Good idea well executed, I'd also been thinking this helm would look better with the shield up. I did notice a minor glitch (using the replacer)- if you have 'Show Helm in areas with atmosphere' on, while first-person piloting a ship the visor shield is viewable and partially obstructs the top of the view. I tried a few cockpits (Taiyo, Viking, Armstrong) and it happened in all three. While one might agree the shield would indeed restrict visibility that way, at least it's easily worked around by disabling that helmet setting.
In case you do decide to look at it, there's a similar-in-concept mod for the Pirate Assault helmet (https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield/mods/11548) which doesn't have that issue and might help(?) Presumably the texture would need to be 'transparent from the inside'...
This is something that irritated me ever since the game launched, thank you.
Just a suggestion, but you should consider also posting this as a straight replacer with no plugin/other mod requirements. Your mesh seems to work fine to replace spacesuit_ucpilot_helmet_01_m.nif directly and the vangard/marine/sysdef logo swaps all work as expected.
Yes, I am working on adding clear, gold, silver/chrome visored versions. I tried to find online if there was a way to make craftable visors via the spacesuit workbench but I couldn't find anything so they will have to be standalone helmets I guess.
For sure I'd appreciate a few pointers. Can you make craftable skins/visors using materials or can you only use textures? I found this post about using materials to make skins but I couldn't figure out what I needed to do. Anyway I'm going to continue this in the morning but going to sleep for now as its getting late.
Yes that post is the technique I'm talking about - you can create your own custom visor materials and then use the skin feature to swap them out at the workbench in game (as well as a full helmet retexture too of course if you so choose.
I was originally using the AVMS skin method (detailed here), but I much prefer doing the material swap version instead now. I'll post below in a spoiler in case anyone else is interested:
Spoiler:
Show
1. I set up the AVMS for the item in the editor as normal, purely to generate mod_AVM record
2. Main difference is you need to make a new Mod Association Keyword (ma_...) to parent your skin to the item. I took the UC Marine one (ma_Spacesuit_UCMarine_Body) and duplicated/renamed for the new item.
3. Go to the item's Armor record and add the 'ap_AVM_Armor_Skin' keyword to the Attach Parent Slot, and your new ma_ keyword to the keywords list.
4. For the layered material swaps, go to the Materials Editor and duplicate the materials for your item into a new skin folder, and then edit the new copies and change the texture paths to your new mod textures, and save.
5. Then go the Material Swap Editor and open the nifs for the item, and then drag your new materials into the corresponding material swap box and press 'Save Individual Swaps'. You don't need to go through every nif - you just need to make sure you have saved a swap for every material you've edited once.
6. Go back to your mod_AVM record, add the new ma_keyword and add each of the material swaps you've created to the Property Modifiers. This applies the modded texture to both male/female and 3rd/1st person automatically (thank God).
7. Make and associate a co_mod entry as per AVMS tutorial link
Thank you for the help! I've made a version of this mod with craftable visors but before I upload it I want to get rid of these last couple of bugs. Do you have any idea why the helmets become frozen and uninteractable when I drop them from my inventory? Do I need to apply physics somehow when I use a modified global nif? The helmet is also visible in first person when sitting in the cockpit (but not when sitting down in a normal chair). Once again thank you for your earlier help, and sorry for bothering you again with newbie questions haha.
No worries! I'm afraid I don't know about your issues - I know almost nothing about NIFs, not done any work with them. All my time has been with textures / materials / basic Creation Kit stuff. I usually suggest looking carefully at exiting items in CK to see how they work, and then copying over everything apart from what you are directly changing.
Very nice. I always thought it was dumb that people would run around blind with the blast shields down. I suspect the concept was for the shields to drop to protect the visor in the event of an explosion, not constantly be down covering the visor. I think some people just assumed there was some kind of HUD but if you look closely, there is no HUD it’s just a couple of metal plates on rails/hinges.
Yeah I get what you mean. I think we are even looking at the same picture. It will be harder to model because there isn't any art of it in both configurations like the pilot helm but I can make it.
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In case you do decide to look at it, there's a similar-in-concept mod for the Pirate Assault helmet (https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield/mods/11548) which doesn't have that issue and might help(?) Presumably the texture would need to be 'transparent from the inside'...
Anyway, nice mod regardless. Thanks!
Just a suggestion, but you should consider also posting this as a straight replacer with no plugin/other mod requirements. Your mesh seems to work fine to replace spacesuit_ucpilot_helmet_01_m.nif directly and the vangard/marine/sysdef logo swaps all work as expected.
I was originally using the AVMS skin method (detailed here), but I much prefer doing the material swap version instead now. I'll post below in a spoiler in case anyone else is interested:
1. I set up the AVMS for the item in the editor as normal, purely to generate mod_AVM record
2. Main difference is you need to make a new Mod Association Keyword (ma_...) to parent your skin to the item. I took the UC Marine one (ma_Spacesuit_UCMarine_Body) and duplicated/renamed for the new item.
3. Go to the item's Armor record and add the 'ap_AVM_Armor_Skin' keyword to the Attach Parent Slot, and your new ma_ keyword to the keywords list.
4. For the layered material swaps, go to the Materials Editor and duplicate the materials for your item into a new skin folder, and then edit the new copies and change the texture paths to your new mod textures, and save.
5. Then go the Material Swap Editor and open the nifs for the item, and then drag your new materials into the corresponding material swap box and press 'Save Individual Swaps'. You don't need to go through every nif - you just need to make sure you have saved a swap for every material you've edited once.
6. Go back to your mod_AVM record, add the new ma_keyword and add each of the material swaps you've created to the Property Modifiers. This applies the modded texture to both male/female and 3rd/1st person automatically (thank God).
7. Make and associate a co_mod entry as per AVMS tutorial link