Creating this conversion took significantly more time, effort, and care compared to past armor conversions I've tried my hand at, so I've decided to compile the process here for my own reference. Someone can treat this as a modder's resource, in a roundabout way.
Preface
Or, "I heap praise on the Shadow Eyeglasses".
The set looks great on any thief character, which is why I set out on converting this armor for HIMBO (note, the original mod's male meshes fit SAM; there's no Vanilla body version) after seeing there were still no conversions almost 6 months later. But the one thing in this set that really made my heart flutter are the Shadow Eyeglasses.
The Shadow Eyeglasses err a little on lore-friendliness in so far as how modern their design looks compared to volvaga0's two goggles mods or those seen on Dunmeri armor sets. I could make up a story justification about them being an inventor's gift for a thief friend, but bottom line is: The Shadow Eyeglasses are 10/10 if you're just looking for goggles to stick onto your character, a follower, or anyone else. The mod now contains forehead and neck variants if you don't want them stuck on your face (hair/armor clipping permitting), they are just armor pieces without any extra functions, either gender can use them unlike the Osare Culort mod, and they aren't impractically giant like Haladoon's goggles. No offense to any of the aforementioned mods and their authors! I really believe that the exact aesthetic sense the goggles give off feels like they were tailor-made to my tastes, whilst Fuse00 also kept her mod's scope in check.
Preserving armor SMP
The process for retaining the SMP physics of an armor can be split up into two parts: the Outfit Studio conversion work, and the finishing touches.
The conversion work assumes that the armor has been morphed to your target body, but you have not conformed sliders:
- This step is very important; if you don't mask the rigged parts here, their bone weights will be overwritten after copying the reference shape's weights and the armor's physics will more than likely break in-game.
1. Load the appropriate reference shape. You generally don't want merge sliders checked if coming fresh off the initial morphing, though exceptions exist; more on that later. I'll use the HIMBO Body HP (SOS) reference shape alongside the Shadow Armor body in this example.
2. Click on all outfit meshes except for the reference shape in the Meshes tab. Go to the Bones tab and select all of the SMP bones. If you're not sure which bones are SMP, they will be at the bottom of the list.
3. Once all of the SMP bones are selected, right-click > Mask Weighted Meshes.
4. Once all of the non-SMP bones are selected, go to the Meshes tab and select all outfit meshes except for the reference shape then right-click > Copy Selected Weights. Be sure to check that the original SMP bone paints have been preserved after copying.
5. Once the reference shape's weights have been copied to the outfit meshes, remove the weighted meshes' masking and click on Slider > Conform Selected at the top menu bar.
6. Delete the reference shape and replace it with the target body's proper reference shape (if applicable), then save.
The reference shape to use will vary on what you're converting. The HIMBO body comes with three main reference shape variants: Vanilla, SOS, and SOS Phys. Aside from the latter most variant supporting body physics on the breast, belly, and butt areas, it's important to reiterate that each reference shape contains different bone lists, with the Vanilla shape lacking the Genitals01 and GenitalsBase bones present in both SOS shapes. If the crotch area of the armor is sinking to the ground in-game after following these steps, check if there's Genitals01 and GenitalsBase weighting accidentally included in the armor as the original armor xmls don't expect those bones and will produce this SMP error if so.
In this instance, the Shadow Armor didn't sink at all even with these bones included; it's likely due to this armor set not only having physics bound to the leg bag and around the jacket only, but also because this set doesn't use any collision meshes in the first place.
The Shadow Boots are a bit different as I had to conform the main HIMBO body's sliders to the shoe mesh, then swap reference shapes to HIMBO Feet with Merge Sliders checked in order to preserve the body sliders while still getting the 0-1 weight slider on the feet as well. You don't need to go this far for main body pieces, but it's good to know this extra step for gloves/shoes.
Outfit Studio rigging is the bulk of the work, but there's still two final steps I took:
- Link the SMP xml path node to the bodyslide mesh file so the link is transferred when building the in-game mesh files. I simply opened the original armor meshes and the bodyslide mesh in NifSkope then copied the SMP node from the original armor mesh to my bodyslide mesh. Ordering doesn't matter here.
- Test the armor in-game to see if the physics are working like they were prior to conversion. Building the conversion to a separate mod in MO2 then toggling that mod to compare both the original and my conversion helps a lot with this.
And thus this conversion taught me how to do all of this, as it's very poorly documented otherwise barring a random /tesg/ post from last year that guided me through most of this process. I hope this mini-tutorial will be helpful for others trying to convert armors that already have SMP rigging on them.
Reducing gloves clipping
The original SAM-fitted Shadow Gloves mesh has a fair degree of clipping on the left glove's wrist by the thumb side. Roughly tracing the SAM hands with masking then deleting the majority of the HIMBO hand not visible through the gloves' square holes made the clipping more evident in-game.
My solution? In addition to deleting more of the unseen HIMBO hands mesh, I've also opted to deflate the outer edges of the HIMBO hands mesh after masking the rest of the hands instead of trying to inflate and potentially distort the gloves' shaping. The important part in my view is that you don't see a hand gap in the gloves' holes during gameplay since you can't see the deflated hand edges anyways; and short of screenarchery, I think the results are much better than ruining the gloves mesh in trying to get rid of the clipping entirely.
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