So I've been looking into some of the nifs from vegas, and I noticed that there are nodes called "DecalPlacementVector" on melee weapons.

I don't know what these are for exactly, and google is not particularly illuminating on this topic.



Seems like they would do what there name suggests which is to place decals at a specific vector.

I imagine that this -probably- has something to do with blood decals placement on hits. It looks like it could be some kind of collision system to put blood decals on things hit by the weapon.




Anyone care to explain what they actually do? Am I right?


EDIT: Drat! This will teach me to have multiple windows open at the same time. This should be in the GECK forum. My bad.

Yes, they have to do with how blood decals are applied to a weapon. I never really investigated these further, so the naming may be off in NifSkope for this block (Vector is probably more appropriate). But what's going on is textures a projected onto the meshes' surface from one of the origin points, with an angle of XYZ. The different locations and angles allow for a nice variation and realism for applying, rather than relying on older methods of 'apply overlay to the UVs'.

Interesting!

That explains the variation in placement of the nodes. I was wondering why the bladed weapons seemed to have these nodes only on one side.

They are built like that so that the blood decals are placed primarily on the blade, and not on the handle or back edge.

Very clever gamebryo engineers. Very clever indeed.

Actually this is a custom node written by Bethesda, not Emergent