Dwarven Cyborg Collection & -Biological Automaton Framework-

[KazeNoAkuma]

I just want to say thank you for this mod. Especially the port of the Edhildil Dwemer Cyborg Armor. I tried fiddling around with it in Blender before by trying to take a UUNP body from Outfit Studio and manually erasing nodes to get an amputee look, but got nowhere before giving up. I hope to see your progress!

[AVS]

Hey, look at that, an update.

 

Took longer than I intended it to because of course it did, but also because I kinda got sidetracked a few times. Then again, pretty much everything here except for the fix on the head base plates is a sidetrack from my earlier plans. I don't have a roadmap, here. I've got a series of rabbit holes. 

 

Speaking of the base plates, a bit of an explanation. My first thought after I realized the problem assigning them to slot 31 had caused was to change them to slot 45, the 'collar' slot used by TAWOBA, Zaz, and DD. It seemed like the sensible choice, since the plate tends to clip pretty badly with most of the collar meshes and you don't really need a collar around a neck that isn't there anymore, but I was kind of leery about the idea due to there being mods out there that auto-apply collars to characters. The idea of a character's head popping back into existence because some mod's collar kicked my cyborg head out was kind of annoying. So I took another look at the slot list and exactly which ones got used by what, and settled on 44, the 'mod mouth' slot. It's still associated with the head, which was something I was trying to keep to, and the only notable things that seem to use it are the gags from Zaz and DD, which aren't exactly compatible with my heads anyway. I'm sure there's still mods out there that auto-apply gags, but at the very least they're not ones that I use. So this'll do for now.

 

Of course, what I really should do is set the base plate to slot 30 and change the rest of the head's meshes to slot 31, but that would be an ohsweetfuckno level of work at this point, so screw that. 

[Loki15kun]

Lovely update.

Thanks.

[dorkulon]

For v2.1, looks like the heads got uploaded twice and the bikini not at all?

[AVS]

For v2.1, looks like the heads got uploaded twice and the bikini not at all?

 

 

The Bikini set is completely unchanged from v2.0, so there's no need to update it. The double heads was a pure whoopsie, though. I'm gonna go ahead and strip it out, as well as the obsolete files. Thanks.

[AVS]

Spooky update! Getting a bit of blood and gore in, cyborgs ain't always gonna be made from the cleanest and freshest source material after all. 

 

Getting the neck stump to work was actually a *lot* easier than I expected it to be. Didn't even have any trouble getting the beast race version going. Although the Khajit's larger stump did restrict me to just doing the skulls with it. The Gyros and Lexicons just straight-up don't fit on there. 

 

The wounds I'm still not happy with. Sourced this attempt from Edhildil's conversion, which is a bit more usable, but it's still not really up to my standards. I'd rather have 'not great' than 'nothing', though. 

 

Most of the outfit conversions were really quick and dirty. As long as the outfit doesn't alter the base body shape in any way, it really is just a simple matter of changing the slot assignment (and then the more tedious matter of making an entry for it in the CK). The Goma Merchant Clothes required a bit more work, as they did alter the base shape a little, but they work so damn well with the Gynoid body that I didn't begrudge the effort. 

 

The LostDayWalker leather suits were significantly more involved, however, as they required me to first convert them from the older version of UNPB that they were built on, that both loads into Outfit Studio out of sync with the reference body and isn't really the same shape as OS's UNPB even when you get things repositioned. I like the design of these enough that I don't mind, but don't go asking for much of anything else from those sets. 

 

As usual, no promises on when I'll get further updates done. Even less so than usual, honestly, since I've been taking a bit of a break to play games besides Skyrim. Was starting to get a bit burnt out again, there. 

[Narakesh]

Thanks for the update dude! This is my favourite mod from LL. Take your time with the updates, they're always worth the wait. 

[terrorofmorrowind]

All great and awesome work (like i said way at the start) but is there a way to convert most of these to another bodytype like COS? Since it is based on UUNP and some parts come with a bodyslide option i guess it should be possible right?

[thomas00126]

man a quest mod for all this stuff would be awsome

[AVS]

Now that the site seems to be somewhat stabilized, a status update and request for help with one of the things I've been working on. 

 

First, some backstory. Remember some time back when I mentioned the possibility of 'salvaging' heads from cyborg victims? I did some experiments with that, but getting decent results was a pretty involved process, so I ended up getting distracted by other, easier things. Then I started a new game focused more intently on playtesting these cyborg parts, and ran into this iteration of Lydia.

 

Now, I've been ignoring poor Lydia for months. One of my earlier attempts at a mod was a simple hair swap for her, which worked pretty well... Until I did a complete reinstall of Skyrim back at the beginning of this year. I tried carrying that mod over, but not only did it all of a sudden not work, it also left her with a persistent grey face bug. None of the obvious solutions- running a new FaceGen and all that- fixed it, and I didn't care enough to try harder, so I've mostly just been sticking her in full-face armor mods since. Sevennity's Bombshell, some of the BDO armors, whatever, as long as I could cover her shame before leaving her shuffled off somewhere. When I ran into her in this game she was a bit more interesting for various reasons, and I had the Gynoid head handy to cover up her problems. I was happy with that for a while. 

 

But then I remembered those earlier experiments and decided that I could do better for her. 

 

The process was... Pretty involved. Exporting the head mesh via FaceGen was easy enough. Re-importing it into Racemenu to give it high-res makeup wasn't too bad. Figuring out why that makeup wouldn't show up in-game took a while- apparently it doesn't like the SKSE directory path Racemenu gives the tintmask. Getting it into the game at all was a pain, as the Creation Kit seems to be weirded out by changing heads into armor in general and the shaved hair meshes in particular. Had to bootstrap it in with renamed meshes to keep the CK from crashing. And then I had to teach myself how to convert it to a ground object, hijack some havok data for it, find out the hard way that you need to remember to remove all the skin and partition data to get it to render stably, so on and so forth, all so I could get a proper 'detachable head' into the game. And it almost works. 

 

There's two problems, and they're both issues with the textures, where I have even less of a clue of what I'm doing than usual. First, there's the face tint. While it shows up fine on the on-body head, rendering properly regardless of who you stick it on, it completely refuses to show up on the ground model. I've tried messing with various texture settings with no positive effect. At this point I'm not even sure it's possible to get it to work, which would be annoying.

 

The second problem is with the eyelashes. I replaced her existing eyes with the meshes from the Gynoid head, but they felt kind of wrong without eyelashes. (Especially since the Mature Skin texture that I'm using has some vestigial eyelashes painted onto it that are annoyingly visible with the regular eyelashes removed.) So I figured out the best way to cut the eyelashes out of the eye meshes that came along with the facegen and stuck them on there. And they look great! ...When they work. They persistently flicker out of existence or flash over to blocks of misrendered texture. The effects seem to be worse when NPCs are wearing the head, and the complete worst on the ground model which gets the chunky textures about 90% of the time. So obviously that's unacceptable. Messing around with some of the texture settings helped a little- it was even worse when they were left as 'eye environment maps'- as did changing the alpha flag and threshold, but I've yet to find something that makes it render properly full-time. 

 

So if anyone could give me any hints with those problems, it would be awesome.

 

I'd also appreciate it if people could try out the head, which I've packaged into a simple test .esp and attached below, and let me know how it works, aside from those problems. Particularly people who aren't using Mature Skin, so I can know that the concept is properly transferable. Everything except the face tint is just using default texture paths, so it *should* be, but it's nice to have confirmation. The head itself takes up only slot 30, and should be capable of wearing any hoods, helmets, circlets, etc that don't touch that slot. It has full normal head and spine movement, but the process of converting it to an armor piece did leave it without facial animations. So no blinking, no lip-syncing, no ball gags. But that just increases the cyborg mystique.   

 

I've still got some other stuff in the pipeline, including something that was given a kick-start by this project and that I'm inordinately happy with, despite being a pretty minor thing. I've also figured out what I was doing wrong with the Gynoid hairs vis-a-vis the slot 41 'long hair' meshes, and will have a fix out for those when I've got a couple more things together. I've also got another side project (that you can just barely see some of the fruits of in these screenshots) which I've unfortunately stalled out on. If anyone can tell me how to get the damned nipple size slider in Outfit Studio to actually reflect the output in Bodyslide and the game, that would be fucking great.

 

Edit: Got rid of mis-pathed version. Use this instead.  DCC - Subject L-D14 Head Test Fix.rar

 

 

Edited November 16, 2017 by AVS

[KazeNoAkuma]

Spoiler

 

I tried the head with Demoniac Fair Mature Skin and this was the result. 

[AVS]

5 hours ago, KazeNoAkuma said:

  Hide contents

 

I tried the head with Demoniac Fair Mature Skin and this was the result. 

 

Well, that's no good.

 

It looks like the tintmask isn't getting applied properly, for some reason. The mesh should be pointed at the mod's folder path for the tintmask, so it shouldn't be looking for it elsewhere... Oooooh, shit, I see what happened. The copy I uploaded still has the wearable head's tintmask path set to my testing folder. I must've changed the one in there by mistake. Here's a fixed version:

 

DCC - Subject L-D14 Head Test Fix.rar

 

Also, it occurs to me that I have no idea what might happen if someone who hasn't enabled high resolution facepaints in SKSE tries to use this. Don't know how much of a problem that would really be at this point, given how that's practically a standard adjustment, but it's something to look out for.

[Goose2]

Nice mod dude. The modularity of your mod makes it really aweseome to mix and match. I prefer playing male characters but i'll patiently wait for your updates. Would be really awesome to make a cyborg fighter, etc. Works without problems btw.

[COLOCO]

need npc remplacement for original dwarven npc..

[KazeNoAkuma]

Tried the fix out. Works much better.

 

 

Spoiler

 

[COLOCO]

SRY MISTAKE

Edited November 18, 2017 by COLOCO

[sabius]

On 1/10/2017 at 12:45 PM, AVS said:

 

Although I was pleased to discover that it won't be quite as bad for the Gynoid body, when I get that done. The full-joint cuts on that do limit the usability of clothing that sits too low on the hips, but its use of reasonably human-shaped limbs means that it can use a surprising number of existing boots and gloves with no problem at all, right out of the box. 

 

You sir, are correct. What boots are those by the way?

[AVS]

On 11/17/2017 at 7:34 PM, KazeNoAkuma said:

Tried the fix out. Works much better.

 

 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

 

Neat! Nice to see that the makeup masks are working, but the skintone itself seems like it's still coming out kinda dark. It's supposed to be pretty pale, setting 1 or 2 IIRC. Not sure what would be making it darker here.

 

The reused head thing in general has turned into a bit of a morass, I'm afraid. I've been trying a few different things, but there's so many texture setting changes you have to make to get things working halfway right in the game, with a truly depressing amount of 'Well, it worked in Outfit Studio' and strangely inconsistent results in the process. The same setting tweaks applied to heads generated by the Creation Kit and those generated using RaceMenu's mesh exporter have completely different in-game results, for instance. No idea what's going on there, and I've blown weeks trying to figure it out. 

 

So I'm afraid I won't have anything more from this line of experimentation ready any time soon. But I have also been working on some other stuff, including some major improvements for the current head sets, some rather fun stuff using a new source of parts, and that one other thing I've been wanting to do with the Edhildil set for months that I've finally figured out how to get working. Still got a bit more cleanup and testing to do, but I should hopefully get an update (and the long overdue Gynoid hair fix) out within the next week or two. 
 

[AVS]

On 12/5/2017 at 12:52 AM, sabius said:

You sir, are correct. What boots are those by the way?

 

They're from the 'Sweet Dress' outfit, with the black leather from the retexture pack here: http://wtfuun.tumblr.com/post/156491120135/sweet-dress-uunp-hdt-main-mod-required-checkout

 

While I'm not particularly fond of the dress itself (I'm by no means a lore purist, but stuff that's too far out of the game's context can kinda irk me), those boots are one of the nicest pairs I've come across, particularly for rogue-type characters. And they cut off at exactly the right point for the Gynoid knee joint, which is a nice bonus. 

[Narakesh]

22 hours ago, AVS said:

 

Neat! Nice to see that the makeup masks are working, but the skintone itself seems like it's still coming out kinda dark. It's supposed to be pretty pale, setting 1 or 2 IIRC. Not sure what would be making it darker here.

 

The reused head thing in general has turned into a bit of a morass, I'm afraid. I've been trying a few different things, but there's so many texture setting changes you have to make to get things working halfway right in the game, with a truly depressing amount of 'Well, it worked in Outfit Studio' and strangely inconsistent results in the process. The same setting tweaks applied to heads generated by the Creation Kit and those generated using RaceMenu's mesh exporter have completely different in-game results, for instance. No idea what's going on there, and I've blown weeks trying to figure it out. 

 

So I'm afraid I won't have anything more from this line of experimentation ready any time soon. But I have also been working on some other stuff, including some major improvements for the current head sets, some rather fun stuff using a new source of parts, and that one other thing I've been wanting to do with the Edhildil set for months that I've finally figured out how to get working. Still got a bit more cleanup and testing to do, but I should hopefully get an update (and the long overdue Gynoid hair fix) out within the next week or two. 
 

Looking forward to it man! 

[AVS]

...Okay, maybe slightly longer than that. But then again, maybe not. I've been finding the Bikini body's slight variance from the UUNP base shape bothersome in my recent gameplay, so I decided to start on the plan I developed following some of the requests in here. And it worked out better than I expected.

 

GENTLEMEN!

 

 

Seriously, it only took me about three hours to throw together all the masks and zaps I need to make just about any variation of this body I want. Still have to make individual versions from that base, an Armored base to do the same with, and toss together some glove sets to go with them, but the real work for this is going to be the Creation Kit end. And figuring out what I'm gonna do for a naming scheme, christ.

 

[AVS]

So it turns out that setting up zaps for the limb variations was easy, but making the individual BodySlide files so you can build every version into the game at the same time was very time consuming. I've ended up with, let's see... about 141 entries for the revamped Bikini body set. That generate 295 files, with the .tri files enabled, taking up 588MB. And that's with my punting on doing individual legs for this go-around.

 

...I have dug too greedily, and too deep.

 

 

 

[senlovenima]

Are you intrested this?

http://bbs.3dmgame.com/thread-4103762-1-1.html

Angeli's Cyborg Maiden...

[Loki15kun]

So cool seeing it evolve. I love what I see here. So many awesome possibilities.

Thanks for doing it.

[AVS]

Okay, one more sneak peek, because this turned out even better than I hoped it would. 

 

Happy birthday to the ground. 

 

 

I've been poking away at this for a little while, building a modified all-parts .nif along side finishing up the armors themselves, but wasn't sure it'd actually make the final cut. Y'see, while I figured out all the stuff I needed to do to make meshes inventory-ready and less prone to crashing the fuck out of the game, I had no idea how the game figured out the on-screen positioning. So my first few attempts at getting them into the game by hijacking existing ground meshes were... Broken, in various ways. Especially when I tried using the vanilla Dwarven armor ground mesh as a base. Outfit studio could not parse merging the two at all.

 

Then this morning I tried merging it with the ground mesh for the Dwarven wizard mash-up set in Immersive Armors, and all of a sudden everything worked perfectly.

 

 

So, um, I'm stealing that root data, thanks. They do clip through the ground a bit if they're on their backs, and can bounce oddly at times, but nothing I can't live with. Took a couple hours to build all the ground meshes- a simple mater of deleting the unneeded parts for each variant from the pre-prepped base .nif, but with 89 final in-game variants it does get a bit time-consuming- and then a couple more to get them into the Creation Kit entries. Figured out that this would work somewhere around 7:30am, had them all in-game and doing a final error-check by noon. I think that's some kind of personal record.

 

Still a few more days until the release. There's a couple more things that I've got to do some cleanup on (which I didn't get to yet because I was doing this instead) and I've still got to put the actual release pack together, make some new screenshots, and revamp the description. I'm tempted to go on a tear making ground models for everything else, but I think that can probably wait for a future update. 

 

I mean, this seems like plenty to be starting with.