Imperial steel armor morrowind how to#
Imperial steel armor morrowind code#

Below, I've chosen the Imperial Steel Armor set as an example. Using the above information as a glossary of terms, we can go ahead and compile the necessary information for a set of specific armor pieces. My work-in-progress OpenOffice spreadsheet is attached below as well (see ' Morrowind Detached Armor Worksheet.ods'). Alongside this information, I've also mapped the binding points as seen from the xbase_anim.nif file included with MGSO 3.0 (see top screenshot of NifSkope).

Imperial steel armor morrowind code#

Using reference information from OpenMW source code and information displayed by NifSkope and the Morrowind Enchanted Editor, I've compiled a list of all body parts, mesh parts and their corresponding part indexes into a spreedsheet (seen below).

In a Morrowind ESM/ESP file, body parts are referenced via a 'body part Index' and mesh parts are referenced via a 'mesh part index'. A ' Mesh part' is an abstraction of the 'body part' in the sense that there is no left or right-handedness. A 'bone' is an individual part that makes up a ' skeleton', which itself is the main entity involved in animating characters during common actions in the game world. This origin or ' binding point' is, in turn, represented as another local coordinate space transformation from a ' bone'. The global coordinate space of the origin can then change depending on the current animation that is playing for the character, and the body part can conveniently follow along with the origin. This is done by defining each body part on in a local coordinate space centered around the origin of the 'body part'. Since there are multiple races of varying sizes, shapes, gender which share many common armor pieces, we need to abstract the position, orientation and scaling of the armor / body parts. By contrast, a closed-faced helmet may replace both the 'Hair' and 'Head' bodyparts so that only the helmet's mesh is drawn without any part of the head/face. For example, if a character is wearing an open-faced helmet, the 'Hair' body part is often removed from the naked character model and the helmet's mesh is drawn in it's place such that the character's face can be seen through the pieces of the open helmet. ' Body parts' represent an area of the body that is either drawn as a mesh from the naked character model or replaced with a corresponding mesh from a piece of armor or clothing being worn. The information that defines the graphical representation of each individual armor piece is stored in several different database tables and records. Let's start with some organizational concepts for Morrowind Armor. Body Parts, Mesh Parts, Bone Bindings, etc. Then, we will need to figure out how the Morrowind engine works to combine them together. The first step is to understand what the individual components are that make up an armor piece in Morrowind.

Imperial steel armor morrowind how to#

So this is post series will document my on-going process of reverse engineering the details of how to do so. After over a decade of Morrowind Modding, I find it irritating that there is virtually no readily available information on how to work with detached mesh files from Morrowind. This is developer journal styled conversion tutorial for Morrowind Armor that comes as detached mesh pieces.