Problems with unit graphic

[cool3a2]

I tried to create a new horsearcher for my Magyar mod out of already existing parts. I wanted to use the head of avains archer and some more parts of units made by aranor (mostly from the scythian horseman). Because these parts are no isolated parts I tried to isolate them via 3dsmax. So I deleted all unnecessary parts of the archer and added the rest to the horsearcher. After some warnings I managed to merge them so they look fine and there are no more warnings (except one, but I found out it can be ignored when I worked on LH's). Sceneviewer crashes without any message when I try to load the nif, which doesn't surprise me. It also did when I worked on that LH. I tried to do that work with nifskope described in the tutorial by ploeperpengel about shading LH's. But when I try to paste the branch nifskope says "failed to map parent link "NiNode|Szenenstamm"" (Szenenstamm means scene root).

Some things I have done that might be of interest:
- I removed the skin of all the parts that I have merged together and add a new one with all bones that have been in in the original skin; i I wouldn't have done this 3dsmax would show errors that there are to less vertices according to the skin (I guess that's because I removed them )
- I have installed both nif plugins; after importing the nif I saved it as max-file, deleted the nif tools plugin, done the changes and exported it as nif, so this should not be because of incompatible or missing plugins
- I haven't touched the material etc.
- I attached the new head to the torso like it is described in sharicks tutorial (it's linked in the other tutorial mentioned above)
- I have smoothened the head

What can I do to get that unit working? In 3dsmax it already looks good...

 

[cool3a2]

Really no advices yet???!!

 

[cool3a2]

Dont' forget to read this

 

[seZereth]

dont know about that one. i can only do blender
a more rough approach would be to use the head as a separate object (export only the head after deleting all the vertices, don´t merge it with the horsearcher) and attach it to the head bone in nifviewer (scaling the head of your original archer to 0.001 and the head you attach to 1000). There should be a tutorial about that in the tutorials section.

sorry, this is an old and crude way, but i cant help directly with your 3dsmax problem.

 

[cool3a2]

Hmmm... Yeah, if nothing else helps I will try that. I will wait some hours more to see if someone else can help me, too. But thank you so far, seZereth!

 

[cool3a2]

I tried what you told me to. I haven't tried it in civ4 itself, but in nifskope only the head is animated although this was the only part I made changes to. The other thing is, that it doesn't looks that well as my 3dsmax version. The problem is that with your technique the neck also disapears, but I would need it. I also made transformed the head to make it fit better to the torso. As it is now, it looks terrible... Any other hints? What are the steps you do in Blender? I believe I have to do the same steps but in a different environment...

 

[The_Coyote]

the Problem with your scene root problem, sometimes when merging files from different nifs the names aren´t consistent, in one nif it´s called scene root in the other it has a different name.
Nifscope tries to match the exisiting linking of the model in the new file (using the name, eg. parts of a model are linked to a node called head, nifscope looks in the target nif for a node called head and will link this part to this node) now when a node with the name doesn´t exist => error message, look in the node in which you want to copy the model, look how the node there is called and rename the node in the exported nif (not in the nif in which you want to copy, the node name is also used as reference in the animation files). Now when you copy the model nifscope should find the matching node.

 

[cool3a2]

Thank you, now I could copy the branch. I followed the instructions of the tutorial mentioned above but it resulted in a nif that still crashes nifviewer (which is only asking about creating a dump before it shuts down). Any ideas?

BTW: It is possible that I have removed the vertex weights when I removed the original skin... Could this be a problem?

 

[cool3a2]

Now I rerigged the modell the way it is described in sharicks tutorial. All I get is a distorted modell. Even the horse is although I didn't touch it. I could copy the branches now, but I don't believe that would work and if so it wouldn't be worth the work. Any hints?

 

[Refar]

I would need the unit and maybe your max files to take a look, to say something definitive.

What i am 100% certain of - there should be no "Szenenstamm" node in there - how did it come into the being ?

Overall the precedure you described does not sound terrible wrong, i never seen the "Not enought Vertices in the Skin" error tho, so i think it is not supposed to happen.

 

[cool3a2]

Alright, load the archive from here:
http://www.adrive.com/public/a69efdb6e6f1d607c1c25cb2d3e1f901dc75c38efc6ca9d03477f3710996c93f.html

You will find two max-files. Their names are selfexplaining. There are also 2 directories. One is the archer the head is from, the other is the horsearcher that should get the head. Inside the horsearchers directory you can find test.nif and test2.nif. Test.nif is created with the niftools plugin (was only a test) and test2.nif was created with the civilizaition4 plugin.

Szenenstamm is certainly created by 3dsmax, it's the only program that uses german as menu language. But Coyotes hint helped, so that is maybe not the biggest problem if I copy the trishape in nifskope.

That vertex problem disappeared when I removed the skin and added a new one. At the end I asigned all vertices to bones and also added weights.

That's all I can say...

 

[Refar]

Ok i had a quick look... It get's a bit technical... One cause of your trouble is saving the file while you are not on the top level of the modifier stack.

If you select the archer body for example you will see, that in the modifer stack small dots are displayed near the entries for Editable Mesh and Skin. This means that you are in the vertex edit mode of the editable mesh.
Simply put - it changes the way how modifiers (Skin in this case) are applied to the mesh - instead of the whole model the modifier will be aplied to a sub-selection.

As a rule of thumb: You should not apply or edit a modifier on the stack (Skin, UWV, ...) while in sub-object mode. Exit the sub-mode first (by selecting the Editable Mesh entry and deselecting the sublevel button there), then select the modifier and do the changes you want to do.

This was likely the cause of the trouble, however fixing it now might not solve the problem, since once the file is saved this way changes are applied to the modifier stack. (Causing some vertices - namely those, that are not selected on the sub-level mode - to loose the skin) This is why the mesh looks distorted.

I will look a bit closer tomorrow, i am not sure if there is a simple fix, without having to re-assign the vertex weights.

 

[cool3a2]

Oh no. I spent hours to do this... Anyway, thank you for your efforts so far...

 

[cool3a2]

This unit is still not working... Refar already helped me a lot and I could shorten the problems list. The nif that I have exported can't be opened by Sceneviewer. So I open it in nifskope (at this time it looks as in 3dsmax, in other words normal, besides of some minor distortions) and rename the root node to horsearcher.nif. Now I open a second niskope window and open the unchanged horsearcher. I change back to my exported nif, select and copy the necessary parts (copy branches), namely:
- the head
- the feather
- the beart
- the horsearchers (henceforth HA) body
- a cylinder that connects the head with the body
Now I paste those parts in the other window and remove the unchanged rider. Lastly I save it. This file I can open in Sceneviewer:

(What you can't see on this picture is, that the whole model is also rotated)

Strangely the modell looks totally different in nifskope. There the rider is positioned over the horse (where it should be), but instead of the head, the feather, the beart and the cylinder there are points. At first I thought those parts are only too small, so I resized them (to 100000 and more), but I still couldn't see them. If I rotate the perspective I can see these parts somewhere in the endless space. Don't know if the distance to the other parts is only very huge or really endless... Moving them is senceless, it doesn't work. What I can't see, is this malformed neck like in sceneviewer and I also don't have to rotate the perspective. It's like two different files, but they are the same. I have to say, that all of the malformed parts of the neck are assigned to the head bone. Also the head itself and the other meshes that behave strange in nifskope.

So the problems are in short:
- same unit looks totally different in the two programs
- neck is malformed in Sceneviewer
- some parts are "somewhere" in nifskope

I checked it several times that all the vertices have their weights and no subcategory is opened in 3dsmax (skin etc.) before I export it. I kept care for keepeing the meshs subcategories closed and unselected when assigning the vertex weights. It is true that I have moved some of the parts in 3dsmax, but they had no skin at this time (according to Refar this is okay). There are some bones that are useless now. I also removed them, but it made no difference. The freshly exported unit becomes distorted when adding a kf while the sceneviewer compatible version doesn't move. Well, that's all I can think of.

I really hope you can give me some hints.

 

[cool3a2]

Okay, I have managed it to fix the distortion problem. I have assigned the head, feather, beart, the cylander and parts of the rider to the other head bone. Unfortunately the animation does not work. I've tried it different ways:
- I simply added the parts to the original HA without adding the new parts as children to any node. I also removed the original rider. The result was that the rider and all the other new parts weren't visible in civ4
- I copied the parts to the original HA, then I add them as children to that node that is parent of the original rider, I removed the rider. This time the rider was distorted, head, beart etc. were okay, but didn't move
- I've done the same as in method 2 but with reassign the meshs to the second exemplar of the bones, same result as 2

Anyone an idea?