Fallout 4 How to Put a Made Outfit Into Game From Outfit Studio

5 years ago

Arideya's guide to modding FO4 outfits, outfit mashups

Phew, done. :)

I'm putting it under the cut as it is very very very very long.

First, important notes:

1. I'm a giant noob and this is my first time doing something like this

2. This tutorial is for noobs too, it starts from basics. If you know some things/parts just ignore them and move on to the next ones.

3. My knowledge would not have been possible without @guidethisonekalahira since we did all our outfits in parallel and were figuring out things together. She helped me with great advice and pointed me to some tutorials which I will include later on. Thanks hon <3

4. English isn't my native language so if there are things I explained bad and you don't understand something feel free to message me.

5. The links to larger images are below the images, I have no idea why it doesn't show a larger image when clicked on.

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Required stuff

Modding F4 outfits is rather easy, it does however require a lot of steps which can make the whole thing rather confusing. My advice: always keep backups , do several versions, even if you end up having 20 variations of the same outfit. It is always easier to go back to the previous version rather than redo something from scratch. Trust me, I've been there and it hurts.

You will absolutely NEED the following tools. So download and install them or place them somewhere for easy access, such as your desktop. Except Bodyslide and Outfit studio, it goes into your Data folder.

B.A.E. - Bethesda Archive Extractor by jonwd7 - for exporting meshes textures and materials from FO4 bsa archives.

NifSkope 2.0 Pre-Alpha 4 by jonwd7 - for editing nif files

BodySlide and Outfit Studio by Ousnius and Caliente - for doing actual mashups. Yes you can use it even if you dont use CBBE.

Gibbed's Fallout 4 Tools by gibbed - for editing BGSM files (those are material files and a new step in modding Beth games which came with F4 sadly)

NOTE: There is a better tool (instead of Gibbed editor) that you can use now to edit BGSM files, which also prevents them showing errors in the future, so you can re-use and re-save the same files.

USE THIS INSTEAD OF GIBBED: Material editor by Ousnius

FO4Edit PreRelease Alpha by ElminsterAU - for putting your outfits into the game

Intel® Texture Works Plugin for Photoshop*- for editing dds files

NVIDIA Texture Tools for Adobe Photoshop - for editing dds files

Note: all images are linked to imgur so you could open them for larger resolution if you can't see whats going on.

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Tutorial

Step 1 - Extracting meshes and textures from Bethesda archive

1. Open B.A.E. Navigate to File -> Open File -> (Your fallout Data folder)

It should look something like this

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Click on Fallout 4 - Meshes.ba2. It will open the meshes tree. Un-tick everything and leave only Armor and Clothes.

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Click 'Extract' button at the bottom and navigate to Folder you want to place it in. I keep it on my desktop. You could also extract it into your F4 Data folder, but I would not recommend it as you may end up messing up the game files.

You need to extract the Armor and Clothes from bothTextures.ba2 and Materials.ba2 as well. Note: there is only one meshes archive and about 9 texture archives. Extract Armor and Clothing from all of them. You will need material files too, so don't forget to do it.

Step 2 - Preparing your armor pieces.

(I'm doing this for vanilla outfits first, the CBBE conversion will come later)

You've extracted your files, and lets say you already have an outfit in mind. You like jeans and t-shirt and you like Desdemona's vest, so you want to combine them. These two:

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Note: the next sequence can happen in order of your choice, I found it easier to start with editing textures, then combine the meshes, and then do the CBBE conversion. You pick whichever you find easier.

Find the meshes for these two outfits in the meshes folder you extracted with B.A.E., then open them in nifskope to see which textures they are using.

Desdemona's vest is here: Meshes\Clothes\Desdemona\FOutfit.nif

Shirt and pants are here:Meshes\Armor\HighschoolOutfit\FOutfit.nif

Click on mesh in nifskope and it will highlight something named 'BSSubIndexTriShape' in Name column with FOutift:0 in Value column. Open the tree to 'BSShaderTextureSet' and it will show the texture paths the mesh uses. Here:

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Also note the location of the bgsm file, you will need it later.

You will need all 3 maps, so navigate to the texture folder, copy all 3 maps and paste them to the folder you are planning to work from and link your mesh to. I save mine to Data/Texture/Arideya/(name of my outfit). Then open the _d map in PS or Gimp. I'm using PS so I'll explain with PS.

PS will ask you to load mip-maps as separate layers, click "No".

Now you need to edit the texture to erase pieces you don't need. For the shirt and jeans we need to erase… well… everything other than shirt and jeans :P

Original _d map

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And here is how it should look after you are done messing with it.

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Note I: you NEED to have transparent background and your map called 'Layer 0′ instead of 'Background', otherwise you will have your full outfit with white parts.

Note II: Be careful when erasing the pieces - cut too much and your clothes will have small transparent parts, cut too little and you will have pieces of texture floating around your SS.

After you are done, click File -> Save as…

If you have installed the new Intel® Texture Works Plugin for Photoshop* the default format to save the map will be 'Intel Texture works (DDS)'. Change it to 'D3D/DDS (*.DDS;*.DDS)' format. Rename and save the texture as 'DXT5 Interpolated alpha'.

Now we need to do several unpleasant and boring machinations for your cut off pieces of the texture to show up transparent instead of white.

You will have to do two things:

1. Edit the BGSM file to add alpha transparency and to link your mesh to the new texture,

NOTE: This part can now be 95% skipped if you use Material editor by Ousnius.

Instead of manually opening BGSM with text editor and manually renaming it, open it with Material editor instead, rename the texture paths into your own, and tick the box with Alpha property (or transparency, I don't remember how its called in the tool), save the BGSM in your own folder and you're done. You will also be able to re-use it later for other outfits/projects. You will still need to do Part 2 onwards.

2. Add alpha transparency to the mesh and link the mesh itself to the new texture.

I should note that I learned these steps from the invaluable tutorial by dragbody-Tutorial - Using Alpha Transparency to Create New Stuff. I would ask anyone who reads and uses this tutorial to go to the linked page and download and endorse dragbody's file. Without it my tutorial would have been impossible. Please do it.

First navigate to the BGSM file which our mesh uses - we have seen its location when looking for the texture paths in the nif file. For our pants+shirt mesh the location of BGSM is here: Materials\Armor\HighschoolOutfit\PrewarUnderarmor.BGSM

Copy this 'PrewarUnderarmor.BGSM' file and paste it somewhere. You will be editing it with gibbed editor, so you may as well paste it to your gibbed folder. Now pick your BGSM file and drag and drop it onto the 'Gibbed.Fallout4.ConvertMaterial.exe'. Like this:

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The Gibbed.Fallout4.ConvertMaterial.exe will then create the .json file which you can edit in notepad. Do not try editing the BGSM file itself. You can delete the original bgsm file - up to you.

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Open the json file with Notepad. You will need to edit these lines:

"sDiffuseTexture": "Armor/HighschoolOutfit/PrewarUnderArmor_d.dds",
"sNormalTexture": "Armor/HighschoolOutfit/PrewarUnderArmor_n.dds",
"sSmoothSpecTexture": "Armor/HighschoolOutfit/PrewarUnderArmor_s.dds",

Change them to the path of the folder you have placed your new edited textures in, this links them to your mesh.

And this:

"fAlphaTestRef": 128

To this:

"fAlphaTestRef": 128,
"bAlphaTest": true

This enables alpha transparency. Both edits in combination make your erased parts invisible.

Note: the  "bAlphaTest": true is case sensitive and if it is not the last line it needs to have a comma after it. Same if you are adding a line after  "fAlphaTestRef": 128 you need to add comma after it or your textures will not show up and your armor/clothing will be purple.

The end result of your .json should look something like this:

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Save the file.

The game can't read .json files, so you will have to rename the extension back to BGSM. Like this:

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It will ask you if you are sure you want to change file extension. Click "Yes"

Note: after you have renamed the extension to BGSM trying to revert it back to .json with Gibbed will cause it to crash, so keep edited version of your .json file as a backup in case you mess something up.

Cut and paste your new BGSM file somewhere you can link your mesh to. Again I put mine here for easy access: Data\materials\Arideya.

Note: If you prefer to keep the file in Materials folder then you need to rename it so it would not affect the normal ingame model. I usually place all my files in my own folder within materials without even renaming them. So my file path would be: Data/Materials/Arideya/PrewarUnderArmor.BGSM

Next step is adjusting the nif file.

Open nif and navigate to 'BSSubIndexTriShape' in Name column with FOutift:0 in Value column.

First you need to Add alpha transparency to it.

Right click BSSubIndexTriShape -> Block -> Insert

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Choose 'NiAlphaProperty'

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Note where it ends up and memorize the number assigned to it. Looks like in this case its 66.

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Now we need to move the AlphaProperty so it would correspond to our outfit, as right now it is just sort hanging there unassigned to anything.

Go to the 'BSSubIndexTriShape' for our FOutift:0 and look down into the Block Details. You will need to find BS properties, expand it and add our AlphaProperty number - 66 - in the correct line.

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After adding the AlphaProperty number the line will move under our outfit

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Note: Some outfits already have AlphaProperty assigned to them, like harness, so you don't have to do anything other than the next step.

Now go to the AlphaProperty which is sitting under our TriShape and in Block Details below find 2 values - Flags and Threshold

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Replace them with 4844 and 128 respectively, like this:

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We assigned alpha property now we need to assign correct BGSM file and correct textures. Our BGSM file is the one we made several steps above. So in our nif go to the TriShape and go to the line 'BSLightingShaderProperty'. You will notice the the name of the file and the path to the BGSM file it uses.

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Right click on the one in block details -> Edit String Index ->

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And change it to the path and the name of the BGSM file we did a while ago.

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Click "OK"

Last step with nif - change all the texture paths too. It is required otherwise your textures will turn up purple.

Expand the 'BSLightingShaderProperty' and click on 'BSShaderTextureSet' - you will see the textures it uses.

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Change them to the location of your new textures.

Note: You do not need to change all three maps if you aren't going to mess with normal (_n) and spec (_s) maps, only change the location of the diffuse (_d) map. BUT your texture paths in nif have to correspond to texture paths in BGSM file. So in our case we will be changing all three since we changed them in BGSM too.

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Save the nif and close it.

If you did everything right and placed all files in the correct folders your resulting mesh should look like this:

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Obviously this isn't a very clean job since I seemed to have erased pieces from the shirt as well.

Problem is you will have to do the above steps for every single piece of clothing from every outfit you want to combine - all the texture, NIF and BGSM edits.

So for our case do the same thing for Desdemona's clothing.

Diffuse map for the vest and boots

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Outfit

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Step 3 - combining the pieces

The most interesting part :)

Open Bodyslide, its located in your Data/tools directory

and then open Outfit Studio (bottom right corner)

This next part really depends on your preference. I usually open one nif and then add on pieces.

Go to File -> Load Outfit

Click Browse and find your base mesh - the one you want to start adding parts to. I pick my shirt and pants.

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Notice Outfit 0 and Base Body. The outfit mesh is the one you will be editing (if required) and the body mesh is something you will need later for CBBE conversion.

Add on the other mesh with Desdemona's vest.

Again File -> Load outfit

But this time tick the "Keep other shapes" square, or you'll lose your base outfit.

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After you load it will look like this:

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Notice it loads the whole mesh with the body, also notice the clipping. Remove whichever body causes more clipping. Simply Right click on the name of the second body mesh and then 'Delete Shape'. You could also just press Del.

Now you need to adjust the clothing mesh a bit. You can do that with brushes above the mesh.

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Brushes:

1. Selects meshes? No idea, never used it myself. You could safely ignore it I think.

2. Marks the vertices you don't want adjusted - useful, but be careful with it as you may end up with a creepy mesh if you select too large spaces, there is little way to go back.

3. Inflation - increases mesh volume, best used alone or with #2 in case you don't want the whole area to increase. Also be careful or the mesh will look bumpy.

4. Deflation - same as #3 but decreases the mesh volume

5. Moves the vertices - also useful, may prevent you from ending with bumps.

6. Smoothens the mesh areas - useful in case you Inflate too much and end up with jagged edges, be careful as it somewhat deflates the area as well.

7. Mirrors edits across X axis - as in you want to Inflate the right boob, it will Inflate the left one as well

8. Only edits the vertices within the area of the brush - as in you inflate the right boob, the left one will stay untouched. Thats the one I always use.

You could also Click on "Brush" and edit with Brush size and strength - in case you don't want too large areas to be changed or vice versa, and if you want stronger or lesser edits. If you have selected vertices which you don't want to be touched with Brush #2, then you can also use "Clear Mask" within Brush settings.

Okay so now edit the vest mesh to remove the clipping.

You can edit as many meshes as you want, just make sure the mesh you want to edit is selected in the right "Meshes" window.

You could rotate, move and zoom it:

Rotate mouse wheel - zoom in and out

Click and hold mouse wheel - move the mesh within the window

Hold right mouse button - rotates the mesh

Hold left mouse button - edit the mesh itself

So after our small edits it will look like this:

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It looks okay, so now time to save it and test it in game.

Go to File -> Export -> Export NIF

Name and save your NIF somewhere in your game folder. Now you can't test it if its a new outfit so you could as well replace something that is within the game with this NIF and test it. Then simply place the NIF in your own folder. I saved mine in Data/Meshes/Arideya/Final Outift.nif

Check how your character moves and whether there is any clipping, memorize the spots and edit them int Outfit Studio.

Advice: You could also erase some parts of the textures so that it would be invisible under other clothing. For example for our Shirt+Pants texture large parts of the shirt can actually be erased so it would not clip through the vest and so that you would not have to edit the vest too much. Actually, the more you mess up the mesh with Deflate/Inflate brushes the weirder it looks in game. To avoid that erase the parts of the clothing that are hidden underneath other clothing.

What is export NIF with Reference? - It is required if you have a body/clothes set up as a Reference shape. The Outfit Studio will export the Nif with the shape that was set as reference, if only "Export NIF" is clicked, then the Reference shape will not be exported. So say you have the body mesh which is set as a Reference, and you want to export the NIF. If you export Nif only in game you will only see clothes, and your body will be invisible. You will need it for CBBE conversion.

Step 4 - CBBE conversion

In Outfit Studio click File -> New Project.

And in the appeared window next to "From Template" find "Convert Vanilla to CBBE" line.

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Click Next, and in the window name your outfit, then in the OutFit/Mesh line pick "Browse" and navigate to your newly made NIF file, load it in.

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You will notice that in the right window the Outfit Studio has added a CBBE body and marked it green. Green color is basically your Reference shape.

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Note: the sliders in the bottom right window should not be here, pls ignore them as they only appear later.

Delete your BaseFemaleBodyFitted_0 - its vanilla and we no longer need it.

Rotate your outfit and you will notice more clipping - usually body through the clothes.

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Note: the sliders in the bottom right window should not be here, pls ignore them as they only appear later.

Remove it with your brushes.

After you have cleaned up the outfit in the right window Shift+select your two outfit meshes, then go to Slider -> Conform to sliders, or click CTRL+C.

Find the pencil button with VanillatoCBBE slider (currently its at 0%)

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Click on it, you will see that your shape changes from Vanilla to this:

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If you see any more clipping - fix it once again, but it looks okay in our case.

After everything is fixed, with Slider VanillatoCBBE at 100% go to Slider -> Set Base shape. A body will be loaded and it will clip through the outfit - don't worry.

Go to File -> Load Reference, and load CBBE body. Your outfit will got back to CBBE but you will see a bunch of sliders appear where VanillatoCBBE slider used to be.

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Shift+Select your two outfit meshes, then again go to Slider -> Conform to Sliders, Slider -> Conform all. Or CTRL+C, CTRL+Shift+C respectively.

Now if you are doing it for yourself you may skip this, unless you either are planning to release this or prefer a… ahem… busty body shape. You will have to make sure the outfits work with every slider that could be big, so boobs, butts, thigs, and everything else. Click on the pencils next to the sliders in the bottom right window to set them to 100% and fix any clipping that occurs.

Then you need to save your outfit.

You can do it in 2 ways:

1. Just File -> Export NIF with Reference - this will just export the NIF file for you so you can use it in game, or

2. File -> Save Project As - this actually saves it as an .osp project which can then be used with BodySlider to fit it to either any of the CBBE shapes or any custom shape.

Note: The Save Project As.. will just save it as a project, you will have to build the NIF in the BodySlide itself depending on the shape you use.

Export NIF we did, so lets try Save Project As…

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1. Name your project.

2. Click "To Project"

3. Rename the file output path if needed

So in the end it will look like this

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Just click "Save"

The last step would be for you to go to BodySlide, find your project in the Outift/Body line and build it with the Preset of your choice.

And voila, you're done :)

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FAQ:

Q: How do I put it in game as stand-alone?

A: I recommend the following awesome tutorial by Elianora: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ze9icEJpQ2M

Its the one I used for my outfits. Its great, explains everything and very easy to follow.

Q: If I use a custom body such as Hardbody how do I use it in CBBE conversion?

A: You need to load it as a Reference shape during the appropriate step. When you click File -> Load Reference, instead of CBBE body that is offered, find "From File" and go to "Browse", then navigate to the NIF file where your custom Hardbody is. Then do the next steps as described.

Q: If I want to release my outfits I will need first person hand mesh as well.

A: Its basically the same thing as your full outfit mashup minus the CBBE conversion. For vanilla outfits you could use their vanilla first person mesh from your original outfit, then change the texture paths appropriately. If you are doing the CBBE conversion, your will have to replace the vanilla First person hands with the ones from CBBE. Ah, load your first person hands in Outfit Studio and add on parts to them. Then Export the NIF to the the appropriate folder.

Q: If I want to recolor it?

A: Well what's stopping you :)

Both spec and normal maps answer for the surface/pattern of the texture, the diffuse answers for the color. If you, say, want to convert Jumpsuit into a Jeans-suit you will have to add a jeans pattern to both spec and normal maps, you don't even have to edit the diffuse with it.

Q: How do I save the normal and spec maps after I'm done?

A: Better to do it with Intel texture works - it just makes messing with them much easier. Save both of them as follows:

Texture type: Normal map (spec map is saved as normal map texture type too)

Compression Type: BC5 8bpp (Linear, 2 Channel tangent….)

Mip-maps: Auto-Generate

Q: If I still have questions can I ask you?

A: Sure :)

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CREDITS:

• @guidethisonekalahira for being a great friend <3
  
• Dragbody for the tutorial on alpha transparency
• Elianora for the tutorial on putting the items into the game
• jonwd7 for B.A.E. and nifskope
• Ousnius and Caliente for the Outfit studio
• Gibbed for F4 gibbed tools
• ElminsterAU for the FO4Edit
• Bethesda for the great game

Fallout 4 How to Put a Made Outfit Into Game From Outfit Studio

Source: https://arideya.tumblr.com/post/139307195693/arideyas-guide-to-modding-fo4-outfits

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