INTRODUCTION

Hello! I am Kiwi, author of the CotW mod and it's predecessors Enhanced Children and CUTE body respectively. Today I come to you with a little piece of information on how to fix the blood decals on custom body shapes, my own mod has this fix and since I've noticed many mods around have this issue and there is little information about how to fix it, I decided to share what i've found through simple observation (and with a little hint from one of our developers).

To fix them there are TWO things you must do.


1. BLENDER HYGIENE o3o

The first thing to know, is that Blender can make your blood decal look wrong if your export settings aren't correct, causing the blood decals on the body look broken as if made by bloody strips. And it is strips indeed what has something to do with it.

To get this solved all you have to do is export your nif file with the [Stripify Geometries] option unchecked, and do the stripifying manually on nifskope later (also update tangent spaces, setting the shaders to skin, the usual body nif hygiene, etc).


2. NIFSKOPERY =_=

Now this is the annoying thing, and the one that took me some time to figure out because it was so "obvious" that who would have guessed.

Basically, the game seems to give great importance to the order of the blocks inside the nif, so all you have to do for the body to show blood decals is move the block of the body to the top in the order of blocks, make it the first one right after the NiNode | Scene Root. After the body then you can place clothes or meatcaps or any other block, but the body can't be anything less than the first block inside the Scene Root.

To do this just select the block of the body (the NiTriStrips) and press ctrl+up until it's placed right under the NiNode | Scene Root.

Save the nif, go in game for test, and Voila! It should work.

The resulting nif should have a structure similar to this in Nifskope's Block List:

Name                              Value
> 0 NiNode                      Scene Root [5]
     > 1 NiTriStrips            Arms01 [8]
     > 9 NiTriStrips            MeatCapLimbs [12]

As you can see above, the Arms01 block, which contains the body mesh is above any other block, making this body able of showing decals.


LIMITATIONS

Well, so far I've only managed to make the first item in the list show the decals, I'm not sure if the game has a limitation for this, if I should rename the cloth parts a different keyword or what? But at least this has fixed the problem for the decals on the body.

From what I've seen, every other body mods have this issue to some extent and after searching a while for a solution I couldn't find anything about it or a method to fix this, so all I could do is search for it myself. Well, here it is :).

If anyone can figure out more about it please share the information in the comments, and I'll be sure to update this if I also come across any new discovery.


UPDATE 1.01!!!

After a long session experimenting I have found out new important information about blood decals on body and armors, here is what I've found so far:

• The body mesh block (or any other armor block) doesn't necessarily need to be at the top of the file, but IT MUST BE ABOVE the meatcaps parts. Anything that is placed lower than the meatcaps in the block list will not display blood decals. Apparently you can place as many objects as you wish on top of it.
  

• Objects that have a NiAlphaProperty won't show blood decals unless you pick the right alpha flag. After a while testing I made it work using the flag 4844.
  

Thanks and hope this is useful to you. Happy Modding! ^^

Kiwi.


CREDITS

Bethesda for making FO3
Arlekin who reminded me that decals get screwed if you stripify in Blender.
CotW Project for allowing me to learn all this fun stuff.

Be sure to check out our mod!:
Beam me up to it!