My custom creatures appear heavily distorted and stretched in the construction set (though they render perfectly fine ingame) ... and they also sometims cause the CS to crash when loaded.

This only happens with skinned meshes ... and that also only if the model is heavily segmented.

So for example, if my model is a single seamless mesh for the whole body then it renders fine ... but if the mesh nif consists of several different skinned TriShapes ... they will get heavily distorted and stretched and some parts might even become invisible.

Can someone please shed some light on this.

1) Have you touched animations at all?

2) Did you re-rig the creature's mesh to a 'clean' skeleton before exporting (aka re-import just the skeleton and parent the creature meshes to that).

Can you show some pictures of how it displays in the CS? I'm pretty sure I've had a this problem before, a picture of it might jog my memory on how I fixed it.

1) Ummm ... its a "custom" creature ... in the meaning that has come to be associated with it ... so the animations are all new.

2) Don't really understand what you are saying here ... I exported the mesh and skeleton like it said in Saiden's 3dsmax Tutorial. I have also tried to use a nifscope-modified stock (biped) skeleton.nif {since its bones are nearly identical to mine} ... but that still give the same prolem.


I will try to upload a pic tomorrow {not at my OB PC right now} ... but here is a more detailed description:

- Some segments become totally invisible ... for example the arms might appear but the torso will will be invisible.
- Some segments turn into a narrow, stretched plane that spawns the whole vertical axis {kinda like when skin is rigged to a bone that is later removed from the skeleton ... if you know what I mean}
- The CS mostly crashes when the creature is previewed in the render view ... but not always and not for everyone (I think it depends on the PC specs).
- Everything works 100% fine in the game ... no distortions ... no crashes.

I've seen some pretty weird stuff happen to custom creatures I've made....most of the time it has been a blender export error that caused wacky things to happen. As a Max user, you'll properbly have to wait for saidanstorm to come along.

For the invisable body parts, check that the textures for that part have a normal map, but that the only thing I have seen to cause missing body parts (and in that case, a missing normal will render in the game fine if you're unlucky).