Same weird issue on DLA Elven Chain robes, my robes. (?)

[Legacy_OldTimeRadio]

               I honestly can't tell what I'm doing wrong but now that I've reproduced this with at least one set of DLA robes, I suppose it's worth a shot to ask around. 

There appears to be some kind of issue with at least some full body robes.  To Reproduce the issue: If you make a dynamic NPC and put a full body robe on them (say, neck down is skin meshed) or you are on a server where another player is wearing a similar robe and you look away from the person wearing the robe for some period of time, their (at least) head & hands appear to go out of sync with the rest of the model when you look back.  But not their legs, it seems.  They appear to be fine.  Any change in animation state fixes the issue and keeping them in view also appears to keep the issue from happening...until you look away again.

Schrödinger's Robe.  '>

The above situation happens a lot in practice.  My full body robes (one based off of a human NPC female model and one based off the male mannakin model which comes with NWMax) both suffer from this.  Not only do my robes have this issue, but I hunted down the DLA Elven Chain Compleat robes and I was able to reproduce the issue I was seeing in my robes, with them.



So...what the heck?  '>

It was very difficult for me to find much of anything about this issue and nothing specific.  I believe I also saw this on the CODI Alienist robe as well, but I definitely couldn't get it to happen on the default Bioware robes (that cover the arms, I figured that was "close enough" to a full body robe) and not on the coats, either.  The way a_ba_coats is set up (it contains a_ba animations for body parts along with coat bones), I can't tell if the addition of the a_ba animations into it was entirely out of necessity for the coat bones or it was necessary for the coat bones and to fix the issue like I'm seeing.

I've tried all kinds of things, compiled vs uncompiled, node ordering, node naming, supermodeling into different things, etc.  I'm hoping the DLA Elven Chain has been kicked around by enough people that someone knows what's causing this problem.

Anybody?  Thank you!
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_henesua]

               I've seen this often on my own character. I use a lot of robes in Arnheim. I have not approached it in a systematic way to figure out what the hell is going on.

It seems to me however that many issues can trigger this. But that it also seems to iron itself out with changes of the animation.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_OldTimeRadio]

               Thank you!  Do you happen to recall what robe you saw this on- like default Bioware vs community-made?
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_henesua]

               I do not recall if it was on any Biowar robes, but definitely on community made robes. Both what is avail in Q and in a couple I added.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_OldTimeRadio]

               Strange update for a strange problem: From my testing so far, it appears the way to fix this might be to not hide the right foot in parts_robe.2da.  That's what it looks like so far, using a robe which supermodels into pmh0.  I thought this was exceedingly odd and then I remembered that rfoot_g is part 0 in caparts.2da, something I'd puzzled over at the time.  Looking further into what significance the right foot model might have, I came across some information (and confirmed it in Leto) that a saved character's .BIC file does not actually have a  BodyPart_RFoot field but a ArmorPart_RFoot field.



Whether these things are significant to the problem...I dunno.  So far, with the test model I'm using and the problem I'm seeing (a similar sync problem with skin as the NPC walks waypoints), it looks like not hiding rfoot fixes everything.
               
               

               

                     Modifié par OldTimeRadio, 07 février 2013 - 06:51 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_Asymmetric]

               That's very strange, but good to know. Thanks for your work figuring this out :-)
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_OldTimeRadio]

               You're welcome! 

I haven't had much time to muck with it more, but I wanted to share with the community what I consider to be an absolutely freaking brilliant piece of custom content that I wished I thought of making at least a year ago:  I call it my Big Idea Testerâ„¢.  It's real simple-just a male human skin mesh robe made from pmh0 parts and colored red.  Looks like this.  So if I get a Big Ideaâ„¢ about doing something involving Robes, Wings, Tails or Cloaks, I set up the model how (whatever) is supposed to work...and just spend 5-10 minutes doing emotes and running around in-game.

To make sure everything actually does work like I think. 

Any time the PC/NPC and the red skin mesh aren't doing the same thing = problem.

Will probably also require a custom pmh0.mdl if a modder wants to do anything with wings or tails because they'll need to move those dummy nodes to 0,0,0.  Also (potentially) change the supermodel in the robe.  But other than that, pretty straight forward.  I've left nodes on him and they're there "just because" but those can be removed too.


               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Pstemarie]

               Wish I'd seen this thread sooner. The issue you describe with robe 012 (DLA elven chainmail) was well known on the DLA Forums and a fix implemented -

change parts_robe.2da so that feet are always shown then if you need the feet to not show ingame - HIDEFOOTR and HIDEFOOTL parameters are always 0 instead of 1. Then set the foot model to the "null" foot appearance (shows up as foot 018 in Project Q) which was added.

The change was never put into the vault release because it was figured that builders would use their own custom 2da anyway.
               
               

               

                     Modifié par Pstemarie, 08 février 2013 - 06:44 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_OldTimeRadio]

               Thank you, Pstemarie!  That's just the kind of recollection I was looking for.

I just tested this out with the particular walkwaypoints NPC issue I mentioned upthread and that does seem to fix it.  I tried re-entering the area after doing the change (via a scripted lever) and some funkiness comes back but I can't tell if that's a huge deal at this point because of how the problem manifests itself.  Thank you!

If you or anyone else has similar experiences with hands or neck, anything like that or anything related to things the parts_robe.2da might mislead you into thinking (other than head hiding), feel free to post it here.  It would be very much appreciated.

I just look at the great bulk of robes which basically (IIRC) stop at the forearms and shins and I think- "Was all this the result of aesthetic choices or was there some technical limitation causing so many of the robes to follow a similar design?"
               
               

               

                     Modifié par OldTimeRadio, 08 février 2013 - 07:56 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_OldTimeRadio]

               Well, an update of sorts.  I fixed my issue, probably by turning my rootdummy into a piece of non-rendering geometry with a trimesh modifier on it.  So instead of a 5cm dummy node, I redid it as a 5cm cube.  I'd noticed this seemed to have been the difference between my robe, the DLA Elven Chain and all the Bioware robes I looked at.  I fixed four different robes of mine this way, so hopefully this will cure what ails others.  The animations sync perfectly now.

I say "probably" above because I also made some changes around the same time.  One of them was bringing my robe's pivot back to 0,0,0.  After reading different opinions in the CCG and elsewhere, I tested other positions without any change in behavior.  I found this problem very difficult to test because hiding bodyparts in the parts_robe.2da seemed to affect the frequency with which the problem would occur.

If anyone wishes to test out their robes with this specific issue:
1. Put your robe on an NPC
2. Give them two waypoints to walk
3. In-game, with the NPC walking in front of you, turn to face the left (for instance) waypoint.
What would happen for me, consistently, is that when the NPC was returning into view from the right, there was a chance their body's animations would be out of sync with the robe's. 

Thanks to everyone who gave input and I really, really hope I fixed this for good, LOL.  This is an evil problem and I was convinced about four times since I posted this that I'd fixed it, only to see it crop up again in testing.  Nasty.

(crosses fingers).
               
               

               

                     Modifié par OldTimeRadio, 20 février 2013 - 04:13 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_NWN_baba yaga]

               i remember an issue when i had a root dummy turned into a non rendering geometry. Not sure what the problem was really but i recall something about transparency or so. I worked a lot with skinmeshs and transparent objects linked to one of the bodyparts within the skinmesh and and and. So if you encounter any problems with alphas later this rootdummy thing could be the reason... just saying;)