I know what you're saying and can totally relate to it. I was on a 7 month employment contract, away from home and Oblivion and my toys. I so hated it. All I could do at the time was lurk.

 

 The meshes I'm currently working with all have and I think use the Op1, Op2 and Op3 bones. I'm assuming those are what are providing the bounce. As I recall the Op1 & Op2 are for the upper body and breast bounce, which for the most part works well with animations. The Op3 is the one in question I think.

 

Gonna take a jump over to the animation setbody reloaded thread and re-download those bodies you posted linked to a while back for review. Maybe I can dig through some and come up with some answers to these nagging questions. Very, very easy now to replace bones and weighting, AND fix broken seams with Gerra6's stand-alone tools.

 

EDIT: I re-downloaded setbody reloaded 1.20.

 

I have to assume that this uses the improved 'bounce' system for lower body meshes vs. the old, yes?

 

If that is correct then I can continue to use my current preferred female lower body mesh (it does not use a mirrored UV map, which IMO is inferior) and just swap out all the bones from the one in the setbody MOD.

 

Apologies for being such a nit picker, just trying to get my core files in place and perfected, before I really dig into this conversion process. Also, if I can pinpoint exactly which bones have the BBB/BB on it by intimately knowing the core meshes I'm working from, I can more easily target just those bones (using Mesh Rigger) to add to those target meshes I wish to convert to butt bounce. These are actually the easy conversions. Follow up with Seam Mender and good to go!

[varenne]

Well a quick review of two female lower body types from setbody reloaded 1.20, HGEC and DMRA the only difference between non-BB and BB is Op3. Unless I'm just not seeing where the actual bounce functionality is being applied in the nif.

 

So is this the old butt bounce or the new?

[gerra6]

Setbody Reloaded 1.20 was released before the B4 butt bounce.

However, since I've shifted my focus over to tool development, Movomo has taken over the project and is working on updating the meshes...right now the main hold-up is working out the last of the kinks in the new Seam Mender project. Once he's satisfied with the quality of the updated neck seams, he'll probably be releasing the updated and improved Setbody Reloaded meshes.

One of our plans is to include a streamlined distribution of Seam Mender with Setbody Reloaded, so that end-users have the option to automatically mass update their neck seams to a single seamless standard.

As far as the OP3 bones on the lowerbodies is concerned, I plan on coding a quick and dirty bone swapper utility. The idea will be to automatically transfer the weightpainting from one bone to another. But I probably won't start on that for a couple of days. It should be an easy enough tool to code, I just don't have room for it on my plate until I get the next public beta of Mesh Rigger, Seam Mender, and the Clothing Converter released.

[varenne]

Fantastic! I quickly reread related threads last night, so I'm a bit more in the loop on current activities across the board on this.

 

So is there a preliminary female lower body mesh that has the correct or more desirable B4 butt bounce available? That way I can use that in both testing and early production vs. continuing to use what is looking like the old way of making the butt bouncy. This could explain why some of my Lovers animations look like crap, when it comes to the female lower body. (Just a note, non-Lovers animations do not, so it must be something in the way those older animations were created.)

 

Rhetoric

With the above mentioned, still-on-the-drawing-board new tool that will simply swap weightpainting from one bone to another. That would (initially) make B4 weighting generic across all body types. I personally don't use multiple body types in-game (yet), but I wonder how that is going to look on the more extreme ends of body types. Is this B4 weighting moderate? Will it then be necessary to use or make mention of something like fore did with NoMaaM BBB animations?

 

The animations come in 3 different scales called BMF (Breast Movement Factor):
1.1 = "EXPRESSIVE"
0.8 = "MODERATE"
0.6 = "LOW-KEY"

The 3 versions of an animation have the same pattern, only deviation and angle for each breast bone from its resting position is scaled.
Which version is the one for you? This depends on breast size of the body/clothing/armor meshIt's a matter of taste. I design and test all animation with Coronerra's HGEC H-Cup and some of Saaya's HGEC H-Cup conversions.
And I like it "expressive" (BMF 1.1). Double Melon I would play "moderate" (BMF 0.8). But if this is too much for you, use "low-key" (BMF 0.6).

[kingkong]

if i may add op1 is used to the nipple op2 is used to the left and right side  and the op3 is the full region

the op3 is generally used for butt also(most of the animations uses just those bones for bouncing)

 

in set body reloaded you find only bbb with only those 3 paire of bones                the only place i know with real bones to the butt  is the buttock bones from lapf bodys

 

in blender you can easily swap those bones with a simple copy and past the bones names with Ctrl c   and Ctrl v    and keep the weight paint intact         when you load 2 meshes you delete just the skeletons than copy name by highlighting  the bones than check in weight paint mode  that there is no mistake before importing a skeleton for nifskope

 

the only probleme is after the change you might need animations for those bones !

[gerra6]

if i may add op1 is used to the nipple op2 is used to the left and right side  and the op3 is the full region

A minor correction. OP1 - 3 work the other way around.

For the breasts, OP1 is the full breast, OP2 is a smaller region, and OP3 is the nipples only.

[kingkong]

oups !  gerra6 is right        (actually because i am upside down)

 

 

[gregathit]

 

Fantastic! I quickly reread related threads last night, so I'm a bit more in the loop on current activities across the board on this.

 

So is there a preliminary female lower body mesh that has the correct or more desirable B4 butt bounce available? That way I can use that in both testing and early production vs. continuing to use what is looking like the old way of making the butt bouncy. This could explain why some of my Lovers animations look like crap, when it comes to the female lower body. (Just a note, non-Lovers animations do not, so it must be something in the way those older animations were created.)

 

Yes, if you look at the LAPF and the alternate bodies pack you will find both an HGEC and a DMRA lower body that have butt bounce per the new B4 system.  Feel free to use them.  If needed you can just delete the futa cock and then remove the un-needed bone nodes via the clean up menu of nifskope.

 

The "old" butt bounce tied the butt to the breast and is easy to spot when using nifskope to view the mesh.  It will have breast nodes that you can remove via the clean up functions of nifskope.  Any animation that has bbb enabled will bounce the butt in the old mesh.  If the bbb is fairly expressive then it looks awful as butt bouncing is only decent looking when used in small doses.

 

Cheers,

Greg

[varenne]

Got 'em g', thanks!

 

Lower body mesh done. I'll run it through Seam Mender and make a composite next.

 

(This is all starting to come back to me now. Seven months away from Oblivion and I forgot quite a lot.)

[varenne]

Next point of discussion. Shouldn't there be only one Scene Root per .nif file? All of the female Robert's feet I have (DLed/collected) seem to have multiple. ???!

[gregathit]

Next point of discussion. Shouldn't there be only one Scene Root per .nif file? All of the female Robert's feet I have (DLed/collected) seem to have multiple. ???!

 

Can't help with Robert's female body parts but here is the one I use for HGEC that I got from GrimReaper.  Seam Mender will likely fix any gaps.

HGEC GM femalefoot.7z

[varenne]

Thanks, I have the same one (from GrimReaper) and it too has an extra Scene Root.

 

 

Not a big deal, just trying to clean up the flock in these nifs before I use them.

 

What is the best way to correct this?

 

EDIT: Rereading ThatOne's Nif optimization and Simon's Cleaning Nifs threads.

 

[gregathit]

What????

 

No.  You don't delete stuff from the niskininstance.  You'll break the mesh that way I'm pretty sure.

[varenne]

So then, the rule of only one Scene Root node does not apply. Interesting...

[gerra6]

That's actually a link back to the existing scene root node in the geometry node's skininstance, rather than a separate scene root. It's perfectly normal and nothing to worry about.

When you need to start worrying is if you see more than one block at the root of the nif.

[gregathit]

Exactly as Gerra6 stated.  

[varenne]

Perfect! Then I'm all set to rebuild my core female mesh set and move forward with more testing and early production work. (I like multitasking, )

 

Thanks all!