How to adjust height on any mesh

[Tomato]

I keep getting asked "could you make that mesh taller," or "could you make that mesh smaller." It's beginning to irritate me because:

A. The reason I keep all of my meshes the same size in max (teen meshes are changed post-export) is to give you guys more animation options. In order to change the height I have to adjust the biped, which means no regular animations would work.
B. It is stupidly simple to adjust the height via nifskope, or even through the old school hex editor. Honestly, it's possibly the simplest thing you can do with the program.

However, I recognize that not everyone on these boards is nifskope-literate(and there's not really a tutorial for it besides), so here's a quickie tutorial on how to change the height of a mesh (short of tommy's giant keys, of course).



Step 1:
Open up the nif and look for the "handle node" (It's not always there*, but if it is you should see it as soon as the nif is opened, you don't need to look into any of the subtrees for it.)



Step 2:
Right click and navigate to Transform -> Edit



Step 3:
You should see this dialogue box pop up. Most of the options should be self-explanatory, but you might want to familiarize yourself with what each does.



Step 4:
The main one we'll be dealing with is scale. As you can see, changing it to a "2.000" changes the size to double the height of male_basic. Obviously this is too much for most cases, so you'll usually want to adjust the scale manually... I used 0.9349 for my teen meshes.

*If the handle node is not there, the same thing can be accomplished by using "Bip01" instead. The only difference is that you also need to adjust the "Y" transformation to compensate for the change, otherwise the feet will sink into the ground in-game.

[yell0w_lantern]

I messed around with the handle nod in Max and I find that it ruins the planted keys. Doesn't that happen here too?

[Podmark]

Thanks for the tutorial Tomato. I'm sure this will be very useful.

A mod should skicky this. Actually we should make a stickied tutorial thread and put all the tutorials up there.
Should probably go on the wiki too.
Information is power people.

[Tomato]

I messed around with the handle nod in Max and I find that it ruins the planted keys. Doesn't that happen here too?

Not via nifskope, which is why I much prefer skoping height post-export. It's actually a trick that was quite popular when FF hexers lived in caves and used the old nif hex editor.

[Kenn]

I never lived in a cave until AFTER NifSkope came out.   

[hoss20]

   I have also seen suggestions to make the scale change to the Scene Root instead (and it's what I've been doing). Is this okay to do or does it make unwanted changes? I haven't noticed anything in game, but I haven't played much, just making, skins, skopes, and hero files. Thanks for the input.

[Kenn]

Changing the Scene Root will either speed up (if you shrink) or slow down (if you grow) the animations.   To some degree this is a good thing, IF it makes the frequency of the steps match their stride.   But in some cases, it makes characters, especially gigantic characters, seem like they're moving in slow motion.

Another trick I've found is to shrink a mesh a little bit (say 0.87) through the Scene Root and increase the size through the Handle by say 1.15 so that the mesh stays pretty much the same size but speeds it up just enough so that the character's motions won't synch with some other character using the same keys.

[hoss20]

Ah, thanks for the info. I was going to remake my Stranger skope and now I know what not to do. Thanks again.

[cmdrkoenig67]

Ah...See, I always thought you had to use the Scene Root to alter mesh sizes too.  Thank you for the info, Tomato.

Dana