copying flexible mesh parts

[seraglio]

The old instructions for transfering mesh pieces in Nifskope always say to delete the NiSkininstance. This is to prevent the mesh pieces from "jumping" all over the place. That works fine on hard objects like a gun or sword. But for a skirt or collar, I've found you need that block, otherwise it becomes rigid.

Is there a way to transfer flexible pieces over? I've tried recreating NiSkininstances from scratch with no luck. I still have several "workarounds" I can try, copying the whole mesh over instead of a piece etc. I'm just wondering if anyone else has encountered this dilemma and has a direct solution.

[daglob]

Someone with more expertise may answer, but you can transfer flexible pieces to another mesh, but it works best if the two meshes are based on the same mesh. There are pants legs on some meshes that you can transfer to any other Male Basic mesh, and the skirts from a female mesh will probably transfer to another similar mesh. You transfer them to the Scene Root with the Niskininstance intact. This may or may not still move around in the wrong way, or there may be a bit of clipping from whatever is underneath. I have one I've been fiddling with that I put the original mesh in Blender and removed all the parts from the editable mesh that clipped, and have yet to find a satisfactory solution.

[detourne_me]

Any pieces that have a nifskininstance are weighted to specific nodes. When you delete that, they become static objects.
I've tried to add the niskininstance to pieces before in Nifskope, but that has never worked out. I always had to add bone weight to the pieces in Blender.

Ideally, the best way to make a skope would be to build it in Nifskope without any nifskininstances as a static model. Then you could open it in Blender, combine all of the pieces into one editable mesh, and then copy the boneweight from the original .nif file, so all of the pieces are weighted correctly. This also solves the problem of mesh pieces floating around wgen using projected shadows.

[seraglio]

Thanks guys. Looks like this is a fairly common scenario with no easy solution in nifskope. Just wanted to make sure there wasn't an easy solution I just didn't know. I'll try some other more compatible meshes. Thanks again!

[Cyber Burn]

If you look at some of Grenadier's newer Meshes, they actually don't have the NiSkinInstance on a lot of the Mesh pieces. It may be worth checking out.

[SickAlice]

The easiest way around it is to transfer from a mesh that has the same assignment as the new one. So like Gren mesh go from a Gren mesh. Ink mesh go from an INk mesh, so on. Also note in many cases converting a nif to  will kill the assignments outright be that with the converters or Blender. If they display fine without conversion don't convert them. Then note to copy from an unconverted nif made by the same author again. Male basic symbiote is a great example here as it has a lot of parts that are specifically assigned to certain nodes and accounted for in the keyframes.

As a side solution though it's a pain in the butt what's happening is the new resting position is slightly off from what the keyframes call for. So they aren't jumping around as much as sitting on an axis that doesn't match the keyframes. If you can watch it in CTool and figure which direction the axis is off you can move them in Nifskope to an allignment that matches up. I did this with Saturnyne for example which is Inks White Queen. If you look at in Nifskope all the parts will appear to be in the wrong place against the body itself. But when you see it CTool everything lines up. Everything as turns out was at the wrong axis being two points higher and one point back so I adjusted everything to match.