I have a dragon mesh that disappears when viewed from certain angles. It appears that the engine doesn't understand when the mesh is within view. It's just a modified version of a vanilla dragon mesh, so I'm not sure what could've been messed up. Anybody know how to fix this?

https://www.dropbox.com/s/3iqrkf48hgwdbq8/thorntail.nif?dl=0 (Easiest way to test it: replace Meshes\Actors\Dragon\Character Assets\dragon.nif and spawn a normal dragon from console)

is there a double sided flag on any of the bslightingshader properties? did you change any nodes in nifskope? what did you do exactly?

edit: double post sorry

Double sided is off. I spliced a new NiTriShapeData and BSDismemberSkinInstance into the old mesh and changed the texture paths. The new data was generated by importing the vanilla mesh into Blender, editing, then exporting to a new nif before splicing into the original.

i can't read your mind, you're going to have to tell me exactly what you did. is this a mesh from old skyrim? is it from SSE? changing any vertices will throw off a skin node, maybe not enough to matter,

it doesn't sound like a mesh issue, unless the mesh is twisting on itself and showing you the other side, you should have something in blender that forces the mesh to render the opposite normals. IF its the mesh. i would try forcing double sided in the shader property first.

Sorry, I was hoping someone would look at the file, because an example is worth a thousand words and I can't really describe what's happening. But the mesh has no holes in it and all polygons face outward, so it isn't an issue with the single-sided polygons. The mesh is literally a vanilla dragon mesh with minor edits to some vertex locations to alter the shape of the dragon. Basically, even if you are viewing the exact same polygons from the exact same position, if you rotate your camera slightly, the entire mesh will become invisible simultaneously, before it actually disappears from camera view. As if it thinks the dragon is behind me and is therefore culling all of its faces at render time, when in reality the dragon is still in front of me.

i can't get anything from your link. it sends me to a blank page.

i'll take a guess, it sounds like you are taking the original skin modifier node and trying to place it back into a new modified data node. if that worked before in other games i would be shocked. even if i look at your file, i still can't guess at what you did. you are being extremely vague. "I spliced a new NiTriShapeData and BSDismemberSkinInstance into the old mesh and changed the texture paths" means almost nothing to me. good luck though.

Strange, link works for me even from incognito mode. Does your browser not like dropbox maybe? I'm not sure what part to clarify though. If the term "splice" is the part that's throwing you off, that means I did this:

Nif1: NiTriShapeData -> Copy branch

Nif2: Paste at end -> Go into corresponding NiTriShape and edit node to point at the new ones instead of old -> Delete old node

Then repeat for BSDismemberSkinInstance.

If you're wondering what's different between the old nodes and the new ones, this sentence here was meant to clarify: "The mesh is literally a vanilla dragon mesh with minor edits to some vertex locations to alter the shape of the dragon" but without you seeing the mesh there's really no way for me to explain that in more detail. The biggest difference is that it now has more spikes.

The splicing technique generally works; see my http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/695/? This is ~20th dragon I've done this to and this is the first time I've ever encountered this problem, so I really have no idea what might be the cause.

Fixed it -- somehow some transformations were being applied to the Nif even though they weren't visible within NifSkope. Right click -> Transform -> Clear on the NiTriShapes took care of the problem. Cheers and thanks for your time marthgun.