I'm currently developing a http://img835.imageshack.us/img835/8417/screenshot93d.jpghttp://img835.imageshack.us/img835/8417/screenshot93d.jpg.

This in itself is going very smoothly. The problem I'm finding is a LOT, which is to say "almost everything anyone has ever made" has got the skin areas incorrectly named. The problem seems to stem from HGEC becoming the base female model everyone uses, and the first releases of HGEC contained the error. Skin areas need to be named skin (lowercase) for the skin membrane shader to pick them up, but most custom meshes on Nexus have it named Skin (with an uppercase S), this tiny error is enough to throw the membrane shader and it skips applying the shader to it if skin-only is enabled.

This problem doesn't effect just me; way back when in 28 Days I encountered the same problem when i tried apply a zombified shader texture to players though back then I couldn't figure out the cause.

Basiclly it seems to me that as long as these models are in circulation then we can't properly utilise the skin-only membrane shader. But... this is where I hope someone can intervene. Actually fixing this bug is trivial, all you have to do is open a file, rename any textures named Skin to skin that also point to textures/characters/, and save it again. Surely it'd be relatively simple to create a program that could automaticlly do this to every loose model in a player's data folder? - If someone could do that, think of the shader possibilities =p



Anyway, just highlighting a plague amongst our community ;p - As for the modellers here making new models, remember it's skin not Skin dammit! :flamethrower:

Ah, non-coders not realising the importance of capitalisation.
Is there any documentation for the filetype lying around? or better yet, a decent library? Because iterating over a folder and making a predictable change would be a fairly simple task for any coder.

I don't know a whole lot about NIF, I stick to hacky edits using nifskope xD - this wiki probably has some relevant information
http://niftools.sourceforge.net/wiki/NifTools

You can use PyFFI, it has a modify_substitutetexturepath spell

C:\Python26\python.exe C:\Python26\Scripts\niftoaster.py modify_substitutetexturepath -a /(.*)Skin(.*)/\1skin\2 .\

add "--jobs=" before the ".\" to speed it up
replace "C:\Python26\" with the appropriate Python install directory

Looking at the code I can probably whip up a quick OBSE plugin to change the case-sensitive check to a case-insensitive. The idea being it would remove the need to hand-fix all existing meshes. Even if you automate the process the users would still need to do that themselves or download fixed versions of the meshes they are using. :shrug:

being a coder wouldn't have helped most of these people with their mods... in fact if they were a coder, they would have perpetuated the skin shader, and would have probably copied the existing format verbatim. which is actually just weird. In the case of a replacer, you can rewrite the rule book. I know only that both roberts male and female have it consistantly "skin". not sure about a few of the others.

anyway, "skin" has long been the favorite of the 2 skin shaders for several reasons. in vanilla iirc the "skin" shader is used on female bodies. and the "Skin" is used on males.. or was it vice versa? yeah think it was other way.. anyway, you get random things as well, like the hand meshes being one while the body being another. Mmmm seams...

Now that I think about it... what about the female head? what shader does that use? surely if it uses the "skin" shader and they are putting "Skin" on the bodies would be wrong. Crazy modders eh.