or, better, there might be. The incredible original mod is full of pieces. Just navigating through the bodyslide files makes it possible to pack the wrong ones, lose hours of conversion work, forget about some pieces, and so on.I tried not to rush and approached the conversion with a love for tinkering and the BHUNP body, not for publishing a mod. But sh!t happens ;-) and while I already did a second round of tests for all (I hope!) the pieces, I might have missed something and we all know how things go with modding Skyrim. I did not test all the possible combos. I used outfitA necklaces with outfitA only, maybe another one, but not all of them. You would still be waiting for this conversion if I had started doing it.
Before declaring a bug, make sure you have accounted for all the possible explanations on your side and try to describe a reproducible scenario, else it will be hard to try and solve them. Exclude issues related to Bodyslide, BHUNP, the original mod and/or OBody themselves (i.e. if you have similar/same issues with many outfits it could be bad luck, or it could be your modded environment).
With more than 400 pieces, a missing transform reset or a bad weight-paint might have happened, although I tried to limit these cases by testing the outfits with poses and normal gameplay. And then again, I could be blind, and every piece has issues.
.oO Wow SMP! Meh SMP! Oo.
If you’re not too fond about how SMP behaves on your system, please read again the SMP considerations on the main page. They could be improved towards perfection, but they already are a step beyond the static behavior of the original.And the longer gown work by Myst42 is a little hackish marvel: while with pronounced hips swaying / catwalking animations some of the tighter gowns might sometimes clip on the Front and/or Rear Thighs, I chose to maintain the overall circular stability introduced by them, as it is quite eye catching.
In summary, that’s why version is still not 1.00.
.oO What dresses have been converted? Oo.
All the ones with female weight support in the original mod. There are some male only pieces that might be converted if they don’t require extensive changes to the shapes, but this has not been done, yet. If you feel a piece is missing or should be added just because, say it. Don’t expect to be done immediately or with specific ETAs, though. And remember I’m doing conversions, not 3d modelling :-)
.oO Prebuilt Meshes? Oo.
Thought about it, and they might come, if there's request for it. In that case, they would be built against the zeroed-slider preset. Please do not ask for specific preset builds.
.oO A note about my images Oo.
Mine are low resolution. I play at 800p on a Steam Deck and when doing close-ups it shows. Expect better quality from the textures if you’re playing at 1080p+.
We all know sometimes SMP goes crazy. In some of my images you will see my Dragonborn stretching the leg(s) out of the gown. Those are not gowns/skirts with slit. I simply put the glitch to some proper use.
can you make a version without the store? I never tried the original mod because the store it adds. Or if you could tell me what to delete with xedit i can do it
hey! this is just a conversion, though. I'm not adding anything but BHUNP files to it. So I cannot really remove what I didn't add. You could try asking in the original mod comments section, because I cannot patch the original mod as per its permissions.
Hey, I'm looking through some of your bodyslide files and I am curious what resource you used to create bones for the dress movements. Did you create these by hand? For example, the gown has both a stabalizer and the ground in the project, as well as bones. I ask because I'm looking to add some bones to some custom dresses and I can't find many good resources on how to do so. I consider just copying your work over into my project, but I'd like to know a bit more about what I'm doing. I've watched some youtube videos out there and have the basics down about weight painting and such, though I'm not any good at all. Thanks in advance.
Hi. My hardware setup is pretty limited right now, so I simply used Outfit Studio to create the rigging, which is a tedious process to say the least. People also use blender or 3dsmax which might offer more streamlined workflows to set up the bones. The stabiliser thing is a hack suggested by Myst, useful for circular gowns around the body vertical axis, but it's not necessary for most pieces, it really depends on what you're adding physics to.
Regarding the idea of simply copying an existing bone rigging from one outfit to another can work, but keep in mind that the bone positions are important and while two skirts or cloaks might look the same, they might not work with the same bones disposition, SMP wise. So at least modify the coordinates of the bones you're copying, so they better sustain the movements for the new piece.
Yes, there are not that many resources out there and most videos and documents always suggest the same things. That's not because authors don't want to really share, but because you need to do it wrong tens of times yourself to begin learning how the process works. When I did this Divine Elegance conversion, I didn't really understand most of the nuances of SMP (as a matter of fact I now consider myself just as a graduated newbie from the wannabe status) and each new outfit offers a new perspective on the workflow.
So the advice here is not git gud, it's just do it, and then redo it.
Thanks so much, I consider myself far behind where you were when you started this. I'm looking right now to just convert some of the vanilla dresses to have physics. If you consider yourself better at doing this kind of stuff now than when you first made this mod, can you point me at a more recent mod of yours (or someone else's) so I can get my mind wrapped around what I'm trying to accomplish? I'm aware that there are already some smp outfit conversions out there. I'm in the process of looking through those as I teach myself as well. Thank you for your response.
There are 2 aspects to this: bone rigging and SMP configuration in the XML for the piece.
Your idea to read other outfits SMP configuration is good, simply keep doing it.
The only con to this process is relative to XML parameters and values as information is incredibly sparse about this. If I were you, to learn rigging I'd look at very simple pieces, like jewellery, because to first understand SMP constraints, you need to have simple short bone chains to look at, so the basics are at hand. Alas, to improve in the XML field, it's just trial and error, because some parameters are not only bound to the others, but also somewhat dependent on the weight painting of the bones and their disposition. So start with small pieces, with few and short chains.
There's a lot of jewellery in my Bloody Glamour Wardrobe mod. Else, to go easy with just one piece, the headdress of Kadis. When you're ready for a skirt/chest piece, The Last Vampire Hunter one.
I'm not going to act like I understood everything your said, but I appreciate your time and suggestions. I'll download those mods at some point and play around with them, perhaps this weekend. Thank you. Your mods are very well done, by the way.
Hello again, thanks so much for all your help. I have hit a bit of a block. I've reshaped a vanilla outfit to align the mesh with the shape of one of the dresses that you converted, the Orianna dress. I conformed the meshes individually, and copied the bone weights over individually. When I open the game, the vanilla dress is reacting to smp physics properly! Yay! However, the legs clips through the inside of the dress. When the actor strikes a pose, the knee and calf sticks through. It's almost as though the inside of the dress isn't colliding with the legs? Do you have any thoughts on why this is happening? Your conversion dress works mostly well in my game for this aspect.
Each shape is different. Long skirt? Slits? Circular? Tight? Spacious? The point is that most of the shapes in this mod used a stabiliser which might or not be useful in your case. But it was used mostly for circular gowns and, at that point, for shapes similar in geometry. But for open ones would not be that much necessary. Collisions are handled in the XML and today I'm still learning new tricks here and there, like proper margins to shapes and bones and weight thresholds. So, case by case, you have to work on the XML parameters, but it's very hard to find a single answer to all of the possible scenarios (read: almost impossible unless the question gets very specific)
Thanks, I appreciate you spending the time. I know you already alluded to the fact that there's almost no information out there on it, but do you know of any where or way I can find out more about these files?
Install the FSMP Validator, which comes with contextual information about some of the parameters. Another source of info is chatgpt/copilot/whatever you might be using. Answers will be contradictory sometimes, so much that most people says the best workflow is to randomly change parameters' values until it works, but it can give you a rough idea. But really, the point is to edit so many versions of the XMLs so you can see in game how it looks like. Only to discover :-) that what you see might not be what the user will, as each system performs differently and base conditions are almost never the same.
I've done some more reading and researching, and I've learned a bit. It looks like the problem is that I haven't pointed the mesh to the xml file that your bones use, and that may be why it's not colliding with the legs properly, though if that's the case I'm a bit confused on why it's bouncing around at all. I have quite a bit more research and learning to do. My goal is to convert all the vanilla dresses to BHUNP smp, though I am not certain I am capable of doing that seeing as I haven't done even one yet. I found this information, but it's almost 10 years old. Hard to know if it's still up to date, and if it's not, what information is no longer relevant. Thanks again for your time. I appreciate the information you've shared with me. https://forums.nexusmods.com/topic/3800385-a-guide-to-hdt-smp-usersmodders/
Oh, definitely. Collisions are handled in the XML and if the nif does not have the right NiStringExtraData FSMP won't work on it. But you see some movements in any case, because the SMP bones are already declared and the shapes weight painted with them. But it should not be the same kind of movement you get from FSMP. It should look static, without freedom of movement on the 3 axis between each bone
Thanks for another reply. Does file structure/location of the xml file matter? If so, where is that assigned? Edit: as I've been reading these files, I see almost all of them have different locations but I haven't noticed where any of them are technically designated.
Structure of the XML is formal and follows some principles that make a formal sense for SMP. Location of the XML is arbitrary; it's commonly located in the meshes folder that contains the nif that references it via its extra data parameter.
Thank you so much again for your continued responses. I think I made a mistake in my last question to, which I was hoping you could clarify? Where/how specifically do you tell the mesh to point to an xml file? Is it in nifskope? Sorry, I haven't looked through nifskope for this yet (been away from my computer since right before my last question), though I've used it to change texture files. Or do you have to change the path in outfit studio? Or is it done via something like sseedit?
Nifskope. You select the first line, the NiNode Scene Root. In the bottom panel you increase the number of Num Extra Data List with 1. In the next line, Extra Data List, you will select the plus sign to add it. Then the two parameters to add are: HDT Skinned Mesh Physics Object in the first and the path of your XML in the second.
The comment section of this conversion is not apt to such discussions, though. A good place to start might be the Discord server for FSMP, whose URL you can find on the FSMP page here on Nexus.
OK thanks I will stop asking you so many questions. Thank you again. I'm on discord, though not that server. I have found that many times, traffic and questions gets lost in those bigger servers. I really appreciate your time and wish you the best. I am watching and reading tutorials to try to take some of the mystery out. Thank you again.
:-) What I meant is that an async channel like the comments' page is not the right one. Too much time between Q and A and it's not possible to really discuss the issues. I'll send you the invite for a discord server where I constantly monitor messages.
Great work, and thank you for doing it. I do have one question. Is there a way I can undo the BodySlide on some of the items? I ran them all through BodySlide but oh gosh, I realized some pieces don't look good with physics. But others look great, so I wouldn't mind keeping those.But I want to remove the changes bodyslide did to probably most of the pieces... just not sure how.
The original v2 doesn't have bodyslide files, so you cannot really automate this process. Bodyslide created replacement nif files that overwrote the original ones. You need the opposite: restore the original ones, overwriting the bodyslide built ones. So you'd need to cherry pick the ones you prefer from the original and have them overwrite the ones you built.
Isn't there already the BHUNP/UUNP preset on the original page, called the "Apachii_Divine_Elegance_UUNP_HDT_Full_v_2_0" or am I missing something here?
You're missing. A lot ;-) First of all the UUNP v2 on the original page has not got bodyslides, so you're stuck with a single set of body proportions. The old UUNP bodyslides available on the original page are not compatible with Apachii Divine 2.0. UUNP is not compatible with all BHUNP body presets and features. BHUNP is backward compatible with UUNP, not the other way round.
Moreover, apart from full BHUNPv4 compatibility and bodyslides to build to your liking, most outfits from the store with this conversion now support cloth physics via SMP in addition to body physics, which is NOT available in the original mod, nor in the CBBE conversions.
Yes, you need the original at least for ground meshes, base plugin and textures. And for all the male outfits as well. If unsure download the UUNPv2 from the original page. If you use ENB or Community Shaders, also download from the original page the optional patch for Iris dress.
That's a lot of extra multi-piece mods to convert. After Divine Elegance and Somewhere in Between I would love for a while to do single outfits, but I'll add it to my list. Who knows?
You seem to exclusively make BHUNP content, but I know there are so many out there that would love a 3BA conversion of your mod. there simply isn't any option out there that also provides the SMP Cloth physics like this mod does. Would it be hard for you to make a 3BA Version? Perhaps Tedious? Please consider making one because you're the only mod author out there right now that can make SMP Cloth physics for Apachii Divine Elegance except for some people on Patreon, but they only do a few outfits not the entire mod like you have. You already laid the groundwork for the SMP. Would it be so hard to make a 3BA version? Forgive me for my ignorance if I offend you by asking.
No worries, no offense at all. There are some issues here: 1) I simply do not use CBBE/3BA. I might add it, although 2) I only play on a Steam Deck, I don't have a PC, so what's happening is that I simply don't have the storage right now to go much beyond what I already have and 3) I'm still recovering from hand surgery and my todo.txt - and real life - are pretty busy as they are. I honestly doubt this is coming any soon.
Also please note that this is not quite the simple process most people think it is, with so many pieces. As a bare minimum it's really time consuming. But in my current setup it would be extremely difficult to test each step (windows virtual machine without GPU to create the files and the conversions, copy over to the Steam Deck, test, repeat).
Thank you for taking the time to respond to me and for your explanation. Please get better and rest while you can. I'm sorry to hear about your surgery, but hopefully it's all for the better.
There are two alternatives: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/78875 which is based on the older 1.5 version but works (and you can also find newer sound banks on Nexus)
or the 1.6 version that the original author put on the net after it was removed: https://drive.google.com/file/d/13B3gK-Rz-uYG7QjybrxSzq6gRO_tceFJ/view (and, again, you can use the newer sound banks from Nexus)
128 comments
or, better, there might be. The incredible original mod is full of pieces. Just navigating through the bodyslide files makes it possible to pack the wrong ones, lose hours of conversion work, forget about some pieces, and so on.I tried not to rush and approached the conversion with a love for tinkering and the BHUNP body, not for publishing a mod. But sh!t happens ;-) and while I already did a second round of tests for all (I hope!) the pieces, I might have missed something and we all know how things go with modding Skyrim. I did not test all the possible combos. I used outfitA necklaces with outfitA only, maybe another one, but not all of them. You would still be waiting for this conversion if I had started doing it.
Before declaring a bug, make sure you have accounted for all the possible explanations on your side and try to describe a reproducible scenario, else it will be hard to try and solve them. Exclude issues related to Bodyslide, BHUNP, the original mod and/or OBody themselves (i.e. if you have similar/same issues with many outfits it could be bad luck, or it could be your modded environment).
With more than 400 pieces, a missing transform reset or a bad weight-paint might have happened, although I tried to limit these cases by testing the outfits with poses and normal gameplay. And then again, I could be blind, and every piece has issues.
.oO Wow SMP! Meh SMP! Oo.
If you’re not too fond about how SMP behaves on your system, please read again the SMP considerations on the main page. They could be improved towards perfection, but they already are a step beyond the static behavior of the original.And the longer gown work by Myst42 is a little hackish marvel: while with pronounced hips swaying / catwalking animations some of the tighter gowns might sometimes clip on the Front and/or Rear Thighs, I chose to maintain the overall circular stability introduced by them, as it is quite eye catching.
In summary, that’s why version is still not 1.00.
.oO What dresses have been converted? Oo.
All the ones with female weight support in the original mod. There are some male only pieces that might be converted if they don’t require extensive changes to the shapes, but this has not been done, yet. If you feel a piece is missing or should be added just because, say it. Don’t expect to be done immediately or with specific ETAs, though. And remember I’m doing conversions, not 3d modelling :-)
.oO Prebuilt Meshes? Oo.
Thought about it, and they might come, if there's request for it. In that case, they would be built against the zeroed-slider preset. Please do not ask for specific preset builds.
.oO A note about my images Oo.
Mine are low resolution. I play at 800p on a Steam Deck and when doing close-ups it shows. Expect better quality from the textures if you’re playing at 1080p+.
We all know sometimes SMP goes crazy. In some of my images you will see my Dragonborn stretching the leg(s) out of the gown. Those are not gowns/skirts with slit. I simply put the glitch to some proper use.
Body preset used is almost always Catwalk
.oO What you can do Oo.
If you like this, please remember to endorse it and/or give a kudo.
Also, I love sshots: make some and post them in this mod’s Images section.
At least, drink a beer in memory of my eyes and wrists, missing in action while testing this on the small screen of my Steam Deck :-)
Or if you could tell me what to delete with xedit i can do it
this is just a conversion, though. I'm not adding anything but BHUNP files to it. So I cannot really remove what I didn't add.
You could try asking in the original mod comments section, because I cannot patch the original mod as per its permissions.
My hardware setup is pretty limited right now, so I simply used Outfit Studio to create the rigging, which is a tedious process to say the least. People also use blender or 3dsmax which might offer more streamlined workflows to set up the bones. The stabiliser thing is a hack suggested by Myst, useful for circular gowns around the body vertical axis, but it's not necessary for most pieces, it really depends on what you're adding physics to.
Regarding the idea of simply copying an existing bone rigging from one outfit to another can work, but keep in mind that the bone positions are important and while two skirts or cloaks might look the same, they might not work with the same bones disposition, SMP wise. So at least modify the coordinates of the bones you're copying, so they better sustain the movements for the new piece.
Yes, there are not that many resources out there and most videos and documents always suggest the same things. That's not because authors don't want to really share, but because you need to do it wrong tens of times yourself to begin learning how the process works. When I did this Divine Elegance conversion, I didn't really understand most of the nuances of SMP (as a matter of fact I now consider myself just as a graduated newbie from the wannabe status) and each new outfit offers a new perspective on the workflow.
So the advice here is not git gud, it's just do it, and then redo it.
Your idea to read other outfits SMP configuration is good, simply keep doing it.
The only con to this process is relative to XML parameters and values as information is incredibly sparse about this.
If I were you, to learn rigging I'd look at very simple pieces, like jewellery, because to first understand SMP constraints, you need to have simple short bone chains to look at, so the basics are at hand. Alas, to improve in the XML field, it's just trial and error, because some parameters are not only bound to the others, but also somewhat dependent on the weight painting of the bones and their disposition.
So start with small pieces, with few and short chains.
There's a lot of jewellery in my Bloody Glamour Wardrobe mod. Else, to go easy with just one piece, the headdress of Kadis.
When you're ready for a skirt/chest piece, The Last Vampire Hunter one.
"There is always a bigger fish".
Thank you, but here the real talented ones are the original 3d artists. I'm simply porting/converting.
The point is that most of the shapes in this mod used a stabiliser which might or not be useful in your case. But it was used mostly for circular gowns and, at that point, for shapes similar in geometry. But for open ones would not be that much necessary.
Collisions are handled in the XML and today I'm still learning new tricks here and there, like proper margins to shapes and bones and weight thresholds.
So, case by case, you have to work on the XML parameters, but it's very hard to find a single answer to all of the possible scenarios (read: almost impossible unless the question gets very specific)
Another source of info is chatgpt/copilot/whatever you might be using. Answers will be contradictory sometimes, so much that most people says the best workflow is to randomly change parameters' values until it works, but it can give you a rough idea. But really, the point is to edit so many versions of the XMLs so you can see in game how it looks like. Only to discover :-) that what you see might not be what the user will, as each system performs differently and base conditions are almost never the same.
https://forums.nexusmods.com/topic/3800385-a-guide-to-hdt-smp-usersmodders/
But you see some movements in any case, because the SMP bones are already declared and the shapes weight painted with them. But it should not be the same kind of movement you get from FSMP. It should look static, without freedom of movement on the 3 axis between each bone
Edit: as I've been reading these files, I see almost all of them have different locations but I haven't noticed where any of them are technically designated.
Location of the XML is arbitrary; it's commonly located in the meshes folder that contains the nif that references it via its extra data parameter.
In the bottom panel you increase the number of Num Extra Data List with 1.
In the next line, Extra Data List, you will select the plus sign to add it.
Then the two parameters to add are: HDT Skinned Mesh Physics Object in the first and the path of your XML in the second.
The comment section of this conversion is not apt to such discussions, though. A good place to start might be the Discord server for FSMP, whose URL you can find on the FSMP page here on Nexus.
What I meant is that an async channel like the comments' page is not the right one. Too much time between Q and A and it's not possible to really discuss the issues. I'll send you the invite for a discord server where I constantly monitor messages.
I do have one question.
Is there a way I can undo the BodySlide on some of the items? I ran them all through BodySlide but oh gosh, I realized some pieces don't look good with physics. But others look great, so I wouldn't mind keeping those.But I want to remove the changes bodyslide did to probably most of the pieces... just not sure how.
First of all the UUNP v2 on the original page has not got bodyslides, so you're stuck with a single set of body proportions. The old UUNP bodyslides available on the original page are not compatible with Apachii Divine 2.0. UUNP is not compatible with all BHUNP body presets and features. BHUNP is backward compatible with UUNP, not the other way round.
Moreover, apart from full BHUNPv4 compatibility and bodyslides to build to your liking, most outfits from the store with this conversion now support cloth physics via SMP in addition to body physics, which is NOT available in the original mod, nor in the CBBE conversions.
Also, thanks for doing this! I love these outfits and have always preferred BHUNP.
If unsure download the UUNPv2 from the original page.
If you use ENB or Community Shaders, also download from the original page the optional patch for Iris dress.
After Divine Elegance and Somewhere in Between I would love for a while to do single outfits, but I'll add it to my list. Who knows?
There are some issues here: 1) I simply do not use CBBE/3BA. I might add it, although 2) I only play on a Steam Deck, I don't have a PC, so what's happening is that I simply don't have the storage right now to go much beyond what I already have and 3) I'm still recovering from hand surgery and my todo.txt - and real life - are pretty busy as they are. I honestly doubt this is coming any soon.
Also please note that this is not quite the simple process most people think it is, with so many pieces. As a bare minimum it's really time consuming. But in my current setup it would be extremely difficult to test each step (windows virtual machine without GPU to create the files and the conversions, copy over to the Steam Deck, test, repeat).
💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/78875 which is based on the older 1.5 version but works (and you can also find newer sound banks on Nexus)
or the 1.6 version that the original author put on the net after it was removed:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/13B3gK-Rz-uYG7QjybrxSzq6gRO_tceFJ/view (and, again, you can use the newer sound banks from Nexus)
newer sound banks: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/92903