How To: Make Leaderheads! Ekmek's Guide

Ekmek said:
well i can whip a quick kfm that plays the standard animations but they won't have him holding a ring like the other ones. if you are ok with that i can do it.

Otherwise I'm too busy to edit Peter to have custom ring animations.
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Ekmek, thank you. If you can, do. Please forgive me, I'm asking a lot. The problem is that this damaged my computer, and I'm using my cousin's computer and is very old, doesn't support Blender.
 
Ekmek said:
you've been talking about doing these leaders for sometime now. When are you going to post one? ;)
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I've had a lot of homework, and I so far have taken Shaka's body off, but I hope to make some real progress at creating Mugabe (for now) this week because I have less schoolwork.
 
Okay, problem again. i want to make a new Leaderhead, Petőfi Sándor, for my hungarian mod. But I ran to a problem!
I will post the files, but now here is a screenshot:
attachment.php


This is a Nifscope pic, and I didn't make every mesh to the torso vertex group in Blender, so I don't know what is the problem. Can anybody help? Ekmek , can you help?
Please!!!!!!!!!!!

:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(
 
nitram15 said:
Okay, problem again. i want to make a new Leaderhead, Petőfi Sándor, for my hungarian mod. But I ran to a problem!
I will post the files, but now here is a screenshot:

This is a Nifscope pic, and I didn't make every mesh to the torso vertex group in Blender, so I don't know what is the problem. Can anybody help? Ekmek , can you help?
Please!!!!!!!!!!!

:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:([/QUOTE]

I think my biggest worry is that you guys are getting good enough to make mistakes I don't know how to fix :eek;

I havent seen something like this before so I'll have to see some files. But did you import two skeletons or an animation or something??????
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I'm trying to do something with animated textures.

Right now I'm working on a LH based on a character who has an "evil eye". I thought it would be a neat effect to take a fire object (The Road to War has them in the nif for its opening menu), set the LH's pupils to be transparent and attach the fire to the nodes for the eyeballs, essentially giving him flaming eyes.

Thing is, once I do that in nifskope and look it up in the game, the entire view is warped, as if someone put their hand on the LH and smeared it upward like fingerpaint. Is there any way around this?
 
Ekmek! I've got only a question.
When I try to import NIF in Blender, I need to wait half hour to import a leaderhead! Why? I'm seen the upper header, and I found that orange something, with a text in it: ,,Importing Data". Why I need to wait many time?
 
cfkane said:
I'm trying to do something with animated textures.

Right now I'm working on a LH based on a character who has an "evil eye". I thought it would be a neat effect to take a fire object (The Road to War has them in the nif for its opening menu), set the LH's pupils to be transparent and attach the fire to the nodes for the eyeballs, essentially giving him flaming eyes.

Thing is, once I do that in nifskope and look it up in the game, the entire view is warped, as if someone put their hand on the LH and smeared it upward like fingerpaint. Is there any way around this?
Click to expand...

after doing the swap. try importing it into blender and then doing the nifswap. this is how i swap skeletons. the initial swap is distorted i import to blender which "fixes" it.
 
I did write my method in the guide. except for swapping skeletons because i have yet to perfect it. sometimes it works sometimes it doesnt. other than that you have everything that i know how to do in my guide.

the deformed bone might be solved if you import it into blender and line your mesh up with it better. but like i said nif swapping skeletons is far from perfected.
 
Hi Ekmek, saw some older questions in the Capos thread, no idea if the questions are still open, but i think posting the information here can´t harm:

shader textures:
  • diff - the colour of the model
  • SPEC- specular Intensity: more or less the gloss map
  • NRML - normal map (better version of a greyish bump map), it simply a map which defines / simulate high and lower parts in the mesh without really modeling them and therefore the most difficult texture to create. But for example it´s possible to create this textures from a slightly adjusted diff texture in gimp

the last two texture, i´m not completely sure - or better said i have no real idea, but i think:
  • ENV - Enviromental map: it the texture below the gloss [no idea how to describe it better, eg for body armors the used texture is often similar to the glow map for units]
  • EMSK - Environment Map: seems to be a second gloss map, perhaps a special interaction with the "ENV" texture, at least intelligent difference between SPEC and EMSK shall have a great effect

to apply a shader you must have:
  • all four "NiIntegerExtraData" and
  • all four shader textures added (so you need five textures)
  • the mesh stripified (NiTriStrips) with tangent data (check the NiTriStripsData - binomials and tangents),
  • afaik it´s not possible to create a working SkinPartition for leaderheads you need to have NiTriShape (causing the model is broking effect in game but it´s already visible in sceneviewer).
  • Older version did not create the tangent data, therefore older leaderheads which shall get a shader should be in and exported one time.
  • IIRC also some flags must be set, because the vanilla export setting is not similar to the one used in Civ4 - i think it was the "Consistency Flags" in the NiTriStripsData - the export value is something like "CT_STATIC" and game models use "CT_VOLATILE" (i think this was a finding from dutchking, but i changed this value for the alexander lh)
  • Set the shader in the "NiTriStrips" block details: "has shader" to yes, "shader name" to "TLeaderheadShaderNoSkin_20" (is one [or the?] option), and the "unknown integer" below to "-1"

now i hope i didn´t missed a step
 
TheMostWanted said:
:)Hi, Ekmek, I need to know: when I open a .nif to remove branch and paste the other branch of another .nif in the first .nif says: failed to map parent link NiNode|Scene Root.00

View attachment 232398

What's the meaning of this?:confused:
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you imported two skeletons when you did your blender work. no problem. rename scene root.00 to scene root and it will copy/swap over. But if its distorted save that nif and import into blender and then export and do the nifswap again. sounds bad i know but on the plus side you kind of "nifswapped skeletons"

Spoiler :
Hi Ekmek, saw some older questions in the Capos thread, no idea if the questions are still open, but i think posting the information here can´t harm:

shader textures:
diff - the colour of the model
SPEC- specular Intensity: more or less the gloss map
NRML - normal map (better version of a greyish bump map), it simply a map which defines / simulate high and lower parts in the mesh without really modeling them and therefore the most difficult texture to create. But for example it´s possible to create this textures from a slightly adjusted diff texture in gimp

the last two texture, i´m not completely sure - or better said i have no real idea, but i think:
ENV - Enviromental map: it the texture below the gloss [no idea how to describe it better, eg for body armors the used texture is often similar to the glow map for units]
EMSK - Environment Map: seems to be a second gloss map, perhaps a special interaction with the "ENV" texture, at least intelligent difference between SPEC and EMSK shall have a great effect

to apply a shader you must have:
all four "NiIntegerExtraData" and
all four shader textures added (so you need five textures)
the mesh stripified (NiTriStrips) with tangent data (check the NiTriStripsData - binomials and tangents),
afaik it´s not possible to create a working SkinPartition for leaderheads you need to have NiTriShape (causing the model is broking effect in game but it´s already visible in sceneviewer).
Set the shader in the "NiTriStrips" block details: "has shader" to yes, "shader name" to "TLeaderheadShaderNoSkin_20" (is one [or the?] option), and the "unknown integer" below to "-1"

now i hope i didn´t missed a step
Click to expand...

very nice coyote! thx!

I never did this part though.. and everything still had shaders.

Older version did not create the tangent data, therefore older leaderheads which shall get a shader should be in and exported one time.
IIRC also some flags must be set, because the vanilla export setting is not similar to the one used in Civ4 - i think it was the "Consistency Flags" in the NiTriStripsData - the export value is something like "CT_STATIC" and game models use "CT_VOLATILE" (i think this was a finding from dutchking, but i changed this value for the alexander lh)
Click to expand...
 
i think both steps are caused by my copy the original files as much as possible trip. But if it´s not really necessary even better. ;)
 
nitram15 said:
Oh :o!
I created a new leaderhead, and I want to shader it, I followed that method, what your guide say, but when I click (in-game) on my leader, the game crashes.

Do you know Ekmek, what is the problem?
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Just a question- did you use the "nonshader" nif for your LH? Did you copy all of the dds files of the LH you want to edit? The LH crashes because it can't find some file it needs for adding the shaders properly.
 
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