SSE | How To Make: CUSTOM ARMOR from Scratch | Modding Tutorial

what's going on everybody it's been a while um today we're going to be doing a Skyrim armor tutorial if you want to go ahead and skip this little intro time stamp and chapters are on the video or you can you know go here to that time stamp um just as a quick um followup a catch up on you know where I've been and you know what my plans are for the future so first things first I post a poll a few weeks ago now um whether I was going to be doing an oblivion weapon tutorial or Skyrim armor tutorial you guys voted Skyrim so here's this um but my next video will be the Oblivion weapon video and uh then after that I want to start branching out of strictly mod things I have a couple other small modding tutorials planned so I can just keep getting you know little bits of content out here and there you know try and upload more regularly because I know I always say that I'm going to do it but I really really want to just life's been busy but I'm finally hitting a point now where I think that you know it's definitely reasonable thing to uh look into so that said though I would really like to know what you guys want to see be you know more modding stuff or you have ideas for you know other tutorials or other types of videos you wouldd like to see me do um I've I've been considering blender tutorials I've been considering um Game Dev stuff because I'm working on my own game and I would love to upload some content about that so I think I'm going to um and just stuff like that so whatever you guys want to see whatever ideas that you have please let me know and I I would love to uh I would love to start branching out another note is um next year um two big things come out first of all the Starfield creation kit comes out next year and I will absolutely be making a video as soon as it's dropped and as soon as I figure it out you guys will be getting a tutorial on it and then secondly The Witcher 3 CD project red is uh releasing tools to mod The Witcher 3 so I will also be be making tutorials about that cuz that's really really exciting that's super exciting I never really thought that it would happen there are some mod tools for it right now but these are like official Real Deal ones I'm really excited about that um so I'll be making some um videos about the wicher 3 um and if there are other games that you guys have thought of or would like to see me mod I've also considered kenchi um because modding that game isn't overly difficult it can just be a little bit uh weird with how you do it and I would love to show you guys how to do that so um I'm totally cool sticking with modding I my modding videos are never going to go away um I would just like to Branch out of just Bethesda game since that's what I've been doing I would like to just try some new stuff so um whatever you guys want to see please let me know and I would love to make it um and then last thing I mentioned this in a couple Community polls but I haven't really gotten a whole lot of feedback about it I've had a couple people ask me to make a Discord and I think it'd be a really cool idea to have a Discord server um one of the things I want to do with it is have you guys send me your mods that are broken or you just want some help with or you know whatever it may be and you send them to me and I fix them I'll make a video about it um and then I'll send you the fixed mod or the better mod or whatever it is uh like a fix your art type video but for mods please let me know what types of videos you wouldd like to see um what types of uh Mo what types of games you would like me to do uh mod tutorials on and uh if a Discord would be interesting to you guys because all three of those things I'd really like to do let's go ahead and get into the Skyrim tutorial now I'm not going to have my face cam on for most of this video um mainly because I found that it just kind of clogs up the screen and as much as I like being able to show my face off it's just it just clogs up the screen sometimes you know you guys just don't get to see everything and things overlap and whatever it's I think it's easier this way if you guys like the face cam I'll bring it back I don't mind doing that but if you guys like this video without the face cam um let me know and I'll I'll stop including the face cam throughout the entire video like I have in the past but with that being said um the first thing that we need to go over are the required tools that being said let's go ahead and just jump into it all right so first things first uh we are going to go over the required tools like I said we're going to go through these pretty quickly so first things first you need a modeling program 3D modeling program um unless you're getting your models from somewhere else that's fine as well but um if you're making your models yourself you need a modeling program for this one we're using blender um good alternatives are Maya and 3ds Max um both of those are paid secondly we are going to need substance painter um that's what I'll be using at least another option is uh armor paint that's $20 U flat fee quickel mixer I've heard that it's really really good and that one's completely free and then there's also mudbox which is $95 a year so um those are all totally fine with substance painter though I will be showing you guys specific export settings for substance painter and also how to make your own export template for Skyrim Textures in substance painter uh next we are going to need the pine niffle blender export uh and import add-on if you're not using blender obviously you don't need this um but if you using blender this makes the process about a billion times easier the links to every single tool is going to be in the description as well as links to the alternatives for all these tools including Mya 3ds Max armor paint blah blah blah blah blah next thing you need is Ni scope um I recommend the most recent uh version of nip scope at always most recent version is always the best one to be using next thing we're going to need is the uh Fallout 3 Archive utility for this tutorial we will be using Skyrim legendary Edition niths the mod that we are making is for Skyrim special edition in this tutorial I use Skyrim legendary Edition NS you can use um you can absolutely use Skyrim special edition niths um but I personally find it a little bit easier to work with the legendary edition nifs so that's why I'm using them and we're just using them as a base template for like weight painting and stuff like that um so if you get uh if you get the special edition nips that's totally fine um the program for getting special edition nips it's called Bae and it's pretty much it's really really straightforward um if you want a tutorial on how to use bae you can look at my Fallout 4 uh weapon tutorial I use it there um and you'll just you know use it for Skyrim special edition instead to reiterate I'm using legendary edition ifs however you can use special edition nifs it's just your preference it's just what you have access to either one is fine but the steps to it are a little bit different um if you are going to follow along with me and use legendary edition you're going to want to get the Fallout 3 Archive utility if you're going to use special edition NS you're going to want to get the Bae and I'll link that in the description as well and then next you're going to obviously want the Skyrim special edition creation kit um you can get it on Steam and I believe you can also get it from bethesda.net um so you're going to definitely just need this that's a no-brainer you also need some some sort of image editing tool um I'll be using Photoshop for this but there are um two really good Alternatives they're both free uh there's one called [ __ ] that's the one that I recommend High but also paint.net that one's totally okay too for [ __ ] there is a DDS plugin that's what you need and I'll make sure I'll link the plugin for [ __ ] in the description as well if you're using Photoshop you absolutely need um this plugin it um when you download it it has a read me and it tells you how to install it it's very very simple it's just dragging and dropping files into folders second and last you're going to need body slide and outfit Studio this is what we're going to be using to get our outfit on the the Skyrim body um this is what we're going to be using for editing our weight paints and a whole bunch of other stuff so you're going to need the body slide and output Studio you just download it here there's the mod manager download and and it downloads it directly into your special edition folder um but if you do a manual download you need to make sure that you put all of the files you follow the readme and put all the files into your uh special edition folder um it's very very simple very straightforward and then last thing we're going to need this this one is kind of an optional requirement but I do highly recommend that you get it um this is a mod that I made it's just vanilla presets for the bodies we are going to be using the vanilla bodies um just because they have the most compatibility obviously you know working across games CU everyone has access to the vanilla the vanilla bodies if you're using the cbbe bodies that's okay um it's the exact same process um you'll just be importing the CBB bodies which come with body slide and outfit Studio when you download them if you want to use the vanilla bodies you can download these uh preset sliders um from the mod page that I have Linked In the description the very very first thing that we are going to do is be getting our reference nips from The Fallout 3 Archive extractor now again this part if you're using special edition nips you'll just use Bae and follow the tutorial that I have in my Fallout 4 video so let's go ahead and and get started all right so first things first we're going to be opening up the Fallout 3 Archive once you have that open you're going to go up to file open archive all right and then you're going to be navigating to your data folder and your Skyrim legendary Edition you're going to be looking through it until you find Skyrim meshes dbsa you're going to click on that and then click open once it's loaded you're going to open up your meshes folder and then we're going to be grabbing a couple things so we're going to be grabbing the reference sffs for your vanilla armor that you want to base it off of and for the male and female vanilla bodies and the ni for the coin now I know it's weird grabbing the coin but you'll see why later just make sure you grab it so first we're going to go over to the actors Tab and then we're going to open up the characters folder and then you're going to be looking in character assets now if you want to just make uh an armor or clothing for a male or a female you'll just be grabbing um whichever ones you need but I highly recommend grabbing both and we're going to find male body and then hold down control while you click these male bodycore 0 underscore one male feet 0 and one male hands 0 and one and then if you're making a helmet or a hood grab the head as well going to scroll back up try and find the female so got female feet 0 and one hands head and then where is the body there we go all right um don't grab the body astd that's her burnt corpse and then the next thing you're going to do scroll down even more and then we're going to be going into the armor folder or clothing it depends on what you're making whenever you're selecting your reference you want to make sure that it's something kind of close like shapewise to what you plan on making so just visualize whatever you're making in your head and then just try and pick a vanilla armor that's close to it in shape just because it'll make it a lot easier if you have the same silhouette when we're copying over the weight paints so for this example I'm going to be grabbing the Thieves Guild Armor so I'm going to open up the armor tab then we're going to go down to Thieves Guild female we're going to be grabbing the normal boots oops the bracers uh and then the Torso then we're going to go down to male I'm only making armor for female but I'm just showing you how to do it you're also going to be grabbing the boots [Music] here bracers and torso now also what we need as you see this boots G and D going to want to grab that too see the gnd DS are the ground objects in game so whenever you throw it on the ground or look at it in your inventory this is the mesh that it's using so you want to make sure you grab those cuz we're going to be making these for our armor as well um so the Torso the Torso gnd D and the brazer g& D now usually they don't have a separate gnd D for male and female they just use the same one it depends on the armor but most don't so if you don't see it in the uh female folder or the male folder try the other one and grab it from there it doesn't really matter if you're making a female only armor like I am you can still use the the the quote unquote male g& D it's the same thing don't worry about it and then the very last thing uh we need to grab the coin so we're going to go into clutter and then we're going to scroll all the way down and find coin 01n and control click that as well so once you have all your nips selected you're going to be going to file or I'm sorry add action and then extract selected files you don't want to extract all of them well maybe you do uh you can extract every single file in the game if you want and then sort through them that way it's really up to you but I'm just going to be extracting the selected ones so extract selected files and you can pick wherever this goes I'm just going to throw it on my desktop for Simplicity select all right and then now we can close this and it's the same thing for Bae all right go ahead and open up meshes so you see follows the same file structure so now we got all these guys in here the next thing that we're going to be doing is opening up blender so go ahead and wherever you install it go ahead and open up blender all right once you have blender open we're going to be installing the pine niffle add-on you're going to be opening it up uh from the link in the description going to go down to files and then manual download all right and then we're going to grab it from here just drag it onto our desktop real quick I personally have an add-ons folder uh for all my blender add-ons but it's really up to you what you want to do um go to blender and and then we're going to go up to edit preferences I'll bring up this window here going to click install navigate to wherever you saved it and then you're just going to click the whole zip and click install add-on I don't want it to overwrite any of my settings so I'm not going to click it but when you click install add-on the pine nifl add-on will install itself and then it should look a little bit like this one here um it'll just be ni format um and you're just going to want to make sure that this is ticked and enabled when you're done go ahead and close that delete all this garbage in the scene originally and then next we are going to be importing our references that we just got from The Fallout 3 Archive so you're going to go up to file import ni file with nifle go to whever you saved them so we are going to be grabbing every single nith that we just down that we just extracted except for the coin don't don't bring the coin in coin comes in later also do not bring in the gnd DS we don't need them uh we'll be making the gnd and outfit Studio later just bring in the base armor and the bodies you'll just go in here select and unfortunately you can't you can select multiple but it'll only install it'll only import one at a time so you're going to have to import each one of these at a time you're just going to click on it click import with niply there we go and we got it so one thing that's kind of weird about blender Imports is that by by default it has them facing the wrong way so the front is technically the back view and vice versa um you can turn it just make sure you turn it back around before you export it personally I just leave it so I don't forget to turn it before I export it but that's completely up to you and then you're just going to repeat process for the for the rest uh file import nip files with nifle and then we're going to bring in the feet and continue so I won't be showing you guys the actual modeling in this video because I don't want to take up a bunch of extra time I did record the whole modeling process and I will be uploading it as its own separate video um I'll have it linked in the description and then it should show up in the top right of your screen now if you want to go see that just the time lapse of me modeling it I do a little bit of voice over just giving you my process but this is the final outcome this armor is based off of Brier from League of Legends hence the uh in theme background today the main things that I wanted to mention when it comes to modeling your armor again this is once you have all of of your um pieces brought in so you see here I have my torso armor I got the boots bracers and then you know I got the bodies there are three main things that I wanted to mention it's polycount silhouette and the UVS and I'm just going to go over these very quickly cuz these are really nice um tips to have whenever you first get into modeling your armor so the first thing is poly count I highly recommend you don't go over 30,000 tries just because over 30,000 things can get sort of bogged down a little bit and you want to make sure that your mod is really performant because people won't download your mod if it isn't performant um this model here is 177,000 yes so um everything together you know the boots the Torso and the gauntlets they are all 177,000 uh triangles combined right then the next thing that I wanted to mention is overall silhouette you see that I didn't actually do an amazing job of it but I did a pretty okay job of trying to keep my armor very very close to the vanilla silhouette this is because when we weight paint here in a minute it'll help a lot in ensuring that your um that your weight paints get transferred accurately from the vanila mesh to your new one that you just made um if they're like super messed up and um it's nowhere close in silhouette to the vanilla mesh then you're going to be having a lot of weight painting issues and you're going to have to fix those manually and it's a big pain in the butt the last thing I wanted to mention is overlapping UVS let's go into the UV editing mode real quick so here we can see my UVS let's just grab the UVS for everything here you can see I don't have any overlapping UVS on my model none of them overlap save a few exceptions so you want to make sure you don't have overlapping UVS because it can cause um artifact issues and substance painter and armor paint and mudbox whenever you go to bake your mesh however there are sometimes when overlapping UVS are okay um in fact encouraged so um for example uh these two meshes here are identical in pretty much every single way um and instead of taking up double the amount of UV space I deleted the left side of the arm The Gauntlet and the boots and I just put a mirror modifier on them unwrapped them and then exported them and then brought them back in applied the modifier and then triangulated the whole thing before I exported it this is so the same mesh pretty much doesn't take up too much space on your UV so you can see here this takes a very minimal space on my UV but it would be double the space if I had chosen to unwrap these separately right if that kind of makes sense uh you want to just make sure that you're sparing with your UV space and condensing where and when you can just so you have the highest quality textures possible um and the very last piece of advice that I have is whenever we finish modeling uh don't do this until the very end and I'll bring it up again later but be whenever we finish modeling you're going to want to um since you'll your mesh will most likely be in quads you want to open up all the meshes uh in edit mode and then type F3 uh you're going to want to click triangulate faces um this is because most game engines uh Bethesda is included it does really really well with triangulated meshes and um nip Scopes sometimes have really bad issues if you don't triangulate it before you export uh I believe the pine add-on automatically triangulates them but it's just best to do it yourself before you get to that point just to make sure that it's done with that said we are going to now get into the weight painting section of this tutorial and before we do I want to give a quick shout out to the arcane University rigging with blunder 2.9 tutorial I have a link to it in the description and in the PDF file that comes along with this tutorial um so thank you again arcane University you guys are awesome keep up the good work so let's go ahead and get into the weight painting all right so let's go ahead and get into the weight painting so we're going to start off with the Torso here you're going to want to make sure that you have the vanilla torso so uh for the vanilla armor and then your armor very first thing that you're going to do is take note of the skeleton here going to be grabbing your torso first and then shift clicking the Tor the skeleton that comes in when you uh import the vanilla armor mesh you're going to want to make sure that the skeleton is the one that's highlighted yellow and that your armor is highlighted orange then you're going to do contrl p and this is going to parent your mesh to um the skeleton that was brought in so we're going to do uh set parent to Armature de form with empty groups all right so now when you look at your torso and go down to the data tab over here on the right um you're going to have all these data groups or I'm sorry these all these vertex and these are all the different bones right so now next what we're going to do is click on the vanilla armor and then click on your armor your armor should be highlighted yellow vanilla armor orange and this is where we transfer the weights from the vanilla mesh to your mesh and to explain what weights are very briefly is the weight painting is basically what tells the computer how to deform the mesh based off of the skeleton and uh where your weights are placed on your mesh right so if you have really strong weight painting in an area that means when the bone that is attached to that weight painting is moved that area of the mesh that you painted will move more if that makes sense so with those things selected again vanilla mesh first your mesh second your mesh should be highlighted yellow vanilla should be orange go up here to object mode and then transfer to and then go to Weight paint mode right so now your mesh should be highlighted blue and the vanilla mesh should still be gray so then you're going to go up to weights and then click transfer weights now there's a couple things we need to switch around in here where it says vertex mapping we're going to set to nearest base interpolated then where it say Source layers you're going to change it from active layer to by name and then once that's done we just go back up to weight paint go back into object mode hide the vanilla torso click yours go back into weight paint and then now when we scroll through all these weights we should see that the weights have been transferred if if as you're scrolling through these the entire mesh is just the same blue color on all of these different vertex groups that means that the weights did not transfer properly and that you're going to have to check them again right so we're just scrolling through here makeing making sure the weights got transferred and they all look good all right and so then we're just going to repeat that process for the rest of the [Music] pieces and your weights are transferred now this doesn't mean that the weights are going to work perfectly cuz again we're transferring them from a mesh that is not identical right so we're still going to have to check them in game and see you know where any if there are any discrepancies lie and we're going to have to fix those up but for now um this is this is where we are at so the very next thing that we are going to want to do is export all of these armor pieces so we're going to go ahead and just start with the Torso real quick go and click on it click file export ni file with NL then I'm going to go into this meshes folder here and then I'm just going to name it torso D that make sure that the target game is set to Skyrim the default thing is totally fine um rename bones can be on preserve pone hierarchy can be turned off uh don't mess with those unless you know what you're doing but make sure that the target game is uh Skyrim if you want to set it to Skyrim SE that is also okay it's just to depends on a number of different factors personally I recommend setting it to Skyrim because it'll be a little bit easier to follow along with the tutorial um but realistically really shouldn't have any big issues because when we import these nips into outfit Studio they're going to get converted to Skyrim SE niffs anyways and then when we export them they'll be SE niffs um so it really just depends on what you want to do but if you vertex painted um which we'll go over here in a second but if you vertex painted your mesh you're going to want make sure that you set this to Skyrim cuzz it's easier to take those vertex paints off um with Le nips rather than SE nips but anyways I'm going to set it to Skyrim torso. niff export ni all right then we're going to be opening up gauntlets file export n file the nly meshes Skyrim and same thing export and so then we're going to do it with the boots as well all right so now we are going to talk about um um the substance painter exports right so now we're going to be exporting our mesh so it can go into substance painter at first uh first few housekeeping things we're going to want to go up here to the uh overlays Tab and then we're going to want to click face orientation just make sure that your normals are good before you export it I can tell you the amount of times I forgot to check this and that I had a couple normals that were messed up and I had to reexport it and it's a whole big thing but you're just going to want to make sure that these are good if it's blue you're good if it's red you're bad um looking into the armor obviously it's going to be red because that is the back face of the normal but so long as all of your outward facing normals are blue you are golden so that's just one really good thing to check first things first I want to talk about um vertex painting just very quickly all right so I've mentioned this before but if you are exporting to uh for substance painter um and I believe also um armor paint has this capability and quick Soul mixer but I'm not positive but vertex painting can be really helpful especially with substance painter all it is basically is just a a color map um that you create to help make it easier to apply different materials to your armor and substance painter so let me show you what I mean so we're going to go over here we're going to click on the uh we're going to click on this belt here CU this is example going to go up here to where it says object mode and switch it to vertex paint and so we're going to go in here just select all of it real quick so you can see here how there's two different materials so this blue here is going to be my leather material and then this orange here this is going to be uh my sort of bronze material right so when I get into substance painter I can bake this as a map and then um I can use the map to mask off different areas with different material so it's just a helpful thing if you want to do it is completely up to you um all you need to do it is go um like I said from object mode to vertex paint select the faces that you want to be a certain color press tab go back to vertex paint make sure you go up here to the paint mask it looks like a square and it's going to make it so um these guys are not currently selected and then you're going to want to set a color up here and then once you have that color selected you're just going to do shift K and it will and all the faces that you had selected in edit mode uh will then be painted into uh the color that you selected right and so you want to make sure you're setting you're separating materials uh with different colors right and try and make the colors as different as possible you don't want them to be too close together so substance painter gets confused and then you have to deal with that one thing about vertex painting though is that because of how nips work if you vertex your paint your armor the color will more likely than not show up after you export the N it'll show up over your textures so um I'm going to show you a way of fixing that later on just keep in mind that that is a real possibility you can always take the vertex colors off just by setting them to White before you export it but again that is your choice I'll show you how to do it in Ni scope it's really easy it takes like a takes like one minute it's not that hard go ahead if you want to vertex paint your whole model and separate each of the pieces by material you're more than welcome to do so once you've done that we're going to be exporting our low poly model right so I have a high poly sculpt and a low poly mesh right um You don't necessarily have to have a high poly sculpt I recommend it so you can bake in all those textures together but if you really know what you're doing and you're confident that you don't need one that's great for you but for all of us with a high poly mesh I'm going to show you guys how to export that as well so we're going to be selecting every piece of our low poly mesh with all of them selected you're going to want to do crl a crl a and then apply all transforms just to make sure that you're not having any weird scaling or transform issues I when you export that's just that's just a good uh piece of housekeeping before you export it then we're going to go up to file export fpx and I have an operator preset in here um you can set them yourself I'll show you how to set it real quick so the settings that we want for substance painter here to armors um you're going to want to name this file you know whatever your Armor's name isore LP and then you're going to want to go over here and we're going to do selected objects get rid of all the object types except mesh and then turn off bake animation um and then once you have those you can click this plus button and then name it you know substance painter and click okay and then you'll have a preset so every single time that you go to export and fpx you can just go up here click substance painter and then it sets all these things for you it's really nice um and then just click export FPS and then for our high poly mesh one thing I want to point out is that if you have all these like different selected pieces and stuff you're going to want to make sure that you name them the same right between your high poly and low poly MH so um for example here this this belt here on her chest is named beltor 2or HP in all caps and then uh the low poly mesh is beltor 2core LP in all caps and so what's important about doing that is is that when we get into substance painter we can actually make it so meshes are only um baked by mesh name so um it'll basically mask itself off and bake each individual piece separately and then combine them all into one normal map that's a very big oversimplification for it but it just helps us ensure that we don't have artifacting and like weird texturing issues so I highly recommend doing this if you have separate pieces of your armor or have some way of separating the pieces before you export it just ensure you don't have those kinds of difficulties but that's up to you now it's going to be the exact same process we're going to go ahead and select our high poly mesh select all the pieces of it file export fbx and then you're going to use the same presets substance painter meshes and then you're going to want to name it you know your armor name undor HP for H poly and then export now with those things exported uh the very next thing that we are going to do is go ahead and hop into substance painter and I'm going to show you how to set all that up all right once in substance painter all right once in substance painter we're going to go ahead and go up to file click new the template we are going to be setting this to PBR specular glossiness starter assets so PBR where is it PBR specular glossiness starter assets so the document resolution I like setting it to 4K just cuz I like giving people a 4K texture option you can sub it to 2K really doesn't matter all that much you can change this uh when you're when you're in substance painer as well it's just you know whatever you want it to be by default once you have that though you can just go ahead and click um file select and then we're going to be wanting to bring in our low poly so your armor namore LP all right then you just click okay all right once you have it brought in since you'll likely have exported this backwards as per how sky room you know does it um you want to make sure that you set up the light so you can see it well so hold down shift and then right click and you can actually move the light and substance pan around so you just want to move it around so you can see the front of it anyways so we're going to go up to this little croissant here um or press f8 to go to our baking menu this is going to have the name of the material that you had it as in blender uh mine was named black just because while I was working on it it was a all black material you can change this now if you want to be the name of your armor set so I have this be Brier um it's up to you though you can always change it later first things first we are going to be showing you how to bake your ID map um this is only relevant if you did the vertex painting if you did not do the vertex painting skip this part um we're going to go up to file output do 4K you can also do 2K doesn't really need to be a 4K map go over here to the uh mesh map Bakers and then deselect everything except the ID map then click on ID and then from color Source you're going to click vertex color and then you click bake and then just to show you a little bit better what an ID map is or vertex painting does so like I said before all these things were painted um using vertex painting in blender and so I can now separate this between three separate materials really easily and I'll show you guys how to do that here in a second so I have white for the iron I have um uh this orange for like the steel and then the blue for the Leather So anyways we're going to go back to baking and now I'm going to quickly show you how to bake uh with without a high poly right so we're going to be deselecting ID and we're going to select normal World space normal ambient occlusion curvature position and thickness so then go click back on common settings you're going to want the output size of this one to be 4K most likely um it really depends on what you want but I highly recommend making this 4K because you can always scale it down later but it's kind of a pain to come back here and bake it again later for anti-aliasing you can turn this up if you want it makes your bake run a little bit longer but it does make your bake textures a little bit smoother so it's kind of whatever you want to do then for match down here you're going to change it from always to buy mesh name you can also come down here to ambient inclusion if you're having issues with your ambient inclusion uh baking incorrectly um and having some artifacting issues likely what is happening is the self-occlusion um cuz you have pieces of your mesh clipping together and it's having a hard time baking those pieces um so if you're having those pieces if you're having those issues and artifacting issues with your ambient clusion map come in here click ambient exclusion and then where it's a self osion click to only same mesh name um that just helps um make sure they avoid artifacting issues personally I bake with it off um because I like having a um uniform uh ambient occlusion map but again that that is completely up to you it's whatever you want to do um but once you have all those things selected you just go ahead and click big textures all right so now back into here now we have the baked uh ambient occlusion map and uh World space normals and all that fun onun stuff so uh if you don't have a high poly mesh now is where you start texturing but if you do have a high poly mesh let's go ahead and do that so first things first with the high poly mesh um all these same Maps need to be checked but then you're also going to check uh thickness height and bent normals if you don't have a high poly mesh uh you can also click those things but I tend to find that they're not overly useful and that they don't really have a large place um if you don't have a high poly mesh they have very little effect but if you do going to want to make sure you turn these on they just add just a lot of extra data that you can use while texturing your asset and it uh it helps a lot so then once you have the normal World space Ament inclusion curvature position thickness height and bent normals map selected you're going to go over here to high poly definition meshes click this little file icon and then click your high poly mesh right and then click open so you should see something that looks a little bit like this like this big wire frame over your mesh um next thing you want to do is make sure that you click match it'll be set to Always by default but you want to click it to by mesh name I've just noticed that that fixes a lot of artifacting issues um because it's making sure as I said before it's just making sure that only the pieces that you know share the same mesh name are being baked together right so you won't get artifacting issues from like belt and stuff on the Torso right so it's very helpful in that regard so I highly recommend that you do that and then down here the low poly mesh suffix mine was underscore LP in all caps and then the high poly suffix was _ HP in all caps and you see that warning went away so now it's matching up the high poly to low poly mesh one for one really well because I named all the things correctly um so that's just that's just the importance of make sure that these things are named correctly another thing that I like to do and this is just sort of like a best practice sort of thing but is completely up to you I like to change the max frontal distance to as low as possible if you change it to like really low you start getting like these big red um clipping issues um so don't want to set it too low but I try and set it as low as possible before I get those issues um just because it ensures that pieces of your mesh that are close together aren't baking on top of each other um because even in situations like this here with the belts um if I don't have this set high enough because this buckle and this belt are all part of the same mesh with the same mesh and name theoretically um it could try and bake um parts of the uh Buckle onto the actual belt itself so you know setting it as low as possible usually helps avoid those artifacting issues but another thing to avoid outer pacting issues is going to the ambient inclusion map um setting self occlusion to only same mesh name it does virtually the same thing that this here does um personally I don't really like doing that if I don't have to just because I like having a uniform ambient occlusion map over the whole thing um but you know if you're having really bad artifacting issues and have no other way of fixing it that can usually be some sort of fix um your thickness map has the same thing that can help avoid artifacting issues only saying mesh name and then your bent normals again self inclusion only same as name it just you can play with these settings a little bit bake it a few times I recommend if you have a high poly mesh because the bake can take so long I recommend baking it at like 2K at first um just to get a test pass on it and so long as everything's looking good then you bump it up to 4K add the anti-aliasing if you want it to smooth out your um textures a little bit smooth out your Maps a little bit and then do a full bake but with that said uh once you click bake selected textures and the textures are baked you are then ready to texture your match all right one thing I wanted to show off uh before we get to the export section is how to use the ID map really quick these are all a bunch of materials that I made uh myself that I find are really well compatible with Skyrim um I have my Skyrim leather material my Skyrim dark steel material and my Skyrim bronze material um I may release these one day just as a modding resource um but you know if you guys if you guys want these materials let me know I'll I'll release them as a resource um for you to use in substance p as well that's totally fine with me I'm just let me know if you want to see those but any who so we are going to uh I'm going to quickly show you how to use your ID map so we're going to go ahead and find okay so this one's just col selection so um we're going to go ahead and I'm going to remove the mask off that all right so let's just say we just put the this material on our mesh and now it is all over the place I mean this kind of looks cool I'm not going to lie it looks really cool but we don't really want it on all the leather parts right so we we just want to we just want it on this little bit down here so um to use our ID map right we're going to right click it and then add mask with color selection right so now everything it will be taken off of everything so then you're going to find the area you know with the color in your ID mask that you wanted to add it to going to go over here where it says color selection Quick Pick color and then you're going to select a color from your ID map so if I want on all the orange sections let's select orange blue white I want it on white so I'm going to select white and there you go that's how you use the ID map it's really easy and they're really really helpful so you don't have to like select each Bas individually cuz it's such a pain but it's completely up to you guys um I just want to point that out to you so uh with all these things finished though we are going to go ahead and um export our our textures now substance bainer doesn't have a good export for Skyrim by default go figure so we're going to have to make our own and so this output template that I'm about to show you you can use for all of your Skyrim um meshes in the future so we're going to go up to file export textures output templates and then we're going to click this plus sign here and we're going to add a new one here's a new name tutorial see did I spell tutorial WR oh yeah I did all right and then once that's done we're going to click on it we're going to click on it again the very first thing that we're going to do is we're going to go over here and we're going to for the output map we're going to click uh RGB plus a uh we're going to get rid of that and then click this little dollar sign here and click texture set so now whenever it's exported it's going to re it's going to replace this this you know uh money sign um texture set with the actual name of your texture set which is really really cool it saves you a lot of time so you don't have to like rename all the manually um but anyways so we're just going to name this uh dollar sign texture set um because this is going to be our base color right so um first thing we're going to do is go over here and we're going to get the base color from the input Maps we're going to drag it onto the RGB Channel and then we're going to click RGB channels next thing we're going to do is go over here to input Maps we're going to find the opacity and we're going to drag it over to our Alpha Channel and then from Gray channel right all right so next we need to make the normal so we're going to do RGB plus a get rid of this garbage dollar sign texture set and then underscore n signify that this is our normal map right so now from the converted Maps area over here we're going to be grabbing our normal direct X putting it on to RGB and clicking uh RGB channels and then next we're going to go over to our converted Maps again we're going to find our glossiness and we're going to drag this on to our Alpha Channel and then gray Channel all right and then last but not least we are going to make our metallic map so create uh this one's just going to be RGB cuz we don't need an alpha channel for this one RGB and then we're just going to delete that texture set then underscore M as in Matthew all right and then we're going to find our metallic map this one right here and we're going to drag it over here and then gray ch Channel and then you're done this is now your output template so you'll use this anytime that you're exporting uh textures from substance painter um to be used in Skyrim right so now that that's done over here to settings for output directory I made a tutorial folder so I'm just going to open up that one real quick tutorial uh textures and then Skyrim all right so we're going to export our 4K textures first so select folder just going to be selecting the folder that you want to send it to um you want to make sure that if you're exporting 2K and 4K textures they are exported to different folders CU they will they'll have the same name they're going to overwrite each other so make sure that 4K and 2K textures are separated into different channels so then with our output template we're going to be selecting the very new output template that we just made and then uh size I want to make sure this is set to 4K to global settings and then we just click export all right then we're going to go back to settings click our output directory find our 2K folder select folder 2K textures export now your textures are exported so the very next thing that we're going to do just to give you a rundown of where we are at the video our model is made our weights are painted our textures are texturized and exported now we are going to be in order we're going to be converting our textures to a DDS then we're going to be setting up our folder structure then we're going to be setting up our nips to be brought into outfit Studio then we're going to be bringing them to outfit studio and putting them all together then we're going to go uh make our mod in the creation kit and then we should be finished after some you know tweaking and other fun stuff but now that this is done you can go ahead and close substance painter and then open up either [ __ ] or photoshop or whatever you're using all right so once we have Photoshop open the first thing you're going to want to do is install the um Intel texture Works DDS plugin for Photoshop if you're using [ __ ] you're going to want to use the DDS plugin for [ __ ] that I provided in the description um you can download it from the Nexus mod page that is linked in the description uh it's really easy to download There's a read me file in the zip folder that you download that shows you how to inst install it but once we have that installed we're going to be opening up our textures that we just exported from substance painter and then we're going to be dragging them into photosop first things first we're going to be working on the um normal map so once you have them in you're going to do control shift s save as file type you're going to be changing that to Intel texture works if you didn't change the name of your textures at any point up until this point um and you want them to be a certain name change them now because these are the textures that are going into game so I'm changing mine to Brier cuz I forgot to do it earlier I made a separate DDS folder if you're making uh 2K and 4K textures make sure that they're in separate folders again because you don't want them to get overridden CU they will share the same names once you have that I'm saving these in the DDS folder um file name is correct save file type is correct going to click save and then you're going to get a dialogue box here in the dialogue box we're going to be um changing a few of these settings here so since this is the normal map we're going to be changing the texture type to color plus Alpha there is a normal map option but I find that works better for Fallout 4 and for my export settings from substance painter we're using color plus Alpha for the compression we are going to be setting this to bc7 8 BPP fast linear direct X11 and then for M Maps you're going to have it autogenerate now if you plan on modding a lot I highly recommend you turn this into a preset you can do that very easy B clicking save here typing in like s uh s normal um and then you just click enter and it saves as preset I already have one s normal same thing then we're just going to click uh okay you can preview them uh this preview the one on the left is the original the one on the right is the export um this is good for checking checking like artifacting and like compression issues um from when it gets exported to me this looks really good it also tells you the new file size so this is going from 64 megabytes to 21 megabytes so we're going to do okay and then we're going to click okay and then now we're going to do the normal map shift uh control shift s DDS folder Brier _ m save file type as Intel texture Works save and then for the metallic we're going to be doing texture type as color the compression is going to be the bc14 bbp linear you can preview this one so this is the highest compression type um and you may see some very subtle um noise and compression issues here um when you scroll all the way in since this is a metallic map that's really not that big of a deal um and I highly recommend keeping it at bc1 um but if you don't like it in the in the metallic map is very important to your model you can always set this to bc7 uh bp8 fast linear um and that has slightly less compression file size will be bigger but it will be less compressed uh you can also do bc4 again the compression is a lot less if I file size is about the same but this can have its own sort of artifacting issues uh these ones sometimes being even worse I highly recommend just sticking with bc1 linear um but again that is totally up to you and how you want to do it so I'm going to go ahead and click okay and then click okay get of that all right and now this is the base color control shift s know this Brier DDS folder save as Intel text works. DDS save texture type is going to be color and Alpha the compression is going to be bc7 8 BPP fast linear direct x 11 M Maps autogenerate uh you're going to generate M maps for all of them uh all the textures and again you can make another preset for this you can also preview it just check it out make sure it's something good um this one should be totally fine click okay and then okay so once you have all of those done the very next thing that we are going to do is set up our folder structure and now we're going to open up our Skyrim special edition folder go into data and so there's going we're going to be making two folders possibly four it depends so um first thing you're going to do is go into your meses folder if you've installed armor mods in the past you'll probably have an armor folder if you haven't then you probably won't um I highly recommend making an armor folder just because a lot of modders um add add their mods into the same armor folder and so it just keeps G and clure pretty um you know the same across the board but it is up to you you can make your own mods folder but anyways so we're going to go into the armor folder and then in this folder we're going to make our own new folder call tutorial Brier and then same thing we're going to go back to data we going to go into our textures folder armor create a new folder tutorial dryer all right double click it and then these DDS textures that you just exported from Photoshop control uh C to copy it we're going to paste them right in there all right and then the next thing that we do before we get into the fun stuff with outfit studio and body slide is we're going to go ahead and set up our NS wherever you uh export your NS from going to go ahead we're going to open up the Torso work on this first so you're going to see if you vertex painted it's going to be all it's going to have all the same colors as your vertex paint first thing we're going to do is get rid of that um so the names of uh the different not are going to be slightly different between the legendary edition NS that I'm using and the special edition ifs that you're using but follow the same file structure and you should um have pretty much the same result right okay so first we're going to get rid of the vertex painting we're going to click on the mesh I have an TR shaped data I believe for um SE niffs I believe it is BS uh Tri shaped data but I could be in correct there I'm pretty sure that's right though um anyways we're going to click on that and then we're going to go click the N TR shape data in the block details we're going to look for vertex colors click the color wheel and set it to White so now it should be uh Pink and that's just indicating that we don't have any colors next thing that we're going to do is we're going to look for a BS lighting shaded property and so you can see here um many of uh many of you probably um might not know this um but right now we don't have an environment uh map on our model and environment mapping is currently disabled um environment mapping is really good for metallic materials and just making sure that everything uh looks correct in game when it comes to textures especially metallic stuff so we're going to go ahead and enable environment mapping real quick um this is a common issue whenever you're um exporting from um blender uh with the nly add-on um but it's a really easy fix so we're just going to click on our mesh I'm sorry we're going to click on the uh BS lighting Shader property where it says the Skyrim Shader type we're going to double click it in this drop down we're going to change it from default to environment map and then the Shader Flex one we're going to double click that too and then we're going to tick on environment mapping and then you can just click anywhere get out of that and so now it should look something like this and now we know that the environment the environment map is working next thing we're going to click on the drop down back in the block list of the BS lining Shader property and then we're going to click on the BS uh Shader texture set node um these this here is where you're going to be putting uh all of your textures so our first line here that is the base color this is the normal we're going to skip a couple down to here this is the cube map or the environment map and then this is the metallic map right so let's just go ahead and add these real quick so we're going to be getting the um the file path for our textures so you can open up the te your um your Textures in your Skyrim data folder so Skyrim special edition data textures armor and then your folder you can just double click the address bar and then you're going to be taking textures armor and then the name of your folder going to copy that paste it in here then do another backslash and then the name of your texture. DDS so this is my base color so I named it bri. DDS and that's the name of the texture so uh then we just click enter should show up you can see here it's Brier so then what we can do is we can copy this and then in the next bar the second one paste it back and then I'm going to add in after Brier n because that's what I named my normal map. DDS click ENT enter so now your normal map should be showing up go down two more uh to the uh we're going to go down to the fifth line so 1 2 3 4 5 and then here's where we're going to be um opening up our Cube map I have a full folder of cube map so I can get all their names for this one I'll be using the uh or goldor e um but the file path is the same for all the cube Maps it's textures Cube Maps slash and then the name of your Cube map so mine's or goldor e. DDS all right so now we can see we have our Cube map on it right and then for the last one going be begin copying uh this here so this one's our met our metallic map double click on that contr V and then prore m. DDS enter all right now got our metallic map on there and for all intents and purposes our torso is done which is pretty awesome right so now we're just going to do contrl s and you're going to want to keep this open right especially if you have multiple armor pieces cuz what we're going to do next is we're going to open up our boots sff and then we're going to be copying a lot of stuff from uh the uh torso NE that we just made but first things first we got to get rid of the vertex colors so click on your mesh and I try shape and I try shape data go down to block details vertex colors click on the color wheel white okay then we got to enable environment mapping so you're going down to the BS lighting Shader property skym Shader type from default to environment map and then the Shader Flex we going to double click on that Dropbox and then enable environment mapping and then you can click anywhere to get out of it all right cool and now now all we have to do is add in our textures so click the BS uh Shader and texture set so with what's really cool now is since you finished your torso you can just copy from if I can get this to work there we go now we can just copy from our torso so double click this this goes there this goes there and this only works if all of your textures share the exact same name if they're all part of the same texture map which uh Mo nine times out of 10 they should be um but if they're not then you'll just go through the same process as before of just making sure that you have the right names for everything but um once that's done you just contrl s on the boots and now the boots are finished so once you get the first part done it streamlines the rest of it pretty easily all right so now we have our gauntlets same thing going to click on them and I try shape data vertex colors color wheel set that to White then we're going to go down to our BSN lighting Shader property change it from the Skyrim Shader type from default to environment map and then the Shader Flags we're going to enable environment mapping click out of that click the drop down a BS lighting Shader property open up the BS uh Shader texture set and then again we're just going to copy and paste all right and then once those are done going to do contrl s and save all right cool beans cool cool beans cool beans so now we have finally reached the point of excitement we finally get to open up um outfit studio so let's go ahead and I'm going to show you how to download outfit Studio really quickly so first things first you're going to want to make sure that you open up your um Skyrim data folder so we're going to go to uh Skyrim special edition then we're going to go into our data folder go back to the mod page you can find this in the description go to files and you can download it with the mod manager um and it will put it in the right place automatically but if you don't have Vortex you can manually download it slow download and then grab it throw that on our desktop all right so now double clip the zip file that you just downloaded all right and then in your data folder make sure you're in your data folder you can copy everything from the zip file and then just drag it directly into your data folder it'll copy everything older over I'm not going to do it cuz I don't want to override my presets but you can just copy it all over and it will be installed once it's installed you're going to go to the new uh cleante tools folder sorry if I'm pronouncing that incorrectly open up the body sight folder and so now you got everything um if you have a 64-bit system you do 64 if you have a 32bit system you do the normal one I have a 64-bit system so I'm going to double click F Studio 64-bit it's let's go ahead and import our nifs that we just added all of our textures to to that we're going to go up to file import from nith then we're going to locate them and so I I got here the boots gauntlets and torso and again I am making a one piece armor if you are making separate armors you will just import one of these so if you're making the ciss you'll import the Torso if you're making the gauntlets gauntlets Boots the boots and then you'll uh import their body part along with it so you know torso will be the body uh the gauntlets will be the hands sometimes not always do you need to import the hands it kind of depends on your armor in particular um but you know we'll get into that a little bit more later and then the boots you'll import the feet um but since I'm doing one piece I'm just going to import all of them now if you use Le niffs like I did uh you will get this little popup would you like Skyrim nips to be optimized for SSE during the session you click yes if you use SC nips you won't get this pop up all right so now we got our armor so now here is the fun part where we bring in the body so bringing in the body it's going to look like a normal Nord uh body but what's important is that it's not always going to be the Nord body um basically we're importing it and it's going to be used as a reference for the game to um add in the racial textures too so if you're a dark elf it gives changed to the dark elf textures uh Argonian kajit all that stuff we're just importing basically your reference right let's go ahead and download our references real quick so the um mod that I brought up earlier um that I made it's not really a mod it's just the uh slider presets I'll have the link to it in the description again I made this one um I know it works this is exactly what I'm using in the video um so you should have no issue with it so we're going to go over here click files um if you click if you download it with Vortex it'll go into the uh SE it will go into the correct spot um but if you if you want to download it manually click manual download all right and then I'm going to drag this onto my desktop all right so we're going to open up open up the data folder in it and then body slide all right and then we can just copy uh these the shape data and the slider sets folder from uh the mod that you just downloaded and and then you can paste it directly into the bodylight folder here right and it has uh the OSP files in there that we will be using right so you can just drag these and drop them directly into the B the body slide folder that's in your Skyrim data folder directory right so once you have those in going to go up to file load reference from file browse and then you're going to locate the sliders that I just brought up um the the sliders that you downloaded from me that I just showed you how to install a second ago and you're going to be opening up the um vanilla femal slider. OSP uh if it's a female if it's a male you'll love it on male so you're going to click that click open so you got a few different options here so for shape you have the underwear which we won't be using today and I don't think you will ever use um you got the under where body this is the this is the body itself you'll use this one pretty often uh if you're using if you're importing the curus this is one this is the one that you're going to be importing um if you're doing boots you'll bring in the feet if you're doing gauntlets that have exposed hands you'll do the hands um so we're going to be bringing in the feet first cck okay now we got the feet in and so since this is a one piece armor I need to bring in multiple of the body parts if you aren't doing a one piece armor you don't need to bring in multiple body parts you only need to bring in one but for me I need to bring in multiple so I'm going to right click um the feet that we just brought in I'm going to click set reference so it unsets it as the reference and then we're going to do file load reference and again from file browse female slider open and then I'm going to grab the body and then I'm going to click merge new sliders with existing sliders click okay so now you see here sliders all work together now we're about to conform our armor so it matches uh the body uh as we use the sliders so um first things first we are going to save this here by doing control shift s going to give it a name for this one I'm going to give it P prior and then this the output data path you want to make sure that it's the same name of the meshes full that you created in your Skyrim data folder earlier uh so let me show you that real quick data then remember we went to data and then meshes and then armor and then we created a folder so tutorial Brier so you're going to name it the same thing what you have these three these three things filled in you're going to click to project and then these will fill in themselves and then you just click save now to make sure to make sure that everything's working what we're going to do is we're going to go open up our Skyrim data folder go back to data go say tools body slide and then we're going to open up body slide 64 bit now oops now um if everything's working properly when you go over here to outfitbody you should see tutorial Brier or you know whatever you named yours show up from this drop down list we're going to click that we're going to click preview everything's looking good we got all of our pieces in there right and we can mess with the highway make sure that's all working and seems like it is so we can just go ahead ahead and close that for now right so things are good the next part is is that we're going to be conforming um our outfit to the body so they uh slide together we're going to be clicking on the Torso then we're going to be doing slider set base shape all right and then we're going to go click on our body I'm sorry click on our torso again slider conform all now what this is doing is ensuring that as we move this ligher right here around and the body grows and shrinks our armor is going to grow and Shrink with it accordingly right and so this is using I don't know math to figure out how to move the faces of your armor mesh around um so it conforms correctly I wouldn't really mess around with these settings too much unless you know what you're doing uh the default settings usually work pretty well so that's what I'm going with st we're going to go ahead and click okay so now when we move this slider around our mesh should be moving moving with it and that is pretty neat however we're not done yet because now we can go ahead and save there uh now we need to um where you see all these clipping issues here we need to get rid of the mesh underneath that uh we can't see um and that's just to make sure that we get rid of as many clipping issues as possible it's still not going to be perfect but we're going to get as close as we can possibly get it first things first is you're going to want to double click on the Torso um the eyeball on the torso up here and that's going to set it to a wireframe mode so eyeball if you click it once she's naked you click it twice get a wire frame right so then we're going to go ahead and click on the body we're going to click on this pencil over here and then the mask tool up here at the box and then we're going to use a little paintbrush here go up to brush settings to adjust the size of it and also just fold s and do your scroll wheel but now we're going to paint all of the exposed part we're going to paint all the skin that we want to keep and you're going to want to over paint a little bit right um because as it deforms as the mesh deforms you want to make sure that you are um you're not getting uh like back facing issues so you can see through your mesh right so it doesn't come apart at the seams [Music] careful about it um and I think that's pretty good pretty happy with that I think that'll be fine you can always uh turn off the wireframe and make sure that any Exposed Skin that you want to keep is like this uh like this brownish color right um and yeah that's looking pretty good so now going to right click click on the body and we're going to click delete vertices and then we're going to click the paintbrush again get rid of all the dots this is looking pretty good I'm not seeing any issues so now uh we can save there and then we got to do the feet so we're going to wireframe the boots um click the feet and then we're going to go back to the pencil and again we're going to just paint all of the faces that we want to keep um a lot of times with boots and gauntlets and stuff you uh just won't be adding in this reference mesh at all um because they'll be completely covered but it really just depends on your mesh in particular there's no there's no real rule around it it it's just it's just whatever works for your mesh all right so now we're going to put delete verses right and then try boots back back on get pencil and yep that looks pretty good so now we're going to go ahead and save it again so now we're going to go ahead and minimize this and we are going to open up um body slide again in the outfit body you want to make sure that you have the one that we were just working on selected you're going go go over to preview everything looks to be like it's working M with the highway ooh it's deforming pretty well um I still have some clipping issues as you can see here it's not really a huge deal um I'll just make sure that I don't set this too high so it Clips so I'll probably keep it around 23 so 23% will be the max that people can set um so okay the best way to explain this is when you set your body weight all the way up in Skyrim um in reality when you put on this armor it'll actually only be at 23% um of the max um and I know that's a little low and it doesn't add a lot of variation but because of these clipping issues I I want to make sure that you know we're not having any serious clipping issues or anything like that so we'll set it's there I know the average is about 40% um but again I don't want to I don't want to mess with my uh I don't want to have clipping issues I'm going to set to 21 all right and with that being said that looks pretty good to me I'm pretty happy with that so I'm going to go ahead and click build so you can see here all the different meshes were made and then we're going to click okay next we are going to go ahead and make our gnd D our g& D that is our uh I don't I don't know what it stands for but it's our ground bash all right it's what it looks like on the ground so going to open up outfit Studio again going to go up to file and then we're going to unload this project real quick I'm going to go ahead and bring in the Torso the Torso niff right so brought in the Torso and then I mentioned earlier we brought in we uh we extracted the coin if you remember we extracted the coin this is where the coin comes in so we're going to bring in the coin as well and then we're going to bring in our uh g&d mesh so meshes from our uh vanilla reference the Guild male and then torso g& D all right so and you might have to make multiple g& D meshes um if you don't have a one piece armor like I do you're going to have to make them for the gauntlets boots and the Torso um this is how this I'm just going to show you how to make it for the Torso since I have a one piece armor if you have a one piece armor this is all you have to really do so we going to go ahead and close this now so now because of my mesh in particular I don't want these sleeves to be present since they're not actually connected to the mesh so what I'm going to do click the Torso and then click the mask tool and then the pencil and then I'm actually just going to get rid of these entirely yeah just get rid of them all together oops I over painted a little bit here um if you want to get rid of the painted sections uh hold down alt and then paint it again all right just want to make sure I didn't grab too many so then um because we mask this out um all the green stuff is going to be what's deleted so then we're going to go um and do contr I to invert the mask and then we're going to go to torso and delete vertices and bada bing bada boom all right deselect the pencil grab the transform tool and then we're going to rotate it so it's facing the sky and then we're going to smush it about like that that looks good and then I'm going to pull it down so it's about in line with the um vanilla mesh and so the reason we brought in the coin is so we can see cuz the coin is sits directly at ground level so the coin based off of where that is you'll be able to tell exactly um what parts of your mesh are clip are going to be clipping in the ground and what parts won't be not overly that important but just in case you're you know finicky about those about those kind of things I just wanted to I just wanted to add that up so uh we're going to go ahead and get rid of the coin now because I don't mind those little bits um clipping into the ground uh the Torso that looks pretty good it's lined up pretty well um so we'll get rid of that now and then finally now that that's finished we're going to do file export to NF and then we're going to have to find data meshes armor our mod folder and then T dryer _ GM D yep and click save and then that is all done all right so now we got our zero our one and our G and D so now finally after all this time we are at the creation kit this is a very exciting moment because now this is where we put it all together in game right so now go ahead and open up your Skyrim special edition creation kit all right once you have your creation kit open you're going to go up to file data going to um click on the skyrim.esm um if you for whatever reason want this to um be reliant on one of the DLCs or something like that um or use content from one of the DLCs rather uh you'll also uh add in the DLC say you want to place your armor on like the vampires from dongu guard or something like that um that's when you'll load that in um but we're just doing base game for now so double click skyrim.esm then click okay and wait for it to load once you're in the creation kit got just close this warnings window nothing there is important the first thing you're going to do is we're going to be making the armor add-on now armor and Skyrim has two different pieces it's the actual armor and then the armor add-on so we're going to make an armor add-on first so go ahead and uh in your object window click armor add-on Tab and then you're going to be looking for the armor that you used as your reference I'm going to be using the thieves guil curos again you going if you're making separate armor pieces like boots curos helm gloves all that fun stuff you are going to uh be making an armor add-on and an armor nip for each one of those pieces but I'm just making a one piece armor so I'm only going to be making one so thieves SK the curse going to double click on that and immediately rename the ID to uh prior AA uh always add on the AA at the end so you know it's the armor add-on so for bipad model we're going to be clicking select edit and then we're going to be finding our armor [Music] armor tutorial Brier and then tutorial Brier and then you're going to be using the underscore one this goes for all your AR armor pieces always underscore one and then click [Music] open guess all oops close all right so now now we can see her in there looking good lady all right click okay now for the first person you can go ahead and make a first person model for this you'd basically be be deleting everything that's not the arms right however personally I just use the same a lot of people don't a lot of people do it really depends on your reasoning for doing so personally the reason why I use um the the same um nith tutorial Brier 1 uh tutorial Brier one the reason why I use the same nip going go here and goe and click okay is because of those mods that add in the first person camera where you look down and see your whole body this uh this strategy using you know just the normal one here it makes it compatible with all those mods so you can still look down and see your whole body when you're wearing this armor often times um and this isn't for all of them but often times if you make your own separate one with just the arms those mods where you get the first person camera and you look down you can see your feet and your body and stuff doesn't work anymore um so it is a it is a preference thing it's it's whatever you want to do um but that's how I'm doing it so this was the right here I didn't make a separate male um I didn't make a separate male one so I just use the female one you can Al you can always also just use the uh the the vanilla one if you're only making it for one of the genders um but I'm just adding in to both uh because I think it's funny uh the model looks funny when you when you put it on when you put it on go down here tutorial prior one okay and then select tutorial r one okay and then okay all right and then here for the bipad objects um because mine is a full piece I'm going to be adding in the feet the calves the forearms the body and that is it um I'm not adding in the hands because my model works better when the hands are not added in um however yours might not um a general rule of thumb and this isn't for everything every every armor Mod's going to be a little bit different but as a general rule of thumb when you're selecting the bipad objects for um cures and torsos you're going to be adding in the body the forearm and the calves um for the boots you could add in the feet and the calves for the gloves you're going to be adding in the hands and the forearms and then for helmets you add in uh hair and ears right so body forms calves for Tor uh for torso boots um get feet in calves gloves get hands and forearms helmets get hair and ears all right um and again it really just depends on your mesh you're going to have to play with it um but that is a general guideline to follow and if you need to reference that guideline again in writing just make it easier for you um you can find it in the tutorial document that I'll be linking below um that goes along with this tutorial so as we finish our armor Adam we're going to go ahead and click okay um when it says do you want to create a new form me click yes all right now we're going to be creating the armor let's go ahead and find the Cur uh tutorial rer and then rer chis value let's just make it like 600 um this is where you can add your enchantments if you wanted to have an enchantment by default we'll just add in uh let's do fortify Health um this is where you can change the weight of the armor I want it to weigh a little bit less uh let's keep it at eight armor rating we'll do 50 that seems about right then we're going to go to the bipad object we're going to be copying pretty much the exact same thing that we put in the other one so body forearms uh feet Cales is that everything yeah okay so that's everything um so this is going to be the uh armor slots that it takes up right so I'm not including hands um because I had some issues with this model before when I included hands um but this will also make it so um since I'm not including hands they'll be able to equip gauntlets over it which I'm fine with if you don't want them to be able to equip an amulet with it um do that click amulet it click ring um it it's really it's up to you entirely um so the these are all the uh these are all like the armor slots basically so um I mean if you don't click body then they'll be able to equip uh anything else that has body so right so they won't be able to equip anything that covers the body the forarms the feet or the cap so basically uh no curses no boots that's pretty much it um then once you're done there for World model we're going to go edit edit armor tutorial Brier bri. g& D there we go okay same thing here uh T Brier g& D and this is our world model click okay all right and now um next thing we're going to do is the vanilla um armor add-on that's set in this box right here the models box going to right click it click delete then click new then you're going to look for yours here's mine okay it's add it in all right now this should be good um this should theoretically be working you'll be able to equip it in game and all that fun stuff um one more thing uh for the keywords um if you want it to be CL classified you know as whatever it is I'm still classifying it as a c but you can classify it you know whatever you want I recommend if it is a cus classify it as such if it's boots as such you know whatever this is also where you classify it as heavy or light armor um and also uh vendor item armor whether it can be given to vendors and stuff like that so go ahead and click okay create new item for yes all right the last thing that we we have to do in the creation kit is do the crafting recipes crafting recipes so we're going to go down here in the object window to constructable object I'm going to get the one for leather armor so leather armor there are two different types there's The Temper recipe and then the recipe recipe recipe refers to uh you making it at like a Smithy um and then The Temper refers to you improving it at a workbench so let's go ahead and do the Smithy first recipe armor love the Cs open up all right there we go so we're going to keep recipe spell it right all right um create object immediately going to change this to to PR armor um and then um over here is where you can add in all the different pieces so let's just say I want it to also include um one and get uh corundum so we'll add in that as well count we'll do two no I'm going to keep it up um but you can also go over here and change it so maybe I want less Leathers do like three or something now um these match conditions um determine uh what exactly um the player needs to be able to craft these things whether it comes to like skill-wise or something like that so let's just say I want them to have to uh like they can't craft it until they can do steel smithing so the best and easiest way to do this is to find a piece of armor um with the perk already attached to it um and then we'll go over here to let's do recipe armor steel Shield double click this and open it and then has perk steal smithing we'll just copy this and then we will paste it sorry copy condition Pace condition all right and then we click out of that and so now they have to have the steel smithing perk let's say actually that's good that's good all right and then we'll click okay new form yes all right and then now we need to do the [Music] [Music] temper Bri I just want it to be one leather remember created object wanted to go to your armor um we keep the perk Arcane blacksmith that's good um tempering item is Enchanted we'll keep that that's fine um and that looks pretty good um again you can include perks and stuff like that in here if you want to it's completely up to you you know whatever you want to do um but I'm pretty happy with this you just want to make sure that the created armor is correct and that the ID is changed um and that you know whatever required items you have are in there I'm going to be using leather and then we'll just do okay and create new form yes all right and that should just about do it so now we're going to go ahead and go in game and test it out now I already know that the weight paints on this armor aren't perfect right now so I'm going to uh I'm going to show you what it looks like in game when your weights when your weights aren't painted um totally correct and then I'm going to quickly show you how to fix that and then I'm going to show you a final armor that looks like really good the weight paints are done and you know how everything's supposed to look all right so let's go ahead and load up Skyrim real quick so I can show you um before we do that though we're going to go ahead and save our plugin uh you just go up to here and click uh save Plugin or you can do contrl s and then you can name it whatever you want to name it same thing save all right and then it's saved and then we will uh go ahead and close the creation [Music] kit [ __ ] Christ so uh with our inkit added we're going to go ahead and uh craft our armor here let's check it out it's looking pretty cool go ahead and add that in all right nice so you can see here it's on our it's on our character it's working right and so I do want to point out a couple issues so so as you can see here we have some issues on our hands where where the little bit um that was supposed to be hanging over her hands are seemingly gone right so that's kind of an issue and that has to do with the partitions and we can fix that in outfit Studio additionally as you can see here we have some um bad weight painting here you know with a mesh clipping all the way through it so let's turn off TFC right so as we running around you can kind of see how the mesh is not really like uh when we jump you can kind of see here how the mesh is like all stretched out so we're going to need to fix that but just show that the crafting recipes are working we can improve our armor with one leather additionally we can go ahead and go over here we can craft another one just want to show that this also works on followers what do you need to take oops I accidentally gave her both of them I can't be naked so as you can see here it also works on followers and like I mentioned before since I didn't select the hands when we were creating uh the armor piece um she can also be wearing gauntlets with it right as you can see you know run around I mean it's working it's working best as it as it can right now with all these clipping and uh weight painting issues so we're going to go ahead and uh so we game here and then I will meet you in outfit studio all right here in outfit Studio we got our mesh loaded up and so the first thing we're going to fix are the partitions right all right so everything uh looks fine here we going want to make sure that we have the gauntlets because the gauntlets were the partitions that were having issues right so as you can see here the red is what's not part of this partition group and the uh and this like bluish color is what is currently part of the partition group right and so as you can see here all this red on the hands that's what was missing uh when we were in game right and it's because they are part um those pieces of the mesh are part of the forearms predition group so what we're going to do is we're going to click on the forearms and we're going to go ahead and just paint over it make sure it's all red so now on the hands it's all green and then we click apply and so that should fix that issue there um if you're having any other issues like that in game just go ahead and check the partitions um and mess around with those um play around with changing you know what parts of the mesh are on what partition group um and uh uh until it's until it's working again and then one other thing that I wanted to show you is how to do weight painting I'm not going to go over the uh like me fully weight painting um this model cuz I've already done it once uh for the full release of the mod but I do just want to show you how it works so um mainly what we were having issues were we're right here you know this area of the arm so we're going to go ahead and find the bone that would be closest to it so I know that um the forearm the I'm sorry the upper arm is the is the bone that is right here all these all these bones are named very aply so this being the upper arm that means that we are looking for the upper arm right bone so MPC upper arm right right so uh also you want to make sure that you have correct mes mesh selected here we're working on torso so bones all right so as we can see here blue means that it's hardly affected and red means that it's very strongly affected and everything in in the middle is you know gradiented from uh green to Yellow to Orange right so what we can do to kind of see how our weight paints are affecting our model cuz like here it doesn't really look like we're having any issues what we can do though is we can go into the posing tab cck show pose select uh the bone that we're working on so MBC our upper arm right upper arm then we can change the rotation so let's change the rotation like that right so we see here a couple different issues right so we have uh it's stretching like this which means that we want to paint this in a little bit more uh we want it to have um because it's like stretching away right it's because the weight paint on this is really weak we can take away some of the weight painting here let's uh actually up the brush strength a little bit here you can take away the weight painting and see it only gets worse however if we increase the weight painting on it it gets a lot better I'm just going to up this a lot here it starts forming to the model a little bit better right you also don't want to it's a balancing act you don't want it to be too too much all over the entire thing because that can cause issues um with it deforming too much right so it's a balancing act and you're going to want to play around with it but you being able to pose um you being able to pose it and see how everything is deforming is a really really neat tool that honestly I don't even think that like blender or anything like that has so um you know take full advantage of this I recommend doing all the weight painting up Studio cuz it is really really good for it so you can see here even though we have full you know red on this it's still being affected by something else so what we can do is we can go ahead and start cycling through all these bones here and start messing Ming with them we're going to keep with the upper arm bones here since this seems to be the problem area and you can see here if I paint in on these twist bones it starts deforming back even more right camera and out studio is a little bit wonky so just bear with me right so I'm going to go to Abus 2 paint that in as we can see here that is way way closer but still not perfect right and so the question here is why exactly is it not perfect what what what is the issue that we're having here because it's still stretching well because it's stretching towards this spine here it might be an issue with the spine bone so we're going to go ahead and we're going to find the spine bones spine one it's not having having any effect right so it's not painted at all spine one that's not the issue spine two not having any effect it's not there either or spine one but spine two there we go now we see that spine two is having a honestly pretty heavy effect on this for no discernable reason so we're going to go ahead and get rid of the weight paints on that entirely cuz it really shouldn't have any uh effect on this piece of armor this should be completely controlled by uh be upper arm bone and so now we can see it's deforming correctly right so we can move this around try it out right right and seems to be working pretty well and so you're just going to want to make sure that like you identify any problem areas that you're having um when you test out the first time write them down or something and then just flip through all these different bones right and then then just check on the weight painting for it right so you're probably going to have to go back and forth between this a couple times just to make sure you get everything right I probably had to go back and forth between Skyrim and outfit Studio doing my weight painting two times it's not out of the ordinary to be spending days on just trying to get the weight painting right so don't feel bad if it's not working the first time and don't be too stressed out if there's just like issue after issue and you're just really trying to figure it out just keep working at it you know um there's a lot of really great tutorials on weight painting uh especially for like blender and stuff like that and that could really help you out if I can find any really good ones that I trust I'll go ahead and Link them in the description below to try and give you guys a basic on weight painting you know have somebody explain it a little bit better than I can um but that is how you weight paint in outfit studio um one thing that I wanted to mention right before we go though is that over here you know we have the bone all posed and everything um before you save and exit and everything just make sure you click reset bone right all right and then you can save and um now now that that's done I'm going to go ahead and uh finish the rest of this and then I will meet you back in Skyrim so this is voice over Noah here um I accidentally forgot to mentioned in the video that after you do your weight painting um and fix all your weights you have to go back into body slide open up your armor or your clothing or whatever it is set the high weight to whatever it was before and then click the build button again um once you do that all the meshes will go back in like normal um but I just forgot to mention that I wanted to leave that here enjoy the rest of the tutorial thanks all right so here we go this is the final reveal of the armor and as you can see here a lot of these clipping issues that I mentioned from from before have been dealt with the bits on her hand they have now appeared and even the minor clipping issues that still exist can be fixed with a few more minutes in outfit Studio working on the weight painting but overall I am exceptionally happy with how this armor came out I am uh very very excited to see what you guys have come up with what you guys have made I know you guys are going to make really awesome stuff in this tutorial or at least I hope so the very last thing that I want to do before we end off the tutorial today is I want to go ahead and um show you how to flag your mod as an ASM and how to package it all up so you can uh send it off on con NEX first things first uh let's flag this baby as an ESL so you're going to need um sedit um before before anything we're going to run our mod through the sedit Quick Auto clean we're going to select just our mod this is my final version of The Mod so we're just going to run that click okay what this is going to do is it's going to check for um any issues that your mod is having um and it's going to go ahead and automatically fix a lot of them for you and flag any ones that doesn't automatically fix for you to fix yourself um so far having no issues um a lot of the times if you have made a record that you ended up deleting and um and stuff like that it'll show up here and this is where you can actually like for real for real delete it this mod looks good I didn't have anything like that so that's pretty good next thing we're going to do is open up SS e edit and then we are going to load our mod okay and then wait for this baby to load up all right and you're going to wait for it until it says finished like it does right here here um you don't really need to um load every single mod that you have Hest I don't really know why I did um but anyways you're going to find your mod you're going to click on it then you're going to go up to record Flags double click on that say let me think about it yes I'm absolutely sure and then you're just going to take ESL you're going to click out of that and then you're going to do contrl s to save save change files okay so if you are having this issue um in your mod where it says uh record temper blah blah blah blah as invalid object ID for light module you will not be able to save this file with the ESL flag active that is totally okay do not panic go ahead and go over to the record Flags double click on it and then untick ESL then you're going to right click on your file going to go to compact form IDs for ESL going click yes right then you're going to double click on it again go back to view record Flags ESL and then save it done saving now your mod is officially an ASL and go ahead and close s set it now and then I highly recommend at this point just to make sure that nothing got totally broken somehow um just loading up your mod in game again uh just to test it out so I'll be right back when I finish doing that after you tested it out in game and you know for a fact it works let's go ahead and package it all up in a nice little present and call it a day so first thing you're going to do is make a new folder on your desktop called Data then you're going to make one called meshes mhes and then another one called textures then in your meses folder you're going to make a new folder called armor and then the name of your mod and then you can go ahead and copy this armor folder past textures one just so you don't have to make tune new folders again first we're going to get add in the textures so in your new uh data textures armor Brier folder or mod folder whatever it is you're going to go into your Skyrim data folder and then follow the same file path and grab the textures armor rer then grab those paste them in these are my 4K textures we'll be making a 2K variant here in a second and then same thing with the meshes textures go back to your data folder and Skyrim meshes armor prior and then grab these paste them in all right cool and then back in the beginning of the brand new data folder going to go into your Skyrim data folder look for your mod mine is lost in here somewhere let's see here there we go copy it and then paste it and there you go now it's all packaged up if you are making a 2K variant what you're going to do is you're going to press this to zip all right then we're going to call this we're going to give it the name of your mod so and then you're going to call it _ 4K these are 4K textures you're going to want to double click it just you know go through all the folders make sure that everything's working so I've had mods uploaded in the past where something got broken during the zip compression and it's a whole big thing so I don't want that to happen to you guys so make sure that doesn't happen so now uh back in the folder we're going to delete the uh textures from the new data folder and then instead we are going to bring in the 2K variants where is it oh there it is right 2K variance copy and paste those in and now we're going to zip that up so prior prore 2K done didly done all right so now you have uh your 4K variant and your 2K variant I have open up my 2k make sure that's all working yep all right and now you're done um one thing I want to stress very strongly is I am by no means an expert on this there are many many many many other very talented um modders in the community that are far better at making armor mods than I am they know a lot more about it this is just how I do it this is um what works for me what can work for you um there might be some issues here and there with um you know my methods of doing it um based off of you know like best techniques sort of thing um or you know what other people prefer but this is how it works for me um if you follow everything step by step um and you go through it just as I told you to you will have a finished working armor mod at the end of the day nothing will be broken it will be plenty compatible with other mods um and everything should be fine as long as you dare everything right so that's all I wanted to say I really appreciate you guys watching um my next video will be the Oblivion weapon mods tutorial so make sure you look out for that um I'm really excited to work on that and then after that I have a couple other ideas for for videos I want to make just a bunch of other really small modding tutorials just um um just like little bite-sized content um that I know a lot of people have questions about um and that I don't you know usually have the time to make a full video on but I just plan on making quick like five little five minute little snip bits um that you guys can uh you guys can watch and you know learn how to fix small issues that you're having here and there throughout your mods um if you have any ideas for what you would like to see in the future I would really highly appreciate um you letting me know and um letting me know what you want to see um let me know down in the comments what you think of doing a Discord because I'd really like to be able to keep in touch with you guys a little bit better and be more active in the community um and with that being said um thank you for so much for watching um and I'm going to end it there I'll see you guys next time [Music] bye [Music] so to do this G to go up to file

Channel: Noah Longsfellow

Views: 6,582

Keywords: blender3d, blender, 3d modeling, photoshop, adobe, art, 3d art, game art, video game, skyrim mods, skyrim special edition, skyrim modding, skyrim anniversary edition

Id: ERMGl_OaCas

Length: 113min 1sec (6781 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 07 2023