Yiffy Age of Skyrim

[Bad Dog]

Growf. Don't talk to me.

 

I spent most of the day with your khajiit feet. I got them rigged out with a lower-poly version that works in game, but as usual I'm having trouble with the digitigrade thing. I tried to reproduce what I did with the shark feet so I wouldn't have to deform them down into planti position, and got feet that look like they went through a blender. I tried smooshing them down and it's kinda sorta okay but the stretch looks bad with the spots and the toe angle isn't good. So I have to figure out which broken method I should try to fix. 

 

Upside is, a shitload of the basic work is done. I spent way longer than I should have on things like getting rid of interior faces between the toes and making sure the toes don't overlap, but I've found it's better to get all that right because it will bite you later. I have the head and body textures finished. Upside also is the basic mesh looks good. 

 

How many verts is too many? I'm at 4000 now, which is a little more than the UNP feet.

 

I sorta forget where I left off with the shark feet. Probably what I should do is go back there and figure out what I did that was working, and I can pack up what I have at the same time.

 

For schedule, dunno. The guy has another week if the feet don't totally block me. The girl should only take another week once I have the guy working. I could do the female head first if you're waiting on it--except, I forgot, I ended up using the vanilla UV layout. It's not really a vanilla UV layout because vanilla textures look terrible on the head so you have to make them special anyway, but I never was able to make a working nif of that head. So you can go ahead and assume the vanilla UV if you like.

[NightroModzz]

If you want unless your smushing them in Nifscope, sned me the model before you started smushing it down and the model you did smush down so I can understand the position you want. But again, send them separately in an obj format so they are not fused together. Or I can touch up the one you did. Smushing them from the start might be easier for me. If I can do it in Zbrush, it should be a lot easier than morphing heads.

 

So long as it's something that's doable and simple in Zbrush like changing the shape of a foot, I think it's safe to assume that you can make these requests of me. Plus I should be able to multiply the polycount in specific areas if they are too low, but not sure if I could do the reverse.

 

As for verts/hitpoints, are you decimating the claws separately if you used the file with separated claws? They don't need as much as human nails. The active points/verts on the uunp feet is 10,416 and the polycount is 19,124. so you should be fine and you can increase it if you want.

 

"Growf. Don't talk to me." (???) Someones uuhhh... cranky?

 

EDIT:

As for the head or the Sharkmer feet first, whichever you think you can do faster. The total work for you would be the same, but it would be better if the overall work can get started on earlier rather than later.

[Bad Dog]

Cranky at Skyrim skeletons, not at you.

 

I can send you feet in the planti position, but then there's no guarantee they'll stretch out well. I was hoping that weighting them in the digi position and compressing down would lead to reasonable stretching out--I think that's what I did for the original feet--but these are being ornery.

 

I've gotta hammer on the feet a bit more because they're annoying me. But I'll fire off the shark feet in the next few days.

[NightroModzz]

For the foot your having trouble with, if it's a low poly, I should not have trouble bending it down unless the poly is too low near the bend that it would create too much streatching. But you have a bit more than double the room to increase the poly count from 4000. I can also mask and move certain layers one at a time.

 

If it's the really high poly version, I might have trouble smoothing it after moving it, but can fix that by rigging it in Zbrush and forcing it to bend Nicely a certain way and touch up anything after. I can prevent any mess ups on the toes by masking them so they stay in position. But send me the low poly digi version before you smooshed it down too, not just the plantigrade one.

[Bad Dog]

Okay, I'll send you the mesh when I'm satisfied with the positioning. Just tried using the shark as a model and it's close but not quite because that skeleton put the feet in a different position. I'm going to see if I can get a skeleton with the bones where they should be.

[27X]

 

 

too many

 

64K.

[NightroModzz]

 

too many

64K.

64-67k is the total polycount limit for all body parts together, not vertices or hitpoints as it is called in Zbrush which is usually lower or half of what the polycount is. We're just talking about one body part. It's fine so long as the feet ​alone stays around the UUNP feet equivalent (which is really high compared to it's other body parts because of the unnecessarily high poly count for the toe nails.) which is a ploycount of 19,124 / 19K and vertices/hitpoints of 10,416 / 10.4K. 64K is way too much for a single body part or you just weren't descriptive in your post.

 

 

I'm going to see if I can get a skeleton with the bones where they should be.

You mean to fix the mesh somehow or are you using the feet mesh from my "Khajiit Body Overhaul" file (a more correct position, AKA "bones where they should be" or close)?

[Bad Dog]

Tell you what. ASAP I'll send you my low-poly version that matches your version and the plantigrade foot as OBJs and let you have at making a planti foot. Then I'll see if I can make that option work in game.

 

Meanwhile I'll keep working on fitting the digi foot to the digi skeleton. 

 

Here's the issue: The body part has to be rigged to bones in the nif file, and the bones have to be in the right position relative to the body part. When it's loaded into the game, the bones are moved into the position defined by the skeleton, dragging the mesh along with. In vanilla, bones in the foot nif match the position of bones in the skeleton and all is good. The digi skeleton changes the positions of the bones and all is still good. But that means the foot mesh has to be in vanilla (planti) position so it can be warped into digi position by the skeleton.

 

If I want to rig a digi foot directly, I have to have a nif with the bones in exactly the positions and orientations of the skeleton. That's a royal pain to generate because the bones in the foot mesh are positioned absolutely, whereas the bones in the skeleton are relative to the bone above them. It's possible to derive the absolute position, but it's a bunch of trigonometry and I haven't worked it out yet. And maybe that's not how it works at all, since I have no idea what the fuck I'm doing.

 

What I (think) I did with the shark foot was import the digi skeleton--but the import tools lose the whole bone hierarchy-- then pose the vanilla skeleton to match the digi position as exactly as possible, then get rid of the extra bones, then export that. That's what I'll try with these feet. (I did try it and got scrambled feet but I think I did the posing wrong.)

 

Trouble is it's got to be exact or there's an ankle seam. Also too the goddamn Skyrim normals use object space and the shin will be oriented differently on the body than on the foot, so the colors won't match. If all the tools work exactly correctly that won't matter and the result will be seamless, but I don't have much faith in that. Also it will be hard to get the texture to be continuous across the seam--either by working from a high poly model on both sides, by making the MSN texture really simple at the seam, or by converting to tangent space normals and back again. All those options are doable but every one is full of snakes.

 

TMI as usual, I know. 

 

I'm using the foot mesh you posted a month or two back. The skeleton position is the one in the photos upthread.

[27X]

64K is the limit per NiTriShape, the amount of NiTriShapes hasn't been hit in gamebryo, mostly because main bodies (sans feet, hands, head, and tails) tend to be made from perhaps three or four max, so your vertex count would about half of that for single part or a quarter for paired objects with mirrored rigs or symmetry.

 

12-16K verts tends to produce absolute round for bodies without antialiasing, obviously less would be needed for most smaller things

 

 

 

 

 

There are Daz based custom bodies sectioned off to a greater degree that the Skyrim/Fallout engine does support and have been successfully converted, but that's outside the purview of what you guys are doing.

 

 

 

tangent space versus world space

 

World space normalmap simply encodes a normal direction. The object space normalmap encodes the direction of the normal relative to the faces of your geometry/UV, which is why you bake normalmaps in combination with a low poly surface in the normal workflow.

 

Quixel actually makes the only decent cross converter I've ever used in this regard, but you have to pay for it, and it's still not perfect by any stretch, and the payment is now on a subscription basis, when it used to be a one time thing.  

[Blaze69]

[...] Quixel actually makes the only decent cross converter I've ever used in this regard, but you have to pay for it, and it's still not perfect by any stretch, and the payment is now on a subscription basis, when it used to be a one time thing.  

Well, I haven't tried Quixel, but so far I'm pretty happy with XNormal, both for actual baking and tangent-to-object/object-to-tangent conversion. I didn't notice any quality loss or anything like that on the end result.

 

I would bake the normals in object space straight away, but I have yet to find out which are the coordinate settings to use with OBJs exported out of NifSkope that generate Skyrim's own layout. I guess I'll stick to baking as tangent and coverting to object for now; so far, it's worked.

[27X]

I'll have to check out XNormal, I bought the Quixel suite back when it was just NDO/DDO so I don't have to subscribe, but they've done stuff since then that you have to subscribe to get access to, which is dubious at best.

[Bad Dog]

XNormal is what I use when I'm creating the normals in photoshop.

 

I can bake model-space normals directly in Blender, but there are some quirks. As I recall: invert normals in blender--bake--swap blue and green in resulting image--invert red channel.

[NightroModzz]

@Bad Dog

 

You seem to have only given me one foot for the low poly so I'm guessing that you expect me to mirror and weld. Anyways, something must have went wrong during your decimation process. The is an open gap/missing poly in between one of the toes.

 

 

 

 

Also, the poly count is incredibly low. only 1.5K vs the UUNP 19.1k, and the vertex count is 0.98k vs the 10.4k. That very low poly count might be the reason why that poly gap is there. I also needed to also have the plantigrade version, messed up or not. I just need it to copy the position so it fits the way you need it too. I'll give a crack at making a new low poly that has the appearance of an even square layout and reposition the claws to the center as a separate mesh. They can still be merged after on both high and low poly.

[Bad Dog]

Yes, that's right on the mirroring. I always only work on one side and then mirror as part of the process of producing the nif.

 

There were a bunch of artifacts I had to clean up after making the low poly version (Blender shrink wrap modifier, yadda yadda). That looks like over-zealous cleaning up. Won't matter in game, but it's good to fix.

 

As for poly count... this is in the range I see in game. Okay, the feet I was looking at were the old UNP feet. I guess the UUNP feet are really 19K. But is that really necessary? outside of, say, the heel area? Anyway, make what you're happy with. 

 

Plantigrade feet on the way.

[NightroModzz]

Lol, well some people don't play on a laptop. Sorry, I'm just a bit of a perfectionist. BTW, it's a very good learning experience for me and going to need it anyways. It's taking a while but I've been doing some experiments and getting some good results. The way it is now it looks good, but the poly count would match that of the UUNP when going for even tri formed quads. I'm trying to shoot a good deal lower than that.

 

I've been learning some tricks like using poly groups to specific edited higher or lower poly areas, creasing to define edges, as well as some edge loop features like lowering poly count in certain areas, and one that lets me make the paw pads really pop by adding layers around it. Also only dividing in an inverted mask. Well anyways, my goal is professional results so hears hoping I can pull it off soon.

[boo]

Higher poly counts make for better deformation and its not much of a performance hit.

[Blaze69]

Higher poly counts make for better deformation and its not much of a performance hit.

Totally agreed. Extremely hi-poly meshes (nearing the hardcoded limit) do have a performance impact and could cause things like spare-milisecond stutters when being loaded into the game, but that's it.

 

If your game CTDs or becomes unstable when you load such a mesh, that means your game was already right on the verge of crashing anyway. Provided the mesh is not broken or corrupted or something like that, of course.

 

The UUNP feet have (according to NifSkope) 7158 vertices and 13428 tris for the main feet mesh, plus 3258 vertices and 5696 tris for the nails (lol). And it works just fine; even the nif size is low (around 800KB). So we could have paw meshes with that same amount of vertices and tris, and there wouldn't be any problem, even if we go higher.

[NightroModzz]

Higher poly counts make for better deformation and its not much of a performance hit.

 

 

 

Higher poly counts make for better deformation and its not much of a performance hit.

Totally agreed. Extremely hi-poly meshes (nearing the hardcoded limit) do have a performance impact and could cause things like spare-milisecond stutters when being loaded into the game, but that's it.

 

If your game CTDs or becomes unstable when you load such a mesh, that means your game was already right on the verge of crashing anyway. Provided the mesh is not broken or corrupted or something like that, of course.

 

The UUNP feet have (according to NifSkope) 7158 vertices and 13428 tris for the main feet mesh, plus 3258 vertices and 5696 tris for the nails (lol). And it works just fine; even the nif size is low (around 800KB). So we could have paw meshes with that same amount of vertices and tris, and there wouldn't be any problem, even if we go higher.

 

 

Okay. But what I failed to mention is that it was at 19K without the claws at the moment. I want to see what the lowest I can make it is while preserving the most detail and I am keeping the plantigrade deformation in mind. It's also good practice for any future low poly models I make for UE4, and the final "Khajiit Body Overhaul" model.

[Blaze69]

Okay. But what I failed to mention is that it was at 19K without the claws at the moment. I want to see what the lowest I can make it is while preserving the most detail and I am keeping the plantigrade deformation in mind. It's also good practice for any future low poly models I make for UE4, and the final "Khajiit Body Overhaul" model.

Oh, yeah, of course. You are right, hi-poly is good, but there is no need to reach the actual limit or a very high polycount if we can achieve a similar result with a lower (bit still higher than vanilla/average) poly/vertex count.

[S_Apples]

Hey im in need of help installing this [im an idiot] so I have everything else installed but when I activate the yiffy age consolidated the game crashed, when its deactivated everything works fine, im super confused atm what happens the game starts then when it reaches the tittle screen it crashes

[Blaze69]

Hey im in need of help installing this [im an idiot] so I have everything else installed but when I activate the yiffy age consolidated the game crashed, when its deactivated everything works fine, im super confused atm what happens the game starts then when it reaches the tittle screen it crashes

Crash before the menu loads means a master file is missing. Looking at the pic you posted, seems like you forgot to install USLEEP, and as far as I know it's a master for the main YA plugin (though I could be wrong). Try installing and activating it and see if it fixes the missing master CTD.

 

But then again, I can't provide much help because I don't use NMM nor I intend to do so, so if any of your problems is due to wrong install order or some other thing coming from NMM, you would have to wait for someone else to help you. 

[S_Apples]

 

Hey im in need of help installing this [im an idiot] so I have everything else installed but when I activate the yiffy age consolidated the game crashed, when its deactivated everything works fine, im super confused atm what happens the game starts then when it reaches the tittle screen it crashes

Crash before the menu loads means a master file is missing. Looking at the pic you posted, seems like you forgot to install USLEEP, and as far as I know it's a master for the main YA plugin (though I could be wrong). Try installing and activating it and see if it fixes the missing master CTD.

 

But then again, I can't provide much help because I don't use NMM nor I intend to do so, so if any of your problems is due to wrong install order or some other thing coming from NMM, you would have to wait for someone else to help you. 

 

 

Nevermind! I got the Skyrim Mod Organizer and it showed my problem, ty for the help!

 

[NightroModzz]

Finished the low poly digi feet. I think it's good. well, for a first time on a UUNP level comparison. I could do a better one, but made the mistake of not making all the poly groups before re-meshing to a lower poly duplicate of the high poly mesh and trying to fix the gap between the toes a bit on the low poly since the high poly one is a bit messed up. Should have fixed it on the high poly first.

 

It's at 15.5K poly and 7k vertices without the claws. The claws will likely add another thousand or two. I could make it look just as good with half the polycount or better, but it wouldn't have the quad look which I heard is better for animations and see on all other tri body part meshes. I could try to make another later before a plantigrade deformation, but go ahead and check it out.

 

 
https://gyazo.com/cf1e2f1649f4a0cf4d07f3e7104e499a

 

DigiKhajiitFeet.rar

[S_Apples]

I sorta have another problem now, Ive gotten everything working Its just that the SOS MCM Menu wont show up but everything else will, Ive tried using the [setstage SKI_ConfigManagerInstance 1] command but that doesn't do anything, im super confused right now, please help?

[NightroModzz]

I sorta have another problem now, Ive gotten everything working Its just that the SOS MCM Menu wont show up but everything else will, Ive tried using the [setstage SKI_ConfigManagerInstance 1] command but that doesn't do anything, im super confused right now, please help?

You have a bunch of unmanaged mods. That means they are directly in your data folder and SOS is one of them I think. Have all your unofficial patche mods above all your other mods accept for SKSE like "SOS" and "Wet&Cold," etc. Do a clean install of your game and make sure to delete the data folder before reinstalling just in case those mods are still in there. Also, install "Loot" if you haven't.

 

I can't help you with anything directly with the mod because I don't use it myself. You might want to also consider getting rid of "Floppy SOS" too. It's a crash whore.