Blender/Custom Cuirass (part 2)

Explanation

This is a continuation of the Custom Cuirass in Blender tutorial. If you haven't done Part 1, this one won't do you much good.

The Pauldrons

You don’t have to have pauldrons, but some people like the look, and they add authenticity by adding protection to the chest and neck area. Look at your player character in Oblivion when they’re in their “fighting” stance, and you’ll see that they’ve slightly hunched their shoulders so that their pauldrons can help guard their throat and upper chest.

This is a little tricky, because we can’t add vertices. What I usually do is to copy a big patch of vertices from the shoulder section of BOTH shoulders in Edit Mode using select and shift-D, then g-z to slide them up above the original shoulders to somewhere we can work on them easily. Depending on what pauldron shape you’ll want, you might have to subdivide all these vertices. These will be your proto-pauldrons. Then I select just the outer row of vertices on one “pauldron” and do g-z again to drag them slightly downwards. Next select two that are opposite each other and press alt-m and “at center” when that comes up. This merges the two vertices into one. Repeat until you have a closed shape that is roughly domelike. This will be your pauldron. Give it the shape you want by using the g and the axis keys before you lower it back down onto the shoulders. I don’t recommend joining the mesh to the cuirass, because that can make texturing much harder later on.

I do recommend doing each change you make on one pauldron, then the other, in a continuous way. It can be hard to replicate all the changes from one pauldron on the other side otherwise. You can just make one and copy it, but then the weight paint will be wrong for the side it’s on and you’ll have to rename all the bones to which that particular pauldron is painted (this is done in Edit Mode).

Don’t forget to export the UV map.

The Arm Section

Now when you make this part of the cuirass, you need to have a couple of things in mind. If you want a sleeveless look, you don’t need to do anything here; you’ll just leave the bare arm sections with your cuirass. You do have to have some sort of arms included with the cuirass even if it’s sleeveless, because the game engine deletes the body’s arms and torso when anything is equipped in the upperbody slot. Trust me on this, it will look really strange when a character appears to have a nice cuirass, hands, and no arms.

If you want an armband look, you can do the same as you did with the cuirass: copy the arm sections and enlarge them using s. However, with the arms this will make them further apart, so you’ll have to select each arm separately in edit mode (use b-b to get a bounding circle and z to select vertices all the way through) and move them back in toward the body so they don’t look odd or have the weight paint overlap wrong.

Toggling the wireframe (z key) is an excellent way to make sure things overlap just right, or to select vertices that are behind other vertices.

Once you get the copied arm sections situated, trim away whatever you don’t want. Remember, gauntlets usually cover part of the wrist, so unless you have a very clear and specific idea what gauntlets you want to make/use you don’t want to put things there.

If you want multiple separate parts of the arm section, like the glass cuirass in the game has, you can always copy vertices again. Just make sure you don’t move things around horizontally too much or we’ll get clipping again.

Again, remember that UV map.

Optional: The Skirt/Kilt Section

Bethesda’s default cuirass meshes generally have a lower section that protects the hip/groin areas of the body (which contains many important arteries including the femoral artery in the inner thigh). This overlaps the greaves and provides additional protection over them. However, it creates some issues with fit. This is why this part of Bethesda meshes tends to be so large; it has to fit over every type of greaves in the game to avoid clipping.

If you want a shorter cuirass, you don’t have to include this. Or, if you wish, you can include this section with the greaves instead of the cuirass to make your cuirass compatible with more different greave styles.

If you do want to include this section, there are a couple of ways to do it. One is to import a game cuirass and delete everything but the skirt (don’t forget the skeleton!), then scale and subdivide and grab and drag that into the shape and size you want. Don’t forget to parent this to your skeleton, or you’ll get a really odd look ingame. If you want something longer, do the same thing with a plain skirt mesh from the game.

I've tried expanding duplicated vertices from the underwear meshes, but that tends to result in having to repaint a lot of very small points. I don't recommend it as a method.

And of course (sing it with me, now) don’t forget to save the UV map!

Bonus Section: Editing the Default Game UV Maps

Bethesda’s default UV maps for their body meshes look nice in the UV screen, but once you get them out and start trying to texture them, you realize that they are absolutely insane. The femaleupperupperbody.nif in particular has considerable distortion in the chest areas. It is very difficult to texture over UV maps with no straight lines in them. This gives us much respect for the talents of Bethesda’s texturers, but it doesn’t do a thing for us as modders. Besides, we don’t have to work with the filesize constraints that the original game makers did, because we’re making a mod rather than a whole game.

Before I get into what I’m about to propose, you need to be familiar with this method for UV mapping:

[Relevant Section of Sword Tutorial]

…Or at least with the UV window and where it is.

Here is a dress whose upper bodice I made using a method similar to the one for the cuirass above:

SickleYield's Regency Ballgown

I then discovered that I wanted to paint folds on the bodice, but it was impossible with the UV map as it was and my limited drawing talents. After much flailing, swearing and muttering, this is what I did.

I went into UV Face Select mode in Blender. Then I used the bounding circle (b,b) to select the front half and ONLY the front half of the bodice. Then I went to the UV screen, which I had in a small window (per the sword mapping tutorial above). It was showing the section I had selected with its overly-curvy original UV map.

Then I went to the UV dropdown and selected “LSCM unwrap” (in Blender 2.42a it says nothing but "unwrap"). Suddenly my UV map was beautifully flat. I repeated this with the back half and laid them one above the other in the UV screen, so that they could still be used on the same texture.

NOTE ON UV MAPPING IN RECENT BLENDER VERSIONS: You can use the "u" key as a shortcut, and it will pop up with a list of options for unwrapping. Very handy.

Now, what you get by doing this is still rather curvy for us to use a flat phototexture over it. So then I used the weld commands (w,2 and w,3) to straighten the lines where possible. On female chest sections, you’ll sometimes just have to learn how to draw lines curved to make them look straight. If you straighten too much, you’ll get a bizarrely stretched texture that won’t look right.

Be sure and export this UV map so you can use it for texturing. A tutorial for texturing from the UV map is [here].

Export: Putting It All Together

Okay! It has now probably been several hours of staring at your screen, swearing violently at Blender, et cetera, and your cuirass looks exactly like you want it to look.

Make sure everything is parented to the skeleton you imported back at the beginning (select item, hold down and select skeleton, ctrl-p, don’t create groups). Press ctrl-A to apply scale and rotation, so that NifSkope and the game know your meshes don’t look like body meshes any more. Make sure you’ve saved your finished project in Blender.

We don’t have to add textures or materials, because they’re already there. You’ll want to add different textures, so you won’t have a fleshtoned cuirass, but I’ll show you how to do that in NifSkope. I won’t show you how to make a new texture from a UV map here, because I’m saving that for another tutorial on another day.

Ready? Okay! Now go to Object Mode and press A to select all. Now File-Export-Netimmerse/Gamebryo. A screen will come up that lets you name your cuirass and decide where to export it. Mine always go to Oblivion\Data\meshes\armor\SickleYield\cuirassname.nif. Make sure you use the default Oblivion settings when exporting!

Minimize Blender when you’ve exported, then click through the Data files on your computer until you find your cuirass.nif in the armor section. It’s NifSkope time.

Adding/Changing the Textures

I'm not going to tell you how to make a texture from scratch here, but once you have one, you've only got to type the texture path into the top of the nisourcetexture node in NifSkope next to the little flower symbol. It will usually look something like data\textures\armor\cuirasstorso.dds. This tells NifSkope where your texture is. For now I'll leave it that the texture must be a .dds file and it must have a normal map, which is called something like mynewshield_n.dds.

Important warning: make sure the slashes in the texture name lean backwards, like this: \ and not forwards like this: / or the game will refuse to recognize the texture. NifSkope will sometimes try to change this around on you. (The newest version seems to have mostly fixed that problem. Huzzah for the wonderful makers of NifSkope!)

Troubleshooting

1. PROBLEM: My mesh looks bizarre and spiky when I copy it into a new .nif.
   • SOLUTION: Perhaps you didn't parent your mesh to the skeleton, in which case you need to go back into Blender, parent it again, and export again. And believe me, the ctrl-A thing is not optional here, it's very necessary.
   • Another possibility is that you chose a game mesh with a very different kind of skeleton from yours to copy into. If you get an error message that says “cannot find (name of bone such as Bip01 UpperArm),” you’ve probably chosen a mesh that doesn’t contain the same bones as your cuirass; choose another one and try the NifSkope dance again.
2. PROBLEM: Error message in NifSkope says "cannot find 2," or "cannot find sceneroot.001," etc.
   • SOLUTION: Rename your mesh's node 0 to just plain Scene Root and try again.
3. PROBLEM: My mesh looks fine in NifSkope, but it's invisible when I playtest in Oblivion.
   • SOLUTION: A few things can cause this, but it's usually that your skeleton is bad. This can happen. You can usually fix it by going back into Blender and deleting the skeleton to which your mesh is parented. Then import a clean skeleton, delete the meshes that came with it, and parent your cuirass to that. Now do the export dance all over again.
   • If you do this, make sure you use the EXACT SAME MESH to copy your new mesh into as the one you parented it to the second time. I.e., you can't usually parent it to the Arena heavy armor skeleton and then export it and try to copy it into the Dark Brotherhood skeleton.
   • It's dimly possible you could get this problem because you didn't do anything in NifSkope and merely assumed you could export a usable mesh straight from Blender. That is possible with Morrowind modding. It doesn't work with the current tools we have for Oblivion. You have been warned.
   • The problem may also be caused by missing normal maps. The mesh will probably not appear as a biped model in game unless you do have a normal map for every one of your color maps. If your texture is named mycuirass.dds, for example, your normal map will be named mycuirass_n.dds, placed in the same folder as your texture and the game will detect it automatically.
4. PROBLEM: My texture won't show up on my mesh. The mesh is totally black in the game even when it looks fine in NifSkope.
   • SOLUTION: This could be caused by failing to create a normal map. Make sure the texture you want to use has a normal map with a name like cuirass_n.dds (if your texture is called cuirass.dds).
5. PROBLEM (unique to NIF scripts 2.0 and later): Parts of my mesh disappear in NifSkope and/or ingame or appear ridiculously stretch in NifSkope. Reparenting to a new skeleton doesn't fix the problem.
   • SOLUTION: The new NIF scripts don't like it when you apply ctrl+a to just one part of a mesh and then try to update the others and export. You might have to join all the parts of a mesh together as one with ctrl+j, update with ctrl+a, and then separate them again using select plus p key. This is annoying, but it's the only surefire fix so far (if another one is discovered, someone please edit this).

Getting The Mesh Into The Construction Set

Double click on the construction set icon on your desktop to load up the CS. If you don't have this icon on your desktop, I urge you to put it there right now. Now wait for it to load. This may take a while, and then there will be very few items on the screen. That's because we haven't loaded any data files. Click file - data in the top menu. You should see a list of all the mods on your computer here. If you don't have any, it'll probably just show oblivion.esm. Click on that so that a little "X" appears next to it, making it active, and then click "OK."

Now wait for THAT to load. Or come back in two years.

Eventually it will finish loading and you can see every object in the game. Imagine the possibilites! Find the objects window, which has a list that says "Actors," "Items," etc. Click on Items to expand it, then click on Armor. Now you see a list of all the armor sets in the game. You can click on one set, say "Glass" or "Daedric," in the left-hand pane and it will show you all the pieces in just that set in the right-hand one.

Choose a cuirass that has the kind of stats you want. Glass and Daedric are very popular because they are the best light and heavy armor in the game. Don't choose one that says "arena" anywhere in the ID, because those have scripts on them that we don't want. Double click the cuirass of your choice to bring up its information. Click on the name of the nif (say, glass/f/cuirass.nif). A little window will pop up with the data directory in it. Click through until you find your own new cuirass mesh. Click on that and click "OK". Your mesh name should now appear in the window.

You'll need to do the same with a new icon, which you can make easily in GIMP using this method: [Easy Icon Tutorial]

Now, this is different from swords and shields. You need a world object, so that your cuirass will be visible when a character drops it in the game. I won’t tell you how to do that here. One method is to pick a game item that closely resembles yours and retexture it. Here’s a retexturing tutorial for the GIMP: [SickleYield’s Retexturing Tutorial]

Now this part is very important. You need to change the ID of the new cuirass, not just the name. The ID is above the name and looks something like "GlassCuirass" or "DaedricCuirass". You must change this to a new ID such as "Mynewcuirass," or you will replace every glass cuirass in the game with yours. Be sure and give it a unique name, too, so that everyone knows what an amazing piece of armor you've made.

When that is done, click OK. You'll get a message asking if you want to create a new ID. ALWAYS SAY YES.

Getting the New Cuirass Into the Game

Now your cuirass will appear in the Armor list. It will be listed alphabetically by its ID, although you can change the sorting method by clicking the headings of the list. If you keep it in a separate folder such as Data\meshes\armor\myarmor and don’t just drop it into Data\meshes\armor, the Construction Set will create a special tab just for you under the Armor list.

Now you can drop the cuirass into the inventory of a merchant, into your house, or into the street of a random city. If you already have a quest all planned out, you can do that, too, but I don’t plan to cover that here. Go to file - save in the main CS menu and give your mod a name. Close the CS. This might take a while. It might even crash. This is okay, because we already saved.

After all that work, you can now go into the game and see where you screwed up. Ha ha. Just a little bitter humor there, based on the number of times I normally have to playtest before I get a version I like. Don’t worry, the cuirass is the hardest piece of armor to create; everything after this is cake. If you plan to make lots of armor, you might want to create a different esp mod file just for testing with a name like “ArmorTestMod.esp.” Then you can create a different one for your actual mod and only setup meshes in that file when they’re in exactly the kind of shape you want.

Making armor can take a little while, but before long you’ll get used to the steps and it goes much faster. There’s nothing like the satisfaction of seeing a character wearing your sweet-looking new armor for the first time.