Anyway, here it is, fuckin' finally. I've done so much fucking stuff for this in the last year that I can't even begin to keep track of everything that I probably ought to be saying about it. I've already spent all night trying to cram in what I could remember, so just hit the note in the reserved post for the highlights. 

And seriously, please let me know if the Automated's faces don't work for you. They should have all the right pathing for the FaceGen models and the textures and everything, but this is Skyrim so who the hell knows. But it should at least be pretty obvious if shit's not working. And do give the Automated Player experiment a try and tell me if it works for you. If anybody can tell me why it works, even better. 

I miiiiiiiight actually get around to doing an SE version of this update, but don't hold your breath. I figured out how to fix a couple of the issues I was having before, but I might just have to punt on having a CBBE-compatible Variable set. And adding all the FaceGens for the Automated might complicate things further, as I've seen stuff about issues surrounding those. Just have to give it a try and see, I guess. 

And, as you might've expected, I spent some time making last-minute changes and additions, as is my wont. One of the more extensive changes actually has very little visible impact, as I followed through on something I mentioned in the last post and built a whole new race for the NPCs that don't have Live faces, solely for the purposes of getting rid of that damn disembodied mouth bug that I kept running into with them. It took a while to get working, but it lets me freely make faceplated NPCs without having to worry about that issue.

These guys are a little bit different from the 'regular' Automated in that their nude body is reverted back to the bare torso frame instead of being changed to a head, mainly so they can fit better with the original DMA concept of being 'built to suit' that got slightly lost with the Live faces. 

I also very briefly poked at the idea of making this race playable, but ended up cutting that for now after running into a couple of complications. One of the more glaring ones being the question of how to change their starting outfit; in the test run I did it just kept sticking them back into the prisoner rags, which does this concept no favors at all.

So you won't get to have a playable Automated race just yet, but I do intend to package up that stopgap version I've gone over previously that just replaces the default head mesh with a modified version that supports the Live Face effect. That method has mostly worked fine for me in my test runs so far, but I did run into one notable side-effect. While the NPCs with existing FaceGen meshes (i.e., every properly built one) don't display the effect outside of a very brief moment when they first render into a cell, NPCs that do not have FaceGen meshes and who display the resulting Grey Face bug also now have this problem:

This is something I probably should've expected from what I could figure out about how both the Live Face effect and FaceGens work, but it's still freaky to see it in the wild. And a good reminder for me to double-check my packaged FaceGens, which was useful because I totally forgot to re-point the textures on a bunch of the converted Vanilla NPCs. 

In terms of the less under-the-hood additions, the biggest is probably the new swords you might've noticed in the images above. These were another thing that I actually kinda forgot for a while. When I was putting together the weapons for this mod that ended up getting released as the Relic Armaments, one of the variants included parts taken from the Dibella shrine. I wasn't quite happy with how it turned out, though, and when it turned out that the shrine parts had to be rehabbed to keep the weapon from crashing the game when equipped I just cut it from the stand-alone pack, intending to get back to it later when I rolled them all back into DMA. And then I completely blanked on it until I was finalizing the outfits for the Statues and Idols and thought, 'Boy, these really could use some themed weapons... Oh, right. Crap.'

Fortunately with my previous practice it was fairly easy to toss these together once I fixed the shrine parts. First up was an evolution of my original take on the concept, a version of the disk-hilted shortsword incorporating the mirror piece from the shrine. This originally had the flower part of the shrine grasping one of those swirly orbs stuck onto the pommel, but poking at it again I felt it worked better with that taken off.

That pommel didn't get dropped entirely, though. I just migrated it over to a version of the orb-hilted dagger with the swirls recolored kind of pink to function as a Dibellan ritual dagger.

Both of those are just rehabilitations of earlier ideas, though, and since they were done quickly I wanted to try building out something a bit different using the parts. One thing I didn't quite manage to do with the Relics was make a rapier-type sword. I approached that with the 'needle' blade, but that's too plain to really hit the 'rapier' boxes, mainly because of the complete lack of an ornate hilt. And I still didn't have anything put together that would be quite right for the full hand guard of a proper rapier, but I was interested in seeing what I could do with that flower structure from the shrine...

Yeah, I'd say that works pretty well. Maybe still not a true rapier, but it's ornate as hell and that's half the battle. It also inspired a bit of a change to the shrine parts; originally I had them recolored brass in the usual way, with the main texture replaced with the Dwarven tile and the environment map added on, but on the larger and more noticeable hilt piece here that just felt flat and washed out. So I made a quick bronze version of the shrine's texture to use instead, which added a lot of depth back in.

While I was at it I also wanted to do something non-sword. I had an idea for something along the lines of a mace, but first I started out with something simpler and more brutal than what I had been going for with the other designs.

This is fairly basic, just a modification of the Dwarven mace's handle with a recolor of the spiked ball trap stuck on top of it, but it's very satisfyingly mean looking. It works quite well in the hands of the enemy Automated.

But in the end, this was just practice. What I really wanted to do was to stick Dibella's shrine on the end of a rod and beat people to death with it.

What can I say? I'm easily amused. The Fragment in the mace head is a particularly entertaining element, given how it retains its glow cycle.

There's other things that I wouldn't mind doing in this vein and might play with later, but this was enough to satisfy my thematic requirements and properly arm the Dibellans.

Aside from that I've mostly been hammering out various tweaks and improvements to the Facility, one of the most notable being a revamp to how I'd been doing the containers. I'd originally set up a bunch of the big Dwarven chests placed around the Facility to serve as distribution points for the DMA parts, but I was never really happy with that. They were kind of a pain to get into the positions that I wanted, so a lot of them just ended up being sorta scattered around. It didn't look great, and it didn't really work with the theme of being output points for the Facility's hidden production lines. But I had also been poking around with modifying and subbing out meshes with the idea of creating new doors for some other concepts that aren't quite going to make it into here. I figured that since I can just sub out meshes to make new containers as well, why not use that to do something more on-theme?

This mesh is the spawn portal for the Dwarven Sphere with the chute part chopped off so it can be repurposed as a general portal. Sadly it doesn't seem to be able to activate its animations when used in this application, but it gets the general idea across rather well. So much so that I also used it to rebuild a lot of the safe storage I have scattered around the place for the player and add a couple a resource points in crafting areas.

This change also let me clean up the main machine chamber some, now that all the chests were out of the way. That gave me space for a quick little control panel type of thing...

I also leaned into the idea that the machine teleports completed Automated into the chamber by adding a SFX mesh to the output area like I've done with the other teleportation devices.

This came about as a direct result of the in-game books I wrote for this update, which were the single biggest time-sink of the last few weeks. Hammering out the head-canon I've got around all this and trying to put it into the voice of the Researcher was a giant pain, and there's still a lot of stuff that I could probably clarify or expand upon that I'm just gonna skip because I've already got ten damn volumes and a sampling of character write-ups. 

The researcher is also a part of the handful of things I've added to the world outside of the Facility, in the form of a copy of herself that she sent off as a messenger didn't quite make it.

There's a couple of other spots in the region where you can find stray Automated. I didn't go too ham with this, largely because finding good places for them is annoyingly time-consuming, but it's nice to have a few encounters.

And lastly I found a couple more NPCs to cram in, specifically some humanoid Automated that use the full D2 torso like the Beast race ones. Partly because I like the look, but also because I'd mentioned them as rare cases in those books. They're... not exactly high-effort characters, being quick copies of Lydia and Jordis with fancy hair as generic Automated Housecarls. Not my best work, but whatevs.

I put a little more effort into someone that's not actually going to be implemented in this release, as she kinda serves as a test for something I want to do later on: a Live Faced statue character. 

This was a 'there's no reason this shouldn't work' sort of situation. Doing it with the metal faces might be a bit trickier, as getting the environment map to work on those requires running the mesh through an .obj conversion which seems to have negative effects on its interactions with the .tri files, but the stone textures can just slap right onto the native face meshes without issue. All I had to do to get it to work with the Live Face effect was cut a mask shape out of it. The problem is doing it with a Vanilla face, as those only work middlingly well in stone due to their low-poly nature, and there's no decent way to give them stone teeth and tongues to keep those on-theme. On top of that it also keeps coming out slightly greyer than the texture on the body, for some damn reason. As a result of those issues this test isn't placed anywhere in the game, although I did leave her floating around in the CK files if you want to use the console to grab her. She mainly serves as a proof of concept for when I get around to working on my next plan for this mod, which is to finally re-incorporate all the Charmers of the Reach content along with some Live Face NPCs using that headmesh. The Charmers head works much better in stone and has retexturable teeth, so this idea is much more viable with them. 

But all that's for the hopefully less terrible future. For now I'm just focusing on getting this batch of girls out into the wild.

The current case in point: I mentioned last time how I was planning to punt on adding the Charmers stuff back into the mod until some future update, to give me time to figure out how to get a few things working there. As a result of that the brass masks I made with the Charmers head mesh won't be available yet, which is a slight problem given how I redid the metal body parts with a customized skin texture to match with them. I don't really want to punt on the updated body, since it really is a massive improvement over the poorly-fitted Dwemer tile texture that's been my default for making bronzed versions of meshes, but without the Charmers masks the only brass faces I have available to use with the brass bodies are the masks sourced from the SeXtreme models from the initial version of the mod. The problem with those is that they still use that tile texture, and as a result look kinda lousy paired with the updated body.

So, best thing to do was update the faces.

This doesn't use quite the same process to get the brass color as the body parts. Those use a copy of the skin texture recolored in a way that reacts with the bronze cubemap to produce the brassy color, while these just use a solid block of color that attempts to do the same thing. Getting it to do the exact same thing as the body has proven difficult, however. Part of that is the fact that different meshes from different sources will often interact with the lighting and shaders in different ways for various reasons that I can't even begin to unpack, which is the likely cause for most of the wonkiness I've been running into here. Another part of it is the fact that my color vision isn't exactly reliable, so I'm never quite sure if I'm getting the results I think I'm getting. But after way too much trial and error making absurdly minute adjustments to the color block, I think I've gotten something that reacts adequately similar to the brass body in most lighting conditions. Hopefully. 

The immediate knock-on effect of this was that it let me use an idea I had for a companion set to the Statue NPCs and build a batch of Dibellan Idols to add to the population around one of the shrines. 

There's a bit more room for development on these models, though, due to an annoying flaw in their build process. One thing I haven't done with any of the Automated so far, including the statuary here, is make them a unique race. They're all just the Vanilla races with their body parts edited per character. It turned out to be very easy to swap out the 'nude' body doing things that way, and for the ones using the Live faces there's no need to alter the head parts at all. But as far as NPCs that use a mask for their face go, as I noted previously it's easy enough to replace most of the head parts with null meshes that don't get in the way of the masks except for the freaking mouth. I just can't find a way to get it to go away completely. I did find that I can reliably get it to initially be disabled on an NPC by using one of the slot 30 versions of the head frames in their Outfit, as the game thinks that they're spawning with a full-face helm and thus disables all the head parts. But the moment anything touches that outfit, say by using a follower framework with outfit management on them, the Vanilla mouth pops right back into place with sometimes horrifying results.

Clearly, this is not ideal. The only idea I have left for fixing it, though, is to try building a custom race for the non-Live NPCs and see if I can get it to exclude the mouth mesh that way. Given that that's one of the things that I didn't really want to have to do for this project, I've kinda been putting that off.

What I've been doing instead is thinking about Dibella. Some sort of Dibellan cultism has been a part of my meta-canon for all this stuff for a while now, and as such it was a pretty obvious theme to go for when doing the decorating for the spaces I've been building for the Automated, but the relatively limited amount of iconography available for her in the Vanilla assets was a bit frustrating. My attempt to use scaled-up placements of the gold statuettes in particular was stymied by the fact that they were still pickable objects. I figured the only way around that was to retexture the static statue with the gold statuette's texture, but right when I went to start on that it occurred to me that I'd just spent a lot of time on getting a clean bronzer texture for the faces. So I gave that a try... and got middling results. Too much of the statue's detailing is baked into the texture, so losing that just makes it look off. Editing the bronzer color into the statue texture, however, works quite well.

Just doing this for the Vanilla models felt boring, though, and it seemed like it'd be easy enough to add in some alternate meshes while I was at it so I did the same thing with the True Dibella and Edhildil's versions of the statue. You guys have noticed by now that I like having a variety of options, right? 

So obviously I ended up doing a whole bunch of these, in both the statuettes and static statues. This skewed the course of my decorating more than a bit. To start with it gave me an excuse to revisit an idea I'd previously passed on, and fill in all those little niches up on the ceiling buttress above this room.

In the form of the Edhildil version and some careful placement it gave me a much more... satisfying object of worship for the shrine with the giant statue.

But more than that, these helped kick off a general flurry of redecorating that saw pretty much every area worked over into a much more presentable state as I figured out how to get the CK to (mostly) do the things I wanted it to do, with the 'Stables' area in particular seeing a lot of improvement. A large part of that was also due to figuring out how to more reliably get the pedestal characters to behave. When I showed that space off last time, almost two full walls were dedicated to their placement, with no idle markers put down anywhere near them as that was the only way I could keep them from breaking position to use them. It worked, but it was hugely wasteful of space. Since then I've worked out how to make a custom AI package that blocks them from using any idles or furniture, removing the need for all that distancing and letting me compact their space down to one side of the room. It also semi-reliably locks them into a static pose that doesn't mess up the pedestal effect, although I haven't found out how to disable their head tracking yet. What it does not do, annoyingly, is lock them onto the spot they were placed. I don't know if they were wandering off a bit before the package kicked in or what, but I was consistently getting a couple that were out of position. 

So what I did here was find a way to brute force it. Turns out that if you only give them a tiny island of navmesh to land in, they'll stay exactly where you put them.

A bit of a downside to all this is that these NPCs are now more emplacements than characters. I made the AI package conditional to having a pedestal equipped and tried having both it and a default sandboxing package on the character at the same time to see if the pedestal's would override it, but instead they were visibly fighting each other. There may be some way to get that to work, but I don't know it yet. And the thing with the navmesh makes it a bit difficult to actually recruit these NPCs as followers. You can talk to them like any normal NPC, and recruit them with whatever follower system you're using, but they won't actually, well, follow, because they're stuck on that island. You'll need some way to teleport them to you to get them off of it, and I'm not sure if there's any way to get them back on afterwards. So, yeah, consider these guys mainly decorative. The buttons above their heads, too. Those are just there for the look of some kind of energy something something device, they don't actually do anything.

Given that this method was pretty effective, though, I used it in a few other places. Such as an 'offering' on a nearby shrine, and the couple of 'milker units' that I had previously intended to put behind the bar. So far they've all stayed in place just fine.

All the space this freed up gave me a lot to work with in the remodel. The stables are mostly untouched on the left third of the room, while the pedestal emplacements and the translocator machine take up most of the right third by the door. That gave me all of the middle out from the bar area to turn into a fuller dining area, backed by a small lounge and bedroom. 

Since I had some space on the back wall by that shrine freed up, I decided I might as well add on a bathing area. I... Might've gone a bit overboard.

This was one of those things where the progression of events kicked in. It started with just the idea of doing a sunken metal tub. While messing around with things it ended up becoming quite a bit larger than intended. I had added the waterfalls behind the shrine in the other room just before starting work on this, so I thought why not add in a water feature here, too? Why not a big curtain of water right down the middle of the tub? And hey, why not have it all centered on an Edhildil Dibella statue?

I can't see any argument against it.

I also took some of my exuberance from getting the steam effects to work and added another amusement to one corner of this room: a steam cleaning booth. 

This also inspired some further modifications to the Quarters. I needed some more bed space there for it to really fulfill its role, but the only area I didn't really have plans for wasn't quite big enough to fit all the beds I wanted. So I knocked a corner out and expanded the room. There was a bit of a snag there when it turned out that the outside corner piece I needed to make the turn I wanted didn't actually exist, but I used that opportunity to place another Dibella statue. And a small bath, while I was at it. 

Having all these brass Dibella statues to decorate with had the further effect of getting my head-canon going again. You see, the general idea I've got for the Automated's situation is that they've been pretty much trapped down there, some of them for centuries, until just recently, and they've been pretty bored as a result. At least one of them, however, discovered that they had a talent for making cast sculptures, and has been turning all the scrap the Dwarves left behind into art for quite some time. I decided to cast one of the enemy NPCs that I turned into a friendly Automated in this role, entirely because I'd already given her an all-brass body for her outfit on a whim.

She'll be getting her name changed to 'Automated Sculptress' to reflect that. I couldn't be bothered to go too crazy building up a workshop for her, so she's just got a modified-ish smelter tucked into the smithy area in the Quarters.

Although I did up the scale of the operation just a little bit by adding a closet where the molds cool just down the hall. 

But here's that knock-on effect again. I've got the setup of a bored sculptress living in a highly sexualized society of abandoned multi-purpose companion automata with artificially lowered inhibitions and a strong Dibellan cult presence. 

I've also got a lot of those SeXtreme models sitting around and a texture that lets me make brass statues out of them. 

You can guess where this is going, right?

I definitely went overboard with these. Making them is just a bit tedious, as they require the .obj conversion trick to get the environment mapping to work on top of having all the textures and settings adjusted, but the results are quite nice. I ended up doing a bunch, some of which are preeeeeeeetty explicit.

But they amuse me. I'm entertained by the idea of the place just getting littered with this lady's thirst. And it is littered; these things more or less became a focus of my decorating and are scattered all over the three main sections of the complex, especially the Stables and Quarters. The quarters in particular had one space left over from its donor dungeon that I wasn't quite sure what to do with, a torture room that didn't really fit the theme I had going.

So now it's an art gallery, loaded down with 'study' markers for whoever wanders in there.

A number of these are modified from the originals, as I prioritized female figures that were in a position that would make a believably stable statue. Some changes were purely cosmetic, such as swapping in a Dwarven sword on this model when the original didn't really take to the retexture very well.

Another converts a decorative Dibella shrine to a fully functional one.

Others are purely for perverse shits and giggles, such as this alternate version of the standing group all outfitted with the Dwarven 'strap-ons' I made, plopped down right in the middle of the new sleeping area. I might replace it with something a bit more restrained and move this elsewhere. Might. 

The most significant change that resulted from these isn't actually to these, though. 

The Edhildil Dibella statue is nice, but it's always had a distinct flaw. On the original version, the face is just this featureless blob. The updated version fixed this by adding in a face, but unfortunately it's just the default headshape's face, which can not really be described as lovely. It's better than nothing, but it didn't really feel up to the job of being the Goddess of Beauty, y'know? That was a large part of the reason why I'd never really used it in my game before, but now that I had reason to make significant use of it the face was really jumping out at me. So I thought I'd see if I could find something in the SeXtreme models that could fit into the same angle as the head and replace it.

I expected that would be the hard part. Ended up finding one that would fit on the second try.

No, the problem was, once again, getting it to match. The initial setting looked fine in OS, but in-game it was way off. So once again it had to go through countless minor adjustments... And then I made it harder on myself by remembering that the body mesh on Edhildil's Dibella is an altered 7Base body, and that I had that bronzing skin texture sitting around.

That's an improvement, but the arms were yet another additional complication. They're merged onto the body mesh, but they're not mapped to the body textures so you end up with some noise from the foot textures right front and center there. But OS does have that handy UV map tool now...

And that's how I found out that it will only save the results of moving one mesh each time you open the tool. If you move more than one, the changes on the others go *poof*!

What the hell.

But once you get past that annoyance the fix is just a simple matter of piling the arm meshes onto some open bit of skin texture, and you end up with nice, smooth arms to go with the cleaned-up body. Now back to the head!

I still don't really have a match on it, but I do think it's close enough that it's not especially jumping out at me. It's something that I can always adjust later on, so it's good enough for now. There's a few other tweaks; a bit of a glow on the eyes, a slight edit to the hair, a Fragment of Dibella crammed into the middle of the flower. And while I couldn't do it on the standing version due to the way the other model's hand is placed, this felt like a good replacement for the Dibella statue in this scene:

Of course, working on this had its own knock-on effect. The texture I've been using for the eyelashes on these is the same one that I used on the brass versions of the SeXtreme face masks, which was the 'gold lashes' texture already sitting around in that mod's files. And it works fine, except that for some reason it's missing the bottom lashes. That always slightly annoyed me, but it wasn't really a felt thing until I was working on some of these statues where it really seemed to detract from the look. So I took another one of the eyelash textures, altered it, and replaced the gold lashes with it. Because I'll be damned if I'm going to go in and re-point every single lash mesh. It does add a bit of a different look to the masks, but I kinda like it.

Aside from all that, most of what I've been doing lately could be called rationalizing the Automated's position in the world. I had originally planned to lean heavily on Gloomreach for that, but that has proven a bit... iffy. Some of that remains the nav for followers. I managed to fix some things- adding a jump so they can get down from the exit loop-around, cleaning up and straightening out a lot of the mesh- but there's still two areas on either side of the bottom of the second cave where there's something that just completely borks their pathing. Coming in from the new entrance they consistently jet off through the door for the exit loop, and coming down from the top of the cave they reach a point near where the boss is placed and then run back out of the cave so they can somehow pop back in through the exit. I have no idea what's causing that, and it's annoying as all hell. Especially since you kinda need the help down there.

I've mentioned being confused about why the Rogue Automated I crammed in there seemed to get killed off so often. Well, I finally got an opportunity to watch them fighting and... Apparently you have to set a faction to be friendly to itself when you make it if you don't want them attacking each other? I mean, You'd think that would be some kind of a default setting, but... Anyway, with that fixed the Rogue Automated are much, much more efficient.

The Falmer in the cave spawn at level 9 for my level 1 testing character, so many of the weaker Rogues get offed, but something I'm a bit hung up about with these guys is exactly how to level them. At this point in time they're just imported directly from their face donors, stat-wise, so since I grabbed NPCs based on looks more than anything else they're scattered across most of the level range. That means some of them are piss-weak, while some of them are... I piled all the stronger ones into the boss area to give them a fighting chance when they were all getting killed off. Now that they're actually working together, catching their attention as a level 1 is terrifying.

I'm kinda inclined to go in and set them all to level with the player, with some degree of adjustment either way depending on their original base level, and to thin them out by spreading some of them around the nearby wilderness. That does mean they're more likely to get rolled by the Falmer while the player is a low level, but I'd kinda like to keep things so you don't have to be any sort of a set level before you can get into any of this content. I mean, in a lot of ways it'd make sense story-wise to not be able to use any of this stuff without Ancient Wisdom or something, but that kind of forced delay is just a hassle. And I do have some vague ideas about researching how to set up alternate starts...

Regardless, I may also simply not implement every Rogue I've got built just yet. I could just put in enough for what I have set up now and keep some in reserve for future plans. I do have an additional area that I've been trying to build but haven't liked the results on, and will probably punt that down the road. Might be a different case if I could get a few things to work the way I want them to, but annoyingly the collision box on the pipes is single-sided and I have no idea how to invert it.

As an aside, I've finally found out what happens if a Live-faced Automated gets decapitated. Basically it does what I expected, sending the face and hair (if present) flying off and plopping the decapitated neck mesh onto the body while ignoring the head frame on slot 59. Oddly it also leaves the helmet behind, and I'm not sure why it would do that. But then I'm not sure of a lot of things here.

This next thing isn't quite a knock-on effect of the above, since it's something I was planning on doing anyway, but it takes on a new light in the event of a weak assault on the Falmer. There's uncomfortably little space between the two ends of the Excavations should the Falmer counter-attack, and they lead right back into the main Facility. As such the pathway through the crystals is now fortified, and the place is loaded up with all the 'drone' NPCs that I had intended to make before the Live faces took over the mod, along with some Automated Adventurers and a particularly strong Subject. Hopefully that will be enough to hold them back, and it will be, because I don't intend on implementing anything like an invasion. But they wouldn't know that.

Anyway, as a result of those problems with Gloomreach, I've tweaked the concept of the Automated's imprisonment a bit. I'd always intended on adding a 'teleporter' exit at a certain place in the Quarters but had been debating how to have it be something that the player turns on; now it's going to be something that had already turned itself on some time before the player arrives, for unknown reasons, and the Automated will have a limited presence out in Skyrim as a result of it. 

A bunch of statues are scattered about the room, because part of that presence in Skyrim will be the Sculptress doing some export business.

This exit deposits you behind the Dibella shrine across the river from Old Hroldran, not far from the physical entrances to the Facility. You'll meet a caretaker of sorts out there, and the shrine itself has been augmented with a grand statue of the Goddess.

A couple more of the Dibellans are at other shrines to the Goddess (and there may end up being more if I remember any other appropriate places to stick them), and at least one of the Subjects has been keeping an eye on things at Old Hroldran. 

Back at the Facility, the entrance to the Ventilation Shaft has gotten cleaned up and improved, and the drop itself has gotten a bit more treacherous-looking.

There's one more character who needs a bit more progress, and who's tied to what's probably the most significant chunk of work I have left: The Synod Researcher. She herself is pretty much all set, as I've decided against killing her off like I'd originally intended and have instead given her a lovely little chamber not far from the teleporter exit.

Her role is to be the 'author' of the series of explanatory books for the mod, which will be conveniently housed in one of those bookcases there... when I manage to finish writing them and copy them into the mod. I'm maybe halfway through? It's been a few weeks since I had a chance to work on them, and I've changed and added some stuff since then which probably added more volumes... That duplicate of herself she has in there is also of some note, since the current idea is that she's taking advantage of the ability to make a duplicate to send out messengers. Whether any of those messengers actually reach there destination is in question, of course... Part of that question being whether I can be bothered to figure out how to make that an actual Event or if just want to dump a corpse somewhere noticeable.  

At some point here I'll decide this thing is done enough. Of course, then I'll have to clean it up and pack it for distribution... 

A large part of it is, to kick a very dead horse, just how god-awful the Creation Kit's interface is. For example, I spent entirely too long trying to figure out how to get the lighting to do what I wanted it to do. The placed lighting that you drag in from the CK's lights list is uselessly dim, and you can't make up for that by placing more lights because having too many in an area causes annoying flicker effects. But there's no obvious way to adjust the brightness settings in any of the context controls. Turns out the only way to do it is by holding down a fucking three-key macro and dragging the mouse up and down, because apparently that makes more sense than putting a fucking lighting tab in the edit window! Christ.

Bethesda likes to mention how the Creation Kit is 'the same tool we use' to build the game, and I honestly think that's the whole of the problem. Internal and corporate tools are where UI design goes to die. They're invariably these horrible, cobbled-together, nightmarishly unintuitive messes crapped out on the cheap that spend far too much time getting in the user's way. It reminds me of the access control program we used at a previous job that didn't even have basic UI shit figured out like greying out text boxes when they're not editable. A frickin' college kid making a freeware program for downloading porn can manage to pull that trick off, so we're spending how much money for a program that we're relying on to secure our facilities and comes from a company that can't? It's baffling. 

Anyway, angry rant aside I have been making progress with this. It's just been irritatingly glacial. Both for the reasons mentioned above, and because I have, as usual, really overextended my scope. Making the Automated turned out to be kinda interesting and, as mentioned before, really easy to do with the existing NPCs, so before I knew it I had, um... Going by the FaceGen file count, 143. So far. I think I might have plot openings for a few more. 

So obviously the location work has taken on new priority, because I need someplace to put all these fuckers. The previously mentioned re-dress of Raldbthar still forms the core of it, and I've done various major and minor edits to get it styled up, especially that central room that I've remade to be the Automated factory's output. That got cleaned up and relit, with bins filled with Type XXX parts and chests scattered around that should contain every armor piece in the mod, if I filled them up right.

Some of my more recent work has been adding in idle markers scattered around so the Automated that I staff the area with have something to do, but that's one of those 'half the time it doesn't work' things. I gave all the Automated pretty much the same sandboxing packages, aside from some cases where I had reason to do otherwise, but for some damn reason most of the ones I put in this room just stand around like idiots. I've got 'study' idles all over the place, but most of them are going to waste. 

Yet at the same time I've got other areas where I can't get the NPCs to keep still for all the markers and furniture they're constantly hopping between. So I have no idea what's happening here. 

The rest of the Raldbthar rooms have been getting their own little livability edits and cleanups as well, with DMA parts scattered here and there for added flavor.

My plan to make use of copies of other Dwarven interiors ran into an all-too familiar snag, however. I had intended to make use of a couple of the rooms from the Afflicted dungeon, but those had even worse cases of the problem with sections not visually rendering that I ran into with the Avanchenzel interiors, one of them having pretty much everything ten feet from the door failing to render when you entered the room. I have no frickin' clue what's causing that, much less how to fix it, so that ruled those out for me. Out of the small handful of useful-looking areas I had identified, the only one that didn't really give me issues was the living quarters from the ruins under Markarth, so that kinda ended up as my expansion space by default. But it is at least a fairly useful space. I bodged together a door to it from the Raldbthar space off the bridge at the top of the main room...

...and rebuilt the tree area further in to serve as a sort of main room with an ad-hoc player home in the rooms around the dining area. The tree itself got replaced with a Dibella shrine, although my plan on using a giant version of the golden Dibella statuette as its centerpiece is slightly hindered by the fact that I don't know how to make it so it can't be picked up like the normal version. Doing so and then dropping it has odd results.

The real fun here is actually in an alcove next to this area, which was previously just a caved-in passage. I'm a big fan of player home mods that include a teleport spell to the place, and it certainly made sense to have something like that here given that the current entrances and exits are a bit... fraught. But more on those later. Making teleport spells is actually one of the few bits of scripting that I have previous experience with, as I did one for the last attempt at a interior mod I made, some five years ago. Which turned out to be particularly useful since it meant that I could just reuse that script instead of going through the trouble of compiling a new one. Given the sort of worldbuilding I had in mind here, though, I wanted something a bit more impressive than what I had in that old project. This is Dwarven shit, now, it has to be a whole machine.

It took a lot of digging to find that lighting effect, let me tell you. On top of that, a regular old spellbook for learning the teleport spell wouldn't do, so I had to figure out how to make this happen:

Then there's the spell effect itself. I'd previously just copied the Skyfall Estate teleport spell's method and used the Restoration effects, but digging around in the effect list I found one that specifically said it was for a 'teleport' from the College questline. I tossed it onto my spell and, well...

Much more on-theme.

I have run into one problem with this, though. I've been using the spell from that previous project for years, and I've never had any problem with followers teleporting with me. They'd always end up right on the landing area beside me. With this one, though, that hasn't been the case. They consistently end up coming in through the relatively distant main door into the area instead. I'm not sure why, since the COC marker for the teleport is planted on the navmesh and everything. One of the many things I still have left on my to-do list is tearing that older spell apart and seeing what I did differently back then.

On the subject of entrances, here's the main exterior entrance to the Automated space.

There's some additional clean-up and detailing for it on my list, but it's currently functional. It does not, however, lead to where I originally intended. My plan was to use that long-drop trap from that one Dwarven ruin up in the mountains on the Morrowind border, but it turned out to be both more of a pain in the ass to rebuild than I expected and subject to that same unrendering bullshit that's been plaguing all of this stuff. So I finally said 'fuckit' and built a new space from scratch. It took a few tries to get started, but eventually I ended up with something acceptably close to the theme I wanted of a one-way drop into a pool of water.

That said, this very nearly ended up being abandoned as well, since it turns out that this is exactly the kind of space that you do not want to follow Bethesda's instructions for generating navmeshes on. Their damn auto-generator doesn't even recognize water. I wasted far too much time trying to salvage that mess before realizing that my best bet was just deleting the whole disaster and building my own nav from scratch, vertice by vertice. That was a useful thing to learn how to do, though, since it made cleaning up and altering the navmeshes in the copied spaces much more feasible and made those spaces more useable. But lord, was it a time-sink. 

Eventually I ended up with a nav that would let followers fall into the room alongside me and escape from the water without trying to walk on the bottom...

...and that let the 'worker' Automated I had placed in there actually use the various idles I had placed around.

My one regret with it is that I didn't give it as long of a drop as I'd originally envisioned, as I didn't want to risk having parts of it outside of the view distance. But it gets the idea across.

Obviously, though, this won't serve as the physical exit. For that I wanted a tunnel off to Gloomreach, with an entrance in the Raldbthar space tucked into that sort of living area along the one side. My original plan there was to have a bridging pace using one of the Afflicted rooms, but since those wouldn't work I was left having to build another new space for it. I figured that it should be a sort of mining area, as I had a general idea that the tunnel into Gloomreach would be something that the Automated would've finished digging at some point immediately prior to the Dragonborn stumbling onto the scene, and in light of that there ought to be something worth mining there that might also explain why the facility as a whole was located there. To build it, I actually took that above shot looking up the ventilation shaft as my starting point, turning the 'shaft' cave meshes sideways and then shoving them full of Azura crystals.

The concept is that these crystals are the source of the ones used for the Automated's brains and various other parts. I had considered doing a larger excavation space reflecting that, but actually building it was a pain in the ass and then I lost all the work in a fucking CK crash, so to hell with it. All that's left of that is a little stub tunnel off to the side with some Blackreach crystal clumps in it.

The actual gameplay reason for this room, though, is the tunnel roughly knocked into the back wall. A short winding walk through there gets you back into Vanilla Skyrim, but not into all that great of a place. 

So, the current plan is for this to drop you into the very bottom of the Gloomreach Hive, right next to the tunnel leading back to the entrance. The idea is that you could then either sneak off to the start and go through the dungeon properly, or charge right into the boss area and see how well that goes. Things will be more complicated than they originally were in the Vanilla, though, because there's going to be a whole mess of Automated sourced from enemy NPCs who're hostile to both the native Falmer and the Player running around.

The exact details of this I'm still working on, as dungeon leveling is yet another of those things that I have no previous experience with. The Falmer pre-existing here are fairly tough, with the boss being a level 26 for the level 1 testing character I'm using here. The handful enemy Automated currently placed have their original levels, for the most part, so how well they fare against the Falmer is a bit of a mixed bag. Sometimes I go in there and they manage to kill the Falmer off, sometimes it's the other way around. 

Part of my plan is to expand the battle some, adding more Falmer to help match the mass of Automated and moving some of the fighting up to the large but previously empty initial room of the first cave, but I may find myself having to change even more things around due to the pathing being a freaking headache. I've run into three different issues with followers already. First, while they'll go through the entrance between the excavations and the hive just fine, they invariably run off through the nearby door to the upper cave whenever you try to get them to go past it, so they will neither go into the lower cave or back into the excavations with you. Second, when they get to the upper cave they can't parse the jump down into the initial room.

And third, even if you get them into the start of the cave and proceed on the proper path through the dungeon, they get stuck on the ramps halfway down to the bottom of the hive and can't even approach the exits! So no matter what the heck I do there I've got a lot of what looks like Bethesda's fuckups to fix to get this running properly, and I'm not even sure what might be causing the first one. I might end up having to reposition my entrance, which'll be a pain. 

For the followers and some of the generic non-hostile Automated I've got them set to level with the player, so they can be useful for longer, but that also means that most of them will be pretty useless early on against an enemy Automated with a set level of 27 like the Storm Wizard there. One of the things on my even larger 'would like to do' list is finding some way to add the Automated factions to the Player. As things are currently set up I have these NPCs divided into the regular Automated faction, which is friendly to the player by default, and the rogue faction which is hostile to you, but it would be nice to have an option to let them tolerate you nosing in on their Falmer extermination. I know there's ways to do this, but I need to do more research to see if I can easily implement them. There's probably more hostile Automated than could reasonably fit into these caves, too, so I might end up scattering a few more around nearby, but I have to see how the current hostility settings for their faction work with that.

I also complicated these a bit by not making every single Automated sourced from an enemy NPC hostile. Mainly because some of them are kinda cute. I needed a way to differentiate them, so all the hostile ones are now named as Rogues. This does make some of their names pretty long, though.

I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to do with the non-hostiles. Right now I've got most of them hanging around in the excavations, but I'll probably end up peppering them around with the other generics or setting them up as lesser followers. I've got some story ideas for how this all works, as well...

I should get a bit deeper into the People part of this post, but first I want to segue a bit into few additional items I threw together while I was working on the rest of this. The first one... doesn't quite work the way I want it to yet and probably won't be released with the rest of this, but it amused me and I want to show it off, so... 

Remember last post, how I talked about figuring out how to make the Automated's default nude body be just their head, and maybe making a head-specific pedestal to showcase that? Well, I did that thing.

This is highly amusing in concept, but in practice there are... Problems.

Mainly it's the same problems faced by the other pedestals, in that it needs to have a fairly stationary idle pose forced on it to keep it from swaying around and clipping through the ground all weird like that. But while I found a good-enough solution for the regular pedestals in the form of the Soldier Wall Idle marker, using this pedestal with one of those just straight-up breaks the HDT height setting.

Now, while I was messing around with this I did find one thing that got me exactly the effect I wanted, and oddly enough it was the 'hands behind head' submission pose from Display Model. Not only did that get me a completely stationary pose, but it also coincidentally corrected the somewhat-off guess I made for the HDT setting and put the base more or less level on the ground.

So of course it then turns out that if I try to correct the HDT so that the base is level without the pose, the pose ends up hovering a bit. 

I've got some vague ideas for making something useful out of this, maybe by finding some way to put a sphere or hover effect on the bottom, but it's not that much of a priority. The pedestals as a whole still need some way to lock the characters into poses and out of furniture and idle markers to really have the functionality I want for them. DAR has some promise for the former, although I didn't get quite the performance I wanted out of it on NPCs, but the latter is way outside of my ken. A script effect like Holzfrau used on Dwarven Augumentation might also be worth exploring. Either way takes a lot more work and research than I really want to put into this just now, though. I probably ought to focus on actually getting the basic mod out before I try out any fancy tricks like that, and I definitely need to stop adding new stuff.

That said, I did add some more new stuff. Not much, though! I've wanted to add some pony-themed headgear for a while, you see. The horse head mask is amusing, but... not really cute. I've made a couple attempts at a mechanical horse mask or helmet, but none of them have turned out quite the way I wanted either. I'd been playing around with some quick, non-Dwarven ponygirl stuff alongside all the rest of this, though, and found that combining the bridle piece from the Haru outfit with a pair of equipable horse ears, initially cut from the Vanilla horse and later from Bad Dog's Horse race mesh, had some pretty favorable results. while I was playing around with the cow horn pieces that I added recently, I thought, hey, why not recreate that?

The bridle part is very loose on the face to hopefully provide clearance for all face morphs, but it's supposed to be more evocative than functional. I used the Horse race ears in my first test of this because obviously they look vastly better than the Vanilla horse's, and couldn't bear the thought of giving them up so I got Bad Dog's permission to use them here. ?

This is set up the same as and categorized with the horn sets, and can be used with the wigs or a character's existing hair, but I also did a combo piece with the Crest that's set up as a helmet under the name Cavalier. 

I also asked if I could use the Horse race tail to make a new weighted horse tail accessory in the vein of the equipable Khajiit and Argonian tails, since it's also so much better than Vanilla.

Nice.

Between this and the cow-themed stuff I had already done, I got the idea for another new area. There was a door in the Quarters area that I wasn't using, so I thought, why not have it lead to a cave that was set up like a ranch? Just a big rocky cave with a grassy field and an artificial sun in it. Sounds great, right?

Yeah, well, turns out that making a big grassy field in Skyrim is waaaaaaaaaaay the fuck beyond the realm of my patience. You can't even actually do it as an interior space, and exterior worldspaces are a whole damn thing that I ain't got any time for. So it got scaled back to a sort of a stable room.

That give me a home for some of the NPCs that I gave cow and horse-themed loadouts, but the space I made ended up being big enough for the stable area to only take up one wall. So I used some of the rest of it for a different kind of stable.

And then I tossed a bar area in because why the heck not.

This whole space also isn't quite finished yet, and again isn't entirely what I originally had in mind. I originally had a couple of the cow-themed characters on pedestals behind the bar, but it turns out that even if you have them set on a furniture idle with them marked as the owners and delete their sandboxing package, they'll still wander around to other markers if they're set close enough. With all the ones around the bar they were just wandering around willy-nilly, so it didn't make any sense to leave them back there. That actually makes filling in the rest of the room a bit tricky; I scattered some idle markers around to give the characters stuff to do, but I have to keep them a certain distance away from the characters on pedestals or they can break off to use them.

The pedestal characters are generics based on various player presets, and I've got one of each race in here. I'm tempted to have more of them, but with as much of a pain as implementing the idea has been I'm content to dial it back to just this group. I might build some additional mechanical structure above their niches at some point, since the head-canon I've got going for these guys is that they're Automated who've set their systems on idle for repairs or somesuch. 

As far as the NPCs in general go, it think I've pretty much got them finished. I've gotten all of the custom RaceMenu-made characters I've had on-hand or made recently loaded in, and Automated all of the Vanilla NPCs that interested me. I've got them all set to have the heads as their nude bodies, and as part of that I ended up setting each crystal insert type as its own 'body' to simplify things on my end. That does mean that the crystals are no longer lootable, but it made setting up outfits that much easier. I'd been vacillating a bit on how exactly to do the outfits, toying around with the idea of doing sets of 'generic' outfits for the bandits and such to choose from and only doing character-specific one for the followers, but in the end I decided it would look better and be easier to keep track of things if everybody got their own specific and unique outfit. Actually adding them all in took a few days, though... 

But in the end, I've got a pretty broad base of Automated 'citizens' running around. Hunters, an Argonian maid, a whole little coven of witches...

The followers have almost as wide of a variety. Some of them are old personal characters, some of them are faces that I made for the mask project, and others are ones that I just made to fill a perceived niche. 

There's some that are of note, and a few that honestly really aren't. A couple I made almost solely to flesh out (aheh) the 'companion' role, and one of those exists entirely because I like redheads.

Figuring out the exact roles and abilities of these characters has been one of the main timesinks around making them, especially since I ended up making so many and even more especially since I don't really know what I'm doing. Sure I can add perks, but do some of them actually do anything? How much do combat styles even matter? What actually is the difference between Berserker and BerserkerLow? I have stumbled across a few good combos, though. One is in the form of N11-24. She was one of the faces that I originally made for the mask project, and I had a frost theme in mind when I gave her that very blue makeup. So I figured, why not give her the ice-encased body parts that I had made on spec? And while I was at it, give her the Frost Atronach's body SFX? And the Ice Form shout? And the Dragonspeaker helmet, so I can cast her as an ancient Tounge who got caught up in the Automation?

And it all pulled together very well, actually. Although there is a bit more of a story behind those iced-up bodyparts. After I made the burnt set for Y1SR4 I poked at the idea of making a few more elemental-themed Assault Troopers and made these parts in the same way that I made the ice skin in the old -BAF- stuff. Those didn't have a matching face texture like the burnt skin did, though, so I tried to make one. And it crashed the game. Consistently. Not right away, though. I had it equipped onto a testing character who I'd spawn into the game using the console, which usually placed them behind me. And every time I'd turn around to take a look at the face... Instant CTD. I don't know what the hell was going on there, but the whole idea got tossed right onto the 'don't care enough to spend the time on' pile. 

Another thing that almost ended up there was Not-Samus, here. I still haven't gotten that gun-arm to line up properly with the magic FX, but that was honestly less of a concern than the fact that the Atronach firebolt spell that I wanted to give her, and that I'd previously used on Y1SR4, persisted on firing from the wrong hand no matter how I changed her spell and equipment loadout. Then I finally took a look at the spell itself and saw that it's specified as a left hand-only one, whoops. So hey, now she's got a custom right-hand version with boosted output.

There's another thing that's not on that pile, mainly because it's very easy, but that I'm inclined to exercise some restraint on, mainly because it's way too easy: Duplicates. 

Before I stumbled upon the Live Face method and ballooned the NPC portion of this project way out of control, I was only planning on adding in a few NPCs equipped with the Vanilla masks. That's mostly been washed away in the tides of all these characters, but it's still something I can easily do. In fact, since I added in all of the faces I made the masks from as Live characters, it's trivial to make copies of them with the null headparts I made for that concept and the appropriate mask tossed onto their outfit. So far I've kept it to just a few; two helpers for the worker in the ventilation shaft, and one duplicate of 12-16 for shits and giggles.

But like I said, it'd be way too easy to go overboard with this. Y1SR4 could use an assault squad, for example...

There's also a few more characters I'd like to get in based on that whole nearly-forgotten 'living statue' aspect of the mod provided by the stone parts, which haven't seen much play in the Live Faces section of this project. That'd tie into what I've got in mind for the other half of the Quarters area and the 'safe' exit from the place, assuming I can get things to work the way I want them to.

One other thing that's gonna get cut for time is the Charmers content. I do still intend to get it out at some point- it's got my best stone and brass faces, after all, given that those textures don't work worth a damn on the Vanilla masks- but there's various complications around them that I just don't want to bother with right now. And one of those is actually the Live faces, because it's perfectly possible and highly effective to use the same process on a Charmers head. That's how I figured the process out, after all. But I've still got to do little things like cut out a proper mask texture for them, and figure out how exactly to add a Charmers-built character as an NPC, and so on and so forth, which hasn't really been a priority with 143 vanilla characters and counting. Eventually I'll get to it. I want my Dibella back. And I definitely want to see if I can get those stone and brass faces moving.

There's also probably some more stuff that I could find to shove in here, particularly with the last Holiday hair set release. Just a quick skim there produced a few things that look worth doing...

But I'm going to prioritize getting the tedious and annoying work of getting the locations built done first. I'd like to get this out sometime this year, y'know? 

To start with, the main reason that I'm considering this to be nearly done is that I've pretty much gotten all the parts I can think to build for this put into the game. The rebuild of the Type XXX set is done, with full Beast race support, rubber versions, and the permanent modesty variants ditched in favor of removable panels. The Relic weapons have been folded into DMA proper, and the wig sets are about as done as I can get them. Even went ahead and fixed the weighting issue with the forelock of the Ellie wig where it'd clip into the face in some poses, since it popped up in the raised shield stance and was bugging the heck out of me. 

I also addressed the issue I brought up last time where figuring out how to recenter the pattern on the Edhildil bikini top left it looking lewder than I wanted for what's functionally the most clothing the Type XXX parts can wear. The solution was pretty obvious really; if I can use Outfit Studio to manipulate the UV mapping on a mesh, then I can just as easily use it to remap it to a completely different texture. Thusly:

Figured I might as well get some use out of that female Dwarven Armor texture. Took quite a few tries to get something I was happy with, but I ended up with a set using the scale mail elements for the bikini bottoms and the breastplate pattern for the tops, which works out pretty well and more than adequately fulfills my 'have some shame' requirement.

Of course, the problem with this method is that changing the UV like this means that I can't simply slap the modifications onto the bikini meshes I'd already built as a texture swap. I had to rebuild all of the Edhildil tops, and then generate an entire duplicate set of tops and bottoms for the Armor textures. So that took a bit of time, and doubled the parts count for these. But you can mix and match the tops and bottoms, which is always nice. I considered doing more variants, including one set remapped to the Dwarven banner texture, but that one kept crashing the game for some damn reason and I decided that two sets was more than enough for the parts count. 

Being able to mess with the UV mapping also helped me out with a problem I ran into on the ground models. I spent the better part of a couple of weeks getting all of those built and updated for the new pieces, and for the most part they were fairly straightforward.

The problem came when I started work on the ground models for the Vanilla masks. Yes, I do still intend to include those even if my focus shifted rather sharply to the Live faces; no sense in letting all that prior effort go to waste after all. The problem is that to make ground models using Outfit Studio you have to move the parts' meshes down into the positioning needed to fit into an existing collision box. Most of the time that's not a problem, but there's some meshes that for whatever reason simply will not respond to OS's move tool the same way as other meshes. So say you've got all the meshes in a model selected and are trying to rotate them backwards, then these uncooperative meshes will rotate forwards, stuff like that. And as it happens, one of those uncooperative meshes is the Vanilla head mesh. So to make a ground model out of one of the Vanilla masks, instead of just moving everything at once I'd have to move all the non-face structures and then manhandle the face back into place over them. For a couple dozen faces. Fuuuuuck. Thaaaaaat.  And then on top of that there's the issue with how the game won't render skin tints on the non-wearable models, so you wouldn't really be able to tell who half of these faces were supposed to be anyway. 

So with all that making 'proper' ground models for the Vanilla masks is pretty much out. But being able to mess around with UV maps made it much easier to go to my backup solution: Making gift boxes. 

Simply get some good close-ups of all the masks (ignoring how Umana's scars are the wrong skintone, as that's from a previously discussed issue):

Use those to generate a bunch of texture files, then find one of the box ground models bouncing around out there. Cut a slice off the top of its mesh and map it to your portraits, then paste it back onto a full box mesh. Remap that slice for each mask, and boom, boxed faces.

It's not as satisfying as having the full mask lying around like I can with the other face types, but hey, it works. And it gets them pretty much as done as they're going to get, in light of that shift to the Live faces.

And on the subject of the Live faces, there was one thing that I've had a suspicion about ever since I first discovered how to get them to work but that I was reluctant to try. You see, the process for making them relies on making various minor changes to a character's generated head model, but as a result of that it only seemed to work for NPCs. The player apparently doesn't get a discrete head mesh generated into an accessible folder the way NPCs do, so giving the same effect to your own character appeared to be a fair bit more complicated. But there is a default head mesh sitting around which appears to be used by the player character in some way, as manipulating that during my previous attempts to make a Live face from a mask-cut version of that mesh did produce some results. So what happens if you make the Live face texture changes on that default mesh?

Exactly what you want to happen, basically. 

On first blush, at least, this seemed to work pretty seamlessly. Unlike my attempt with the cut versions it's still fundamentally the same mesh, so it responds perfectly normally to the sliders and accepts all the existing presets while still maintaining the mask effect.

It even accepted an old existing Racemenu preset in the form of 12-16's original settings without any complaint. 

I did run into one wiggle when exporting the mesh, though. It shows up as expected in the sculpt tab, even to the extent of not having the invisible parts of the mesh colored in by the texture:

But the actual exported mesh in the SKSE CharGen folder doesn't reflect that. Oddly, while it maintains all the flag changes and added alpha property needed for the effect, it automatically switches the texture pathing from the specific mask texture that the default head mesh had been pointed to back to the original default texture paths. Which is annoying in that it means that using this to generate new NPC heads will be slightly less streamlined than I'd like, but otherwise not that big of a deal.

The bigger deal is that this particular method only seems to work on Nords. 

I didn't notice this at first, as during that first test I only went through the Nord presets. When I fired up the save for my existing Breton character after making the alterations to the default mesh and saw that they weren't being reflected on her, I initially assumed that the effect would only work on new games and not preexisting ones. But when I kicked it around in the chargen again and found that it universally wasn't showing up on the non-Nords, I realized what was going on. The Nords are the only ones who actually use the default pathing built into the .nif file. The other races use race-specific texture sets in the CK to do things like use alternate normal maps for the elves and so forth. To fix that I'd have to go into the CK and change those texture sets to redirect them to the mask texture, or... I could just replace the default face texture that they were pointing at with the mask's. 

 I didn't really want to try doing this, but I had a sneaking suspicion all along that it would work thanks to some of the issues I had with getting the Live faces running in the first place. Logically, replacing the head's texture with a version that's had a huge portion of it erased would be a problem. But there's a few factors in how the game works that seem to add up to bypassing that logic. First, this effect only works on a head mesh that's had an alpha property added to support it. All the game's NPCs, however, use existing pre-generated heads that don't have that alpha property, and as such don't have all the non-face areas of the head turned invisible like this. Second, and most confusingly, when a mesh that doesn't have that alpha property set is pointed at a texture that's been altered by erasing sections so as to have areas of the model rendered invisible, it acts as if those erasures never happened. So on head meshes without that alpha tagged in, the full head texture continues to be displayed even if the one in the default texture's folder has been replaced with one modified for mask use.

That previous concern about it not working on existing games was also proven false, as it happily adds the effect to an already-running character.

I don't understand why this works and it kind of annoys me that it does. But since it does, I might as well make use of it. I haven't exhaustively tested it, but so far everything I've seen shows the mask effect only applying to the player while all of the existing NPCs are normal. It seems likely that it would only be an issue for characters that don't have an existing or properly generated FaceGen model, but that's already noticeable through the grey face bug. And you'd have to revert the changes to the default head mesh and texture while working in the CK if you don't want them on your generated characters, as it does apply the effect to all the female NPCs in there. But as long as you don't run their FaceGen you're fine.

And as far as chargen goes, there's now no hiccups for any of the humanoid races. Aside from a lot of the Vanilla hair sets really not working well with the mask effect.

There is some question of what exactly I'm going to do with this, though. Obviously it can't be a default part of the mod, since it's a fairly intrusive change to any and all player characters, but it also seems to be the only effective way to get a functional player Automaton. It's probably possible to use it alongside the original defaults by making a set of separate Automated races, but that's a whole bucket of worms that I don't really want to stick my hands into. Might just release the modified defaults as a separate add-on pack, especially since that wouldn't need an .esp file to work. Or I might just give you instructions on how to use the mask texture already packaged into DMA to do it yourself, since it's really not that hard to do at all once you know the steps for it. Iunno.

In the meantime, one thing I can do with this is streamline building new NPCs like I've been wanting to. Yes, I've already got a bunch in here, but I've been wanting a few to showcase specific parts and body layouts. The Javelin helmet/mask in particular kinda needed one, as I rather like the look of it but its fit on characters with larger noses or cheekbones can be just a bit iffy and it needs a good balance with the mouth.

Another one blatantly cribs from the bandit expansion mod Breton I used to try out the Gladiatrix helmet and a mostly robotic body, as I quite liked how the look turned out.

And yet another is just a quick sort of pseudo-Samus thrown together to go with the Metroid-inspired arm set I made for shits and giggles. Those arms could still use a little work; I got the weighting on the shoulders fixed so that the right one isn't rolling around while firing magic, but the cannon's still not lined up with the magic effect. That's not really a huge priority to fix, though.

I also rolled that cowgirl version of the Dawnguard Redguard that I was amused with in my prior testing into the mod (by treating her like a chargen import, as I'd like to avoid having anything besides Skyrim.esm set as a master file here), but she prompted a few other additional parts. The first ones should be fairly obvious.

That prior version of her just used a playable copy of the Being A Cow horn/ears set that I had put together for use elsewhere, but that didn't entirely work for the Automated setup. Some bronzing, mesh edits, and a few mounting parts later, though...

These are set up like straight circlets, so they're usable with the wig sets. I had originally intended for the same to be true of the last batch of headgear I made, but the skullcaps they were built on to make them more effective as helmets ended up not working well with a lot of the wigs, so they're now just set up as plain helmets. These horns are intended to appear more as clip-on type things. 

They were also made pretty quick and dirty, so while I tried for a certain degree of compatibility between the faces I can't really guarantee it. And they'll absolutely get a bit clippy if you try to use them with a full head, or even just one of the skullcaps.

And of course while the cow horns were the reason for doing this, why would you ever think I would stop there?

There's a few more of these already, including a version of the cow horns without the ears. I miiiiight add more. Depends on what I find that fits. 

But aside from this amusement, adding this character in also prompted me to do something about her chest. I like the MC torso, there, but it has a bit of a flaw as far as using it with these NPCs goes in that it only comes in the pre-expanded 'milker' size or as a Variable part. The permanently big bosom works well enough for a thematic character like this, but I also wanted to use the chest on characters like that Gladiatrix-based one above where a more modest bust would be more appropriate. At the same time I'd like to avoid using the Variable parts as much as possible on NPCs in light of them not being wholly compatible for CBBE users. And while I was at it I could also use a more compatible version of the D2 chest to use on characters with non-mask heads, especially after seeing how well it was working with the Gynoid parts on that Nord up there. I absolutely did not want to do a whole slew of fixed-weight versions of them to match them up to the existing presets, though. In fact I couldn't do that for the D2, since the neck weighting would be completely off for characters at anything less than 100 weight. So the obvious thing to do was to build normally weighted versions of the two torsos. Based on the UNPB preset, for personal preference.

The complication here was that this also required me to make weighted UNPB versions of the various chest coverings, since the existing ones are either fixed weight or the Variable versions that wouldn't be guaranteed to fit. But that wasn't a huge burden, as all I had to do was batch build everything in BodySlide to UNPB and copy & rename them to tuck them into the 'DMN' catch-all that I've been using for the NPC-specific parts. Doing it like that also let me grab .tri files for them, so they should continue to work with SLIF and the like.

Since I did base this on UNPB and made it with the express purpose of using the D2 torso with the Type G pelvis, though, I kinda had to finally get around to fixing the issue with the top ring around the pelvis' mid-torso connection clipping through the back of the UNP-based torsos. Just squeezed it forward a little bit and it looks much nicer. The Type G's are still hopeless with the xF torsos, though. The waists on those are far too narrow for the G's top. 

As has so often been the case in the course of this project, doing all this to get a non-Variable version of the D2 ended up opening a new line of inquiry. Despite having gone to the trouble of adding Beast race support to the Type XXX parts, Beast characters have been conspicuously absent from whole mess of NPCs I've been throwing together. The main reason for that has simply been their heads. Back when I was working on the Vanilla masks from the humanoid races I also made an attempt at making ones for the Beasts. I haven't really talked about it much because it did not work out well at all. It was technically possible, but the cutlines on the meshes were not in particularly opportune places, especially not for the Argonian head mesh which had the cleanest division running right through the middle of where the ear membrane is on the texture. They just really didn't look good. That said, that particular problem could likely be bypassed using the Live face method, as it doesn't rely on the mesh layout and is just a matter of how the texture gets edited. But there's still the other problem that I ran into during that attempt at making masks, which is that the beast heads don't really fit over the human-shaped head frames all that well. They have a lower 'dome' than the humanoid heads, so the tops of the frame structures tend to clip up through them. That could be fixed by making Beast-specific versions of the frames, but ehhhhhhhhh... 

So basically I've written it off as a pain in the ass. But with the non-Variable D2 torso, I can just do the Beasts as a full-thorax Automated with an intact neck. In fact, thinking on it further, I can just set the weighted D2 to be their default nude body and staple DMA parts on to that.

Once you've got that going, well, tossing together these generic NPCs is fairly trivial.

Having them set up like this is both effective and kind of elegant. It amuses me to be able to strip their parts down to the core like this.

But of course, this took me down yet another line of thought. When I took these poor Beast generics off to be killed in the name of science, I also dragged along the one based on Susanna who accidentally ended up as a test corpse a while back to serve as a comparison with the humanoid Automated. The nude body I had been using for them was actually one that I built before I got the Live faces working, and thus was made with the assumption that it would be used on characters using the masks for faces like the first couple of NPCs I put together. I was working with the idea that should they be stripped they'd be stripped down to the bare frame of the torso, so that's what their nude body was. But when used with the NPCs built with Live faces, stripping them bare left a torso frame with a flayed face hovering above it. Not exactly ideal.

So I got to wondering if I could just add in the head frame as part of the nude body. I wasn't entirely certain about it, since it uses a non-standard slot (59), but I threw it together to test it out and what do you know, it works fine.

In fact, doing it like this I don't even need to add the head frame on as part of the outfit, like I'd been doing, as the different slots on a nude body get displaced by outfit parts separately from one another. As long as nothing else is taking up the neck's slot, it'll be visible. This actually streamlines things a bit, as it means I can have a different nude body for each head type- brain, armored, crystal- and distribute them appropriately among the NPCs instead of stressing over building different versions of an outfit with different heads. It'll mean that the brain and armored heads especially won't be lootable, but that's fine since they'll 'belong' with the character's face. The crystal inserts are a bit more questionable, but then I'm thinking that would also be true in-lore.

The dead don't really need a pulsing heart crystal, though. Let's take that out.

Yeah, that's better. Now she looks properly out of commission. 

That bulky bit around the neck popping in after removing the Type XXX torsos with their nice, svelte necklines was still annoying me, though. It also didn't really make much sense from how those torsos were built for them to clamshell open or whatever and have that frame inside. So that was in the back of my mind when out of the blue at work the next day I thought, 'Hey, do the nude bodies even need to have the torso piece?'

As it turns out...

They do not.

This... Is basically perfect. This lets me leave the head frame and the Live face as the permanent body and just build everything else around that. This is actually pretty similar to what I wanted to do in that abandoned 'detachable head' experiment from the DCC project ages and ages ago, albeit in in a completely backwards way from the approach I attempted there. About the only downside is that there doesn't seem to be any good way to block SoS add-ons when the body is empty like this, since they use a similar 'default nude bodypart' system. That'll take some manual editing if you're using the SoS pubic hairs like me, but that was already generally true with the Automated since they're likely to have pelvises that don't match up to the SoS part's bodyslide.

And of course, this doesn't only just work when they're dead.

The obvious problem with stripping them while they're standing being that you're left with a head just floating here in space like this, though. This is really begging once again for some kind of forced animation locking them down onto the ground when nude or something, but that's still a ways outside of my knowledge base. Or maybe some kind of head-specific pedestal, if I can think of a good design for it. I'll have to play around with things a bit. For now the only thing I can really do with headlander here is to perch her on a Display Model rack.

Hey, it's something. Really, truly something. 

A quick upload because it was pretty much done and I wanted to get it out there. The more in-depth lore stuff is in the in-game book and note. 

Enjoy!

And also once again it doesn't help that the bulk of what I have left to do is solid Creation Kit work, which as always is a tedious goddamn grind. Finishing up the beast race support and rubber versions for the Type XXX parts, putting together the NPCs and their default outfits, and very especially building the locations to house those NPCs given that I've had to learn how to fuck around with dungeon building all over again some five years after the last time I gave it a try. I've had some success with the repurposing of Raldbthar that I mentioned in the last entry, but it's also provided a good example of how this shit can get obnoxious.

You see, one of the things that sold me on reusing that particular cell was the room mid-way through it that looked like it could be cast as an output area for the machine that created the Automated living in the ruin. 

After some modifications, cleaning, and giving the place better lighting, it works out just as well as I expected. And the centerpiece, of course, is the actual birthing tube.

This isn't actually what I originally had in mind for it. In fact, this is the third go at it. I originally gave it a longer passage leading into what would've been an actual 'reconstruction chamber' using the Dwarven Repository interior space, but I was already having a hard time getting its entrance to match up with the stone tunnel meshes before trying it out in-game and finding that the whole thing wouldn't visually render until you were actually in it. I did some digging and figured out that this was caused by the 'room' system Bethesda used in a lot of the dungeons, where the spaces are marked off by large invisible boxes that limit how much of the dungeon is rendered at any given time. These are also not visible by default in the CK, you have to go into the settings and turn them on to see where they are. Of course my new space was completely outside of the existing room structure, and since it's not really clear how you go about editing the damn spaces that whole idea had to be abandoned. My next thought was to use a scaled-up copy of one of the Sphere launchers to provide a fancy irised door for the newly-made Automatons to 'exit' through, but apparently scaling it up large enough to match the tunnel put enough of the mesh outside of the room space to cause it to not render in-game either. So this third-try 'fuckit' was to cram the Observatory dome into there. It does look pretty good, but it doesn't actually look like a door per se. I guess the machine could teleport its creations out? Yeah, sure, we'll go with that.

Rehabbing the rest of the ruin is a bit more straight-forward, for the most part. Mostly cleaning and re-lighting, then adding in more stuff for the NPCs to do. The sheer number of Automated NPCs I've put together after discovering that stupid-easy Live Face method does add some wrinkles to that, though. This is a decently large space, but having that many people running around can get messy quick. An idea for handling that that I've mentioned before was to use the door guard idle to lock certain characters to an assigned position in the style of a charge bay or the like. This does mostly work. In the absence of any overriding idle package, the characters placed near the idle markers seem to be quite happy to enter the pose and stay there indefinitely.

Seeing that got me wondering if I could mix this with the Pedestals to produce a display of fully inactive Automated, and it very nearly works. 

Annoyingly, the pose doesn't quite stand straight, which results in a slight but noticeable cant to the pedestal bases. They also aren't exactly 'inactive'; they move around a bit as part of the idle's animation loop, and they'll sometimes headtrack apparently at random. Which isn't exactly a bad thing in and of itself- seeing a pedestal'd Automated move around a bit has its own appeal- but it isn't quite what I was going for.  

The problem is that pretty much the only usable idle I've been able to find in the game that produces anything close to the effect I want is that single gate guard marker. Nothing else comes close.

There's custom idles out there that are closer to what I have in mind, particularly the static Goma poses, but getting them into the mod as a custom idle marker/furniture thing opens a whole fucking can of worms that I don't even begin to know how to deal with, thanks to all the various complications involved in adding animations to Skyrim. The only really feasible route at my skill level would be to outright replace the guard idle, but I definitely don't want to do that because then all the various guards in the game who use it will be stuck with whatever static pose I replace it with. And that route's also more limiting than I'd like. The ideal would be to add in multiple markers that work the same way as this one covering a variety of static poses, because that way I could also use it to build a statuary hall using the stone versions of the bodies. Unfortunately I don't have the slightest idea of where to even start when it comes to making something like that. 

Even with using an idle to shunt some Automated out of activity, though, it's still pretty easy for the space to get overcrowded. It definitely doesn't help that the DMA parts are pretty complex, and I've found that having a bunch of them trying to load in all at once can cause some significant slowdown when entering the cell. So I'm going to have to find some way to split them up more instead of just warehousing them all in the same space, and I think I've found some ways to do that as a result of the location I've picked to center the Facility in. I'd originally thought of this as something that should be placed by Deep Folk Crossing, but after actually trying to build some exits there I've pretty much given up on it due to the really spotty navmeshing in the area. I mentioned last time how I've been looking around for an alternative location, with the ideal criteria that there'd be an existing Dwarven surface ruin with no associated dungeon that I could place it near, in a place pretty well isolated from regular traffic, and with little nearby Falmer activity. There were a number of potential options scattered around the map, but all of the ones I could immediately bring to mind had one thing or another that I didn't care for. Reachwind Eyrie could've been interesting, but it's already a frequent mod target and has a dungeon associated with a Daedric quest right under it, so that ruled it out. The Dibella shrine across the river from Old Hroldan was also tempting, but it's in way too public of a spot. One place I had completely forgotten about, though, was this little ruin at the top of the cliff above the shrine.

At first glance this looked like the ideal place to put my entrance. Out of the way but not too hard to get to, very usable navmeshing, etc. But after scouting around I realized that the Falmer cave Gloomreach was right nearby, which put this out of line with my 'no nearby Falmer' idea.

And then I realized that actually made this location better. 

You see, Gloomreach is a surprisingly empty dungeon. It's got a couple of decently sized zones, some fairly neat bits of layout, and absolutely nothing going on in it. There's a suggestion of a backstory from that layout involving a bandit camp getting taken over by Falmer, but there's no associated quests or notes or anything. You just kill some Falmer, then leave. Well, I've got a bunch of Automated that I made from hostile in-game NPCs that I didn't really have any idea what I was going to do with, and they can kill Falmer as well as anyone else. In fact, that's the whole core of my head-canon for why they were created in the first place. So having some of their natural enemies moving into a cave right next to their HQ gives me the perfect excuse to dump a bunch of them in there to battle it out with them, doesn't it? If that also takes some of the stress off of the main location, hey, two birds.

I'll still probably end up having to build some more housing, though. Both to spread the Automated out, and in service to the bits of story I'd like to try to work in. I currently have an exterior entrance leading directly into the Facility cell, but part of the idea I've had bouncing around for why these guys aren't running around all over the place and how these people got converted to begin with is that getting into the Facility is 99% deadly and getting out is nearly impossible (or at least was until recently, still workshopping that), so being able to just traipse in doesn't exactly work. But actually building the long drop and etc. that I've had in mind would add that much more time to getting this out, so I might just skip it. I'd also like to add in a few side-rooms, something to connect the place to Gloomreach, and maybe something reflective of the Dibellan theme I was working with before hitting on the Live faces that I could link to the nearby shrine.

So there's still a lot of work to do there, and I also stumbled on another rather annoying bit of further work that I'll have to do if I want to decorate these spaces with random DMA parts like I had in mind. Turns out when you place an item into a cell in the Creation Kit, it uses the male ground model meshes. Pretty much all of the DMA parts, however, do not have male ground model meshes set. There didn't seem to be much point in the extra work while I was building them, given that they're female-only, so most of them are either left on the Dwarven armor mesh from the armor entries I built everything from or blanked. So in the CK it either drops that armor model or... nothing, which can get kinda weird. I'm going to have to go back and point the male ground model entries to the appropriate models for all of the DMA parts if I want to place them in-game like this, and that is going to be tedious as fuck. 

And that tedium combined with the hassle of all the car stuff is why I've mostly been doing something completely different the last few weeks.

The part I really enjoy about modding all this stuff is actually building the models. It's a lot more fun than the Creation Kit work, and has the distinct advantage of being a lot easier to pick up and put down as needed, so I tend to fall back on it when I can only catch a bit of time here and there to mess around with things. And while I know I've said that I really need to stop adding things to this already, while I was kitting out the NPCs I did feel a distinct lack in terms of the weapons I had available to them. You see, while I don't dislike the Vanilla Dwarven weapons at all, the sword in particular is a lot more bulky than I personally like my swords to be. There's already a good alternative in the Third Era designs that are available in various mods, but I wasn't exactly keen on the idea of putting them in yet another one through mine, and I do actually like the styling on the Skyrim versions and didn't want to lose that. 

So I figured I'd try building my own.

I'm rather fond of the sort of guardless design found on the Roman Spatha and many Bronze Age swords, so I decided to work with that in mind. My first attempt used parts chopped out of both of the Vanilla swords and Keening, and ended up... Not quite that.

Which isn't to say that they don't look good, mind you. I ended up having to bulk up the hilt from Keening to get it to fit well on the sword's handle, which left it with more of a proper guard. I also ended up with a pretty bad gap between that hilt and the shrunken-down greatsword blade that I had to fill. The original part that was there on Keening didn't really fit, so I spent quite a bit of time casting around for and trying out replacements before settling on the crests from the Lexicon for the normal version and a combo piece made from a couple of DMA eye elements for the fancier one. All in all a perfectly serviceable longsword, but still not quite what I had in mind. So I played around some more with ideas for alternate hilts, and ended up with this:

This got me a fully guardless design reminiscent of a Bronze swords, replacing the hilt with an assembly made from those Lexicon crests and the ever-useful ring pieces that I've been using all over the place. Using those without making them too thick compared to the blade did require me to compress the end of the handle down a bit, and as a result of that and the way the mesh was built I ended up having to cut out the wooden core of the grip due to it coming out somewhat distorted. But that gave me the opportunity to replace it with something more interesting, like the stretched-out black soulgem here, or a rather nice metal core made using some disc elements cut from the greatsword's handle. The whole design turned out to be quite flexible, as I was able to quickly whip up a fancy version with another eye orb from the Vanilla masks in place of the crests, and additional shortsword and dagger variants of all of them.

There's also a Dibellan variant using parts taken from her shrine's model, but unfortunately that needs some mesh rehab on those parts to keep them from crashing the heck out of the CK before it'll be usable. 

But while this turned out quite nice, it still wasn't hitting that 'spatha' spot for me, so I kept looking around for another hilt. After various failures, I happened take a look at the latch piece on the Dwarven gates. 

That's what I was looking for. Especially since this also let me do a particular variant I had in mind, a sort of 'needle sword' with a blade only barely wider than the grip.

That gave me pretty much the entire range of variation I was looking for, so once the car stuff started getting resolved I went to work on putting them into to game for testing. For the most part they worked out great, which was kind of a surprise since these are all built with Outfit Studio. There was one definite annoyance, when it turned out that using the greatsword blade produced a couple of distinct seams in the enchantment overlays...

...but I generally prefer the look of its blade aside from that and really don't feel like going through the trouble of replacing it with the regular sword's blade, so meh. 

Much more of a problem was getting the Dual Sheath functionality to work. I've never really built my own weapons before and certainly haven't messed around with adding Dual Sheath support to anyone else's, but these absolutely need it. It looks great on them!

...Aside from this part.

Since I'm pretty committed to the 'one-handed swords on back' look for my player characters, getting them to not occupy the same space was a priority. Fortunately, that just required moving the left-hand models down by about their own thickness. 

Unfortunately, I was learning how to do this as I went and managed to hit just about every possible damn malfunction, from sheathes ending up on the wrong side after their sword is drawn to sheathes not un-equipping along with the weapon to right-hand swords not drawing in third-person. It was a whole bag of WTF that kept me running around trying to find solutions for a few days.

I was fully prepared for this to be a whole frickin' project by itself to fix, but then it turned out that I was just a doofus and forgot to make sure that the 'WeaponSwordLeft' string was on the sheath models. A-heh.

Works fine now.

There are still a few things that need work there, especially on the daggers which ended up too far apart when worn on the back and with the left-hand one in kind of an odd position when on the hip, but otherwise the whole thing's perfectly functional.

They also look pretty neat racked. They stay in place just fine as well, which I was a bit worried about as that's an issue for some weapon mods.

And they look quite nice in use:

The only problem I have left is that I'm not really sure what to call them. I had a spatha in mind when I started, but only the third one really turned out along those lines and only barely at that. The amount of variants in the second one makes it harder to categorize it as such, too. Maybe I'll just classify them by type, Oakeshott style. 

The shields have been much easier to deal with.

I'm not personally a big shield-user, but the Vanilla Dwarven shield is absolutely A Problem. It does look pretty neat, but it's also massive and unwieldy and tends to clip through the body all over the place. As such finding a replacement for it that the Automated could use seemed like a damned good idea, and the crest I'd already pulled off of the Dwarven greatsword seemed like a great place to start. Once I had that scaled up to size it was just a matter of filling in the back.

That ring piece is really damn handy.

Unlike the swords getting this on the back was a piece of cake, since it only required duplicating the model and changing one string. Hasn't given me a bit of fuss.

More importantly for my purposes, it works just as well on NPCs.

The only real downside to it is that the symbol getting scaled up this much kinda skates the edges of its texture's resolution. I also figured that I could use a more direct replacement for the Vanilla shield, and I had a part laying around that I thought would be absolutely perfect for the job...

Immersion.

This one was a bit trickier to get working, though. Turned out that just dropping it in unaltered aside from the scale produced just about as bad arm clipping as the Vanilla version.

Rehabbing that required flattening it out and shoving it forward a few times, each of which also necessitated alterations to the already kinda iffy handle mount, but I eventually got something I was happy with.

This is obviously a lot massier than the round shield, which can be a bit of a problem when you have it up to block. The cutout does give you a pretty good view but it's well off-center.

It's also pretty enormous on the back, but that just adds to the tanky charm.

All this gives me a much better range of armament options for the Automated once I get these all finalized and into the main mod, but honestly they all turned out nicely enough that I'm very tempted to release them as a stand-alone pack as well. Aside from the Third Era stuff, I've long felt that the options for Dwarven weapons were a bit lacking. All the guns and chainsaws and whatnot are cute, but they're not really on-theme with what we've seen from the Dwarves in Skyrim and stuff that was just wasn't really there. I don't know about anyone else, but this is certainly an itch that I've wanted scratched for a while.

One more thing to bring up before I go. As part of my flailing around trying to fix those Dual Sheath issues, I finally got around to upgrading to the latest version of Outfit Studio. I ended up not needing it to physically flip all of the left-hand sword models, thankfully, but I did find the texture map editing tool they recently added to it. The first thing that came to mind when I saw that, of course, was re-centering the pattern on the Edhildil bikini top. 

This worked out exceptionally well, but also leaves me with a bit of a dilemma. You see, the upside of this is that it gets the radial grid pattern centered on the nipple. The downside of this is that it gets the radial grid pattern centered on the nipple.

It's not a huge change, but it definitely ups the sketchiness factor. Takes it from arguably immodest to distinctly lewd. For something that's supposed to be the more 'presentable' outfit available for the Automated to run around in, that's a significant change. It does look nice...

...But given that it's no longer quite managing to fulfill its intended purpose I'm not entirely certain I want to move forward with it. Also applying it to all the fixed-weight versions would require completely regenerating those, which would be a pain. I don't think I'd want to have both in, either, and not just because jfc the parts count. I'd probably be fine with that if I ever find a more genuinely modest outfit that can work with the body parts, but just having two slight variations of the same top doesn't really cut it. 

Eh, I'll figure something out eventually.

We'll start with an update on those Vanilla clothing-based bodies I brought up last time. I showed in that post that there was a bit of a problem with the neck plate fitting onto the neck seam in the skin on the robes I was using, which confused me some. Well, I belatedly realized what was causing that. You see, I've known about this odd bug in the Creation Kit where if you have the CK open and then generate an outfit in BodySlide so you can create the armor entries for it and get it into the game, the in-game outfit's weight scaling won't work. Turns out the same thing happens if you move a purely Vanilla mesh into a different folder while the CK's open. It just can not, for whatever damn reason, parse the weight scaling on any mesh that wasn't in-place in the file structure before the program starts. So that was an annoying but easy fix... That I didn't actually realize was the issue until I had worked up a different fix, which was to replace the skin sections of those meshes completely.

This was a pretty quick and straight-forward modification, just made by duplicating and enlarging the neck ring a couple of times, but I rather liked how it turned out. It also bypassed the whole issue I was having with reconciling the skin sections on those outfits with the alternate material bodies, which helps keep these suitable for the 'clothed statue' idea that was one of the main reasons I wanted to do these in the first place.

This also led to me restructuring how these were implemented. Originally they were just direct, unaltered copies of the Vanilla meshes with the existing Doll Collar neckplate mesh seconded into the outfit, which led to me scrapping the Apprentice Robes there because they had some issues with the fit with the Doll hands and feet at the wrists and ankles. Since I ended up having to modify the necks of the College set as well- they have a tiny scrap of skin mesh at their collars that leaves a tiny space to be filled in after it's removed- there wasn't any good reason not to just go ahead and do the fixes there as well. So these are now wholly discrete models with their own proper weight scaling and integrated neck plates. Pretty much all I need to do with them is a few touch-up fixes and to build their ground models. Along with the ground models for everything else I've done recently. Those are a biiiiiiig part of the 'too much of a hassle to do right now' pile. 

A lot of what I've been doing instead could be charitably classified as 'play-testing'. The save with the Dunmer character that I've been using for a while had been getting increasingly clunky lately, so I took some time to pare out a few of the more script-heavy mods that I didn't really use all that much and start up a new character. I figured that since I needed to do that anyway I'd take the opportunity to fill in a thin spot in my NPC's racial representation and build a donor face for a new Automated Breton, as B17-1 up there was the only one I had. I did have a couple of Bretons that I had worked up while building faces for the Vanilla mask project, but I honestly didn't much like how they had turned out. Having to build to the restraints of the head frame for the swappable masks limited things a lot, and they came out a bit too generic-looking. Not having that particular restriction in this case, since I don't plan on building a swappable mask from the face, let me be much more creative in how I laid the face out. Especially as far as the eyes go, which I took as an opportunity to go Full Pixie.

For the purposes of this run I'm not decking her out in the DMA parts and just gave her some simple Dwarven Augumentation modifications, as I'm also using her to test out some salvaging I've been doing from other mod outfits for personal use. But eventually she'll be added to the Automated roster as B6-13.

(The Fair Skin makeup's nose shadowing always looks weirder in NifSkope than it does in-game, just ignore that.)

Alongside of her I made some quick non-DMA Automated NPCs inside one of my personal-use mods to use for practicing in-world placement and follower recruitment, as I found that altering those on the DMA NPCs after I had encountered them in-game could be a bit iffy. I mostly took that as an opportunity to make Automated out of some faces that I liked but couldn't really use in DMA, such as some sourced from bandit expansion mods:

But I also happened to include one sourced from a quick NPC I made to play around with Being A Cow, based directly on one of the wilderness encounter Dawnguard NPCs. 

She also happened to be the donor for one of the generic Redguard masks I made for the Vanilla set, as I rather like her face, but I hadn't included her with the batch of Automated I made from existing NPCs inside of DMA because I'm pretty sure that would require me to set Dawnguard as a master file, which I've been reluctant to do so far. Nothing says I couldn't just import her face like I have to do for the custom NPCs, though, and I might just do that because she is fun to have around. I carried on her previous version's cow-girl theme for the heck of it, with the horns and ears set salvaged from BaC, the Pony legs, and...

...the robotic tail, which I actually finalized a while ago but could never find a good space to wedge into these updates. It gets the improved base I showed before for the beast race tails and keeps the large cable element for the tail itself, but the simple sphere at the tip's been replaced by a more streamlined structure made from part of the Centurion bust decoration. The new tip ties the design together a lot better, and the base managed to work pretty well with the bikini bottoms here, as well as the bare Type XXX pelvises and even the robotic ones. 

I also added an extra little touch to that tail-base, mostly for the ground models but also for the little bit of exposure it gets when used with those robotic pelvises, by giving it something of a 'plug' at the end.

So that whole sub-project is pretty much finished off, aside from, again, some small fixes and building those ground models. I really procrastinate on those, mainly because they're a total pain in the ass. 

Anyway, back to... well, another digression, actually. I'll bring it up now to explain why they're in some later shots, but remember how I've mentioned that the process for making an Automated's face can be applied to any female NPC with an exported FaceGen, including existing followers? I wanted to showcase that idea a bit, so I did just that. I figured that a good place to start was with someone who was already pretty on-theme, like Talyn here. Just make the alterations to her head mesh, go visit her in-game and...

Okay, it isn't actually super noticeable on her at first due to her equipment and hair, but there's not much you can do about that initially. One thing you absolutely do not want to do is remove the hair meshes while making the alterations, however, as this will cause the game to stop recognizing the FaceGen mesh entirely in-game with various unwelcome results. So you'll have to modify that at the dressing stage after you recruit them along with adding in the head frame elements, which you can't do outside of the game without modifying the follower's .esp file. So for now they'll just have the creepy floating face, like this:

Now for Talyn, she's already got a perfectly good cyborg body with a lot of fun things built for it, and I didn't see any reason to replace it with DMA parts. So she just gets a Doll Collar neck plate and a Live head frame. 

As you can see that still leaves her existing hair behind, which can be a bit of a problem as some hair sets aren't entirely suited for use in this context, which was a whole source of issues when I was working up the wigs. In this case the shaved sides don't quite work out, so for now they can be displaced with the Null hair set.

The soul gem didn't quite feel on-theme for her character, though, so I swapped it out for the brain capsule, and gave her back her original neck support as it's a rather neat piece in itself.

After that was deciding on a head covering:

I settled on the crest, mainly because it offers a good view of the brain lights which pairs rather well with all the existing lights on her armor.

So that works well, but in a way Talyn is a low-hanging fruit. She's already a Dwarven cyborg, this just adds to that a bit. So next let's look at modifying a completely random follower mod, like, say... This one.

Here we'll do something slightly different and modify the head after encountering her in-game. The game doesn't freak out over texture changes on the FaceGen models the same way it does mesh changes, so it can change mid-save without any ill effects.

The only downside to all this is that it requires editing the file outside of the game, so there's no real 'immersion' to it. That said, there was a mod posted recently that lets you change wig colors through an in-game interface that then somehow edits the mesh's texture settings outside of the game. I have no idea how it works or if the same process would be feasible for the changes needed to make an Automated's face, and certainly don't have the expertise needed to even try to implement it at this stage, but it's an intriguing feature. And if nothing else, that mod might be handy to have when I finally manage to get the DMA wigs out. But for now we'll have to do things manually, so let's finish off Rosie with her robotic parts...

And then we'll set her up with something a little new.

When I first showed off this Gigadeux-based set, I said that I was going to skip the pelvis as the model wasn't really set up for it. And, well, that's still true- there's no actual hips to it- but while poking around at it I felt that it would work out pretty well as a variant of the Gynoid pelvis design. It took a lot of futzing around and eventually turned into an almost entirely different piece, but it came out well enough. The mid-torso connection is new as the old one didn't quite fit, the number of inner cables had to be multiplied to fill in the visual gap between the belt and belly armor, and the Gynoid hip plates ended up getting replaced with a new design based on the Type XXX joint plates. Pretty much just the core structures and the butt and crotch plates are unaltered.

And it also happens to work out pretty well with the tail:

Once again, this still needs some final tweaks and to have its ground models made, etc. I sure am saying that a lot, huh?

Now, to get this back on thread, let's return to Annabelle here. As I said, she has a 'cow-girl' theme going, so as part of that I kitted her out with the Variable version of the Milker chest and used SGO to get some expansion going. 

This is all well and good and exactly what the Variable chests are in there for, as it amuses me, but there's a bit of a problem with those modesty plates. The mesh they're made from isn't particularly high-poly, but they're tasked with covering a part of the body mesh that both is high-poly and is subject to a lot of potential changes with the BodyMorph system, so at high levels of expansion it's annoyingly persistent in doing this shit:

I had thought I had ironed that out in this version of these, but I guess not. This is only a problem on the Variable versions, of course; for all of the Fixed Weight models I went through and fixed any noticeable clipping during the course of building them and they're not subject to any further morphing. But on the Variable versions there's just so damn many potential, um, variables that it's a giant pain in the ass to account for all of them. So Instead of trying, I decided I'd make a new modesty solution.

The first thing I turned to was the cowling piece I used on the Meteor helmet, as it had a decent cup shape to it. A little bit of work later, and...

...Wait.

This isn't modest at all!

But I like it.

The problem is that the morphs have certain points where they're particularly touchy. The nipples are some of the more complicated ones, especially the length and size sliders which can very easily produce clipping and distortion on models that weren't set up to accommodate them. The best way to start on that is by having an intersection of a decently high number of vertices centered directly over the nipple, but the only place with one of those on this mesh is at the point of the cowling. So it's barely providing coverage.

But that does have its own appeal.

It does have its own limits, though. Stupid-huge morphs can distort the ring element placed at the back to fill in a hollow on the cowling mesh, and very small morphs are not kind to it, as should probably be expected. It does pretty well on the middle sizes, though.

It's also only really suited for use with the MC variable torso there. You can use it with the regular Doll chests, but it's just kinda hanging on. 

So I'm inclined to toss it in, but it's kind of a limited use-case and doesn't actually accomplish what I was looking for out of it. For that I had to turn elsewhere, which led to me brainstorming on places I could source a suitable mesh from. And that led me to someplace a bit unusual: The Dwarven Greatsword.

This was a return to the pastie-style covering instead of trying to make a cup element, which I figured would work better with the non-MC torso applications, using the Greatsword's hilt decoration and pommel caps. They worked out pretty well; the hilt deco has a surprisingly high poly count, especially compared to the similar parts on the other Dwarven blades, while the pommel has an amusing design for the context and provides plenty of clearance over the troublesome nipples.

Both of them took fairly well to the various breast morphs, with almost all of the points where it needed cleanup being at the very edges of the mesh where it contacts the skin. The actual results of the morphs can be a bit varied, but things mostly turn out okay. 

So all that was coming along quite nicely, right up until the point where I tested them in-game. You see, making armor parts out of non-armor meshes can be a bit... Fussy. Sometimes it turns out fine, sometimes the game will choke on them entirely, sometimes something weird and in-between those points will happen. This time we got the in-between.

In this case, the parts just sorta flick in and out of visibility as the camera moves around. Get the camera at the right angle and they're perfectly visible, move it a tiny fraction and they vanish. It's super-annoying, but more annoying is that the only way I know of to fix it is by using the .obj-conversion method to remediate the meshes. Which is all fine and good, except that I didn't find this until after I had made all the fixes to the morphs in Bodyslide, and those don't carry over so now I have to do them again. Which I will do, eventually, because these worked out pretty well, but they're right there on the procrastination list.

So that moves us on to my third choice, which ended up being something between the first two: the chassis piece from the Dwarven Sphere. 

This... Actually worked out a lot better than I was expecting it to. I was anticipating problems similar to the current Spider-based plate's, but it turns out that this piece has an acceptable poly count with an intersection of vertices in a reasonably useful place.

Centering that over the nipple gives me reasonable coverage with just a tiny bit of areola peeking out at the edges for some risque flair. The mesh itself manages to cup the breast while only barely contacting the skin, which helps give it an amazing amount of leeway in conforming to the various morphs. Big, small, even some of the really oddball ones in the UUNP catalog, all but a few super-extremes work fine.

Best of all, it didn't give me any crap in-game.

I'm inclined to get all of these into the mod, but this is certainly the most successful. It manages to be both a cup and a pastie at the same time, so it looks good regardless of the chest it's used on, and its flexibility as far as the morphs go is a fricking blessing compared to the usual fussiness I have to deal with. These will still be somewhat limited in their use, though, as I only intend to include them as Variable versions. The Fixed Weight chests will have to make do with the Spider plates and the Edhildil bras, as adding four more coverings for each of them would add another big chunk to the mod's parts count. I'm already at three pages in AddItemMenu and I haven't even gotten around to putting in all the rubber Doll variants yet, guys. I've got to find some place to exercise restraint. 

Speaking of AIM, I actually have been considering some way besides it to get these parts into the game. Not crafting, setting that up is still too much of a giant pain in the ass, but probably something along the lines of chests placed inside the space I'm planning for the Automated NPCs. Working on that has been it's own headache, though. I've mentioned before that my first experiment involved duplicating a piece of Avanchnzel, but that had had some particularly obnoxious problems involving random things not rendering in properly, so that wasn't going to work.

My next thought was that the NPCs would need something to do in the space anyway, so it would make some sense to use a location that was already set up with idle markers and the like. The obvious place to start there was with a Markarth interior, and that actually worked out fine. So I went ahead and tossed in a bunch of the NPCs I've done so far to test out their deployment.

I found out a few interesting things while doing this. First, I can now confirm that the SoS keywords do apply properly on the torsos when the save doesn't have records of those items from before the keywords were added to them, as all of the panties and torsos equipped on these characters loaded without any complaints. This does mean that you're likely to run into the same problems I was having with them not doing that if you upgrade the mod mid-save, though. Second, is that when making these NPCs I really need to remember to strip out any location-specific AI packages left over from the original NPCs if I want them to stay put. I neglected to do that on the Automated Courtesan I made out of Windhelm's Susanna, and she promptly wandered out and managed to get herself killed by a nearby Forsworn. Although that does give me the opportunity to showcase what looting a dead Automated looks like.

You can further loot the head frame as well, but that'll leave her face floating in space alongside the bare torso frame. The face and the torso frame are the only parts that are her actual 'nude' body, everything else is a piece of armor as far as the game is concerned.

And a note about the hair; that clipping at the cheek seems to be caused by some neck weighting on the forelock reacting to the odd angle the head is resting at. In a normal position it doesn't so that. I don't know if the weighting there is really needed, but I'm also not sure if it's worth the hassle to adjust at this point...

Anyway, the other thing of note is that the Markarth spaces turned out to be way too small for the number of NPCs I need to cram in there. I had only tossed in a handful for testing and it already felt cramped, and I've got a frickin' pile of them made up that need homes. One in-theme way to alleviate that would be to have them in the space but 'deactivated' in some way, to keep them from wandering around and getting in each other's way as they compete for idle markers. The ideal way to handle that would be something that could set the NPCs to act like mannequins until removed, like in the Cursed Mannequin Collars mod that I mentioned before, but that uses a complicated and somewhat limited quest-based method that I have absolutely no clue how to get working. Second-best would be something like the Draugr wall niche markers or the ones that ghosts idle in before they walk through walls, but I don't think there's any way to get those to work with non-Draugr or non-ghosts. I gave the latter a try, but nobody was interested in using them.

Going through the Vanilla markers, the only one that seemed to provide anything close to the effect I wanted was the one for the door sentries at the Imperial HQ in Solitude. It isn't quite what I had in mind, as the NPCs still rotate through an idle pose and head-track so they don't really come off as 'deactivated', but it does seem to keep them in place from what I've seen so far. It may work as a good-enough solution.

But even with that the space is still too small. None of the Markath interiors quite felt right, so started looking at other Dwarven spaces that already had some NPC use. Out of them, the most promising candidate for a donor is Raldbthar. It's a decent sized space with some variety to its rooms and nothing particularly obstructive. The only big change I had to make was that I'd pictured the Automated hangout to be in very good shape for a Dwarven ruin, which required me to clean up all the various rubble piles scattered around the place. But this also freed up more floorspace, so it's worth taking the time to do. 

The part that's really selling me on this is the large room just past the bandit-occupied area, though. part of what I had in mind for the Automated's space was that it would include the machine that created them in some fashion, but I wasn't really looking forward to having to build something that represented that. This room, however, is already set up to look like some kind of large mechanism.

I did some more clean-up here and pulled some fences out to expose the structures at the side of the room; I'm thinking that those could be modified as 'outputs' for the DMA parts, with some ground models littered around and containers here and there containing the entire DMA stock. Similarly, the door at the back of the room is perfect for the exit of the machine that a freshly minted Automated would come through. Everything past that point is set up more as a standard Dwarven dungeon and isn't really as usable as the rest of the space, so I don't mind scrapping it in favor of a reconstruction chamber. It won't be functional, of course, as that would require a whole lot of things that I don't know how to do, but I am pretty set on it as an aesthetic element. 

This is as far as I've gotten with this so far, though. I still have to decide a lot of the details regarding how I'm going to kit out and populate the space, as well as where exactly the entrance to it is going to be. I've currently got the doors to all these test zones peppered around Deep Folk Crossing's upper area, but it's actually a bit of a pain to work with due to its navmeshing being rather spotty. What I'd rather like to do is to associate it with an existing isolated Dwarven surface ruin that doesn't have an established dungeon or Falmer activity all that nearby, but there's not a whole lot of those. I'd particularly prefer it for story purposes if it was in an unpopulated area, but that knocks out otherwise decent candidates like the Dibella shrine on the road to Markarth or the henge near Shor's Stone. Ones that get a lot of attention from other mods like Reachwind or the shrine in the mountains north of Whiterun are a bit iffy, too. Any suggestions as far as that goes would be welcome.

One last thing to mention regards the voices for the NPCs I'm making. The Vanilla voice system has some obnoxious limitations where followers are concerned in regards to which voice types will actually work for follower dialog, which I ran into face-first here when I tried to use the High Elf voice for A5-16. This is an old problem, of course, and has long had a solution in the form of the Relationship Dialog Overhaul mod, but I had never bothered to use that both because I had seldom bothered with followers in my own games and because it has a history of conflicts with PAHE. Given this situation where I suddenly find myself building a whole mass of followers, however, it seemed only rational to give it a try instead of limiting my followers to a whole three voice types. The results have been fairly entertaining. 

They'll even play off of each other sometimes, which is pretty wild.

So yeah, you can probably add that to the list of recommended companion mods when this stuff actually comes out. It certainly makes the whole thing work a lot smoother.

Since figuring out how to get the Live Faces to work, I've been spending a lot of time on developing the various possibilities they open up. Part of that involved getting the faces for my own NPCs set up, but I actually put that off for a while because it required me to figure out how to get frickin' NifMerge to do what I wanted it to do again. Instead, I took a while to explore one of the most interesting aspects of the Live Face process: Just how damn easy it is to apply it to an existing FaceGen head model.

So.

Fucking.

EASY.

Seriously, this is all just laughably simple to do. Make a duplicate of the NPC inside the DMA .esp file, swap out their default outfit for one built of Automaton parts, remove the hair and modify the eyes in the head parts tab as needed, and then just export the FaceGen to run the mask retexturing process on it. Doing that I can make an 'automated' version of basically any female NPC I want. I tried to just keep it to a light skim of the ones I found interesting and decent-looking, but I still ended up with... Well, let's just say a bunch. An assortment of enemies, various wilderness encounter characters such as the generic mercenaries/adventurers and the hunters, even a couple of the cut characters that were lying around in the CK, like the Automated Pit Fighter built from the abandoned Windhelm Arena character, Liesl. I also sourced from various in-game corpses, like the Liar's Retreat barmaid here...

Grabbed a few player pre-sets to provide some race generics...

And I also tossed a copy of Salma in as the Redguard generic, since I had already done that in the prior mask project. What can I say, I like her face. I don't really have plans to do the reverse and make equippable masks out any of the faces generated here, though, as making those is much more of a pain. 

These were all made pretty quickly, so the changes are a bit haphazard. Most of them have their original hair removed, but I left it in some cases where I felt it suited the face well enough. Some of them retain their original eyes, biased a bit towards the neutral characters, with those of the rest replaced with either one of the Portal Eyes sets or with Holzfrau's Dwemer Eyes. The Portal eyes were just copied en masse into the DMA .esp, but I actually found it a bit easier and more flexible to apply Holzfrau's at the .nif level, but because they require some shader changes to get the glow mask working right and because it simplified using them as single-eye replacements. Doing that in the CK requires making a new eye part for each combination, which is a pain, but like this all I have to do is give them one of the existing half-blind sets and edit the FaceGen model in NifSkope as needed. 

The CK's annoying UI is also a limitation on doing custom or fancier hair for these guys, as building the hair sets is also a pain. For the most part I'll just let the randos here use the DMA wigs or helmets. But I have been adding in a small handful of hair sets based on the wigs to give to my hand-made followers so I can give them proper hair colors, which one or two of the generics could also take advantage of.

A side note about those hairs and the Portal eyes: while I have them loaded into the mod, my current intention is to have all of the eyes and most of the hairs marked as unplayable, with the exception of the few hair sets that I modified with Dwarven ring accessories. This will keep them from being available during the player's character creation. I'm doing this in part to keep from completely stealing the original mods' thunder, but also because this whole thing is still pretty much NPC-exclusive. I had some hopes that I might be able to set a modified head mesh as a preset, but it won't even let you produce a FaceGen to modify if that tag is set. About the only other method I can think of that might work is directly modifying the base headshape model, but that's a bit more drastic than I'm willing to do. Especially after all the headaches messing with that for the hardware version of this concept gave me. So I'm gonna keep that set aside for now. 

Anyway, you may be wondering what I'm going to do with all these Automated NPCs. Well, so am I! Seriously, I haven't a clue. I mean, I do have some vague ideas, which are at the moment largely based around this girl:

It's been in the back of my mind since early in the DCC project that, should I ever get around to making cyborg NPCs, they should come from a long-forgotten Dwarven facility that had been quietly producing cyborgs from various lost wanderers for centuries. The general idea would be that the facility itself would be deeply buried and all the access routes cut off over time, aside from something akin to the pit trap in that one in-game Dwarven ruin that keeps dropping anyone who happens upon it to their almost-certain doom. The facility would salvage and recycle the remains, but with all the exits blocked up and no Dwemer around to give them directives, the resulting cyborgs are simply left cooped up in the tunnels trying to make the best of their strange new lives. 

From there, the general outline has this Synod Researcher, who is a relatively recent addition to the Automated, manage to find a way out which leads to them encountering the Dragonborn in some manner. Following that the player gets back into the ruin, where my conversion spree here has given them various enemies, neutrals, and allies to encounter. It could be a pretty neat little setup, except for the fact that it would require me to do a lot more in terms of dungeon-building, quest-making, and dialog writing than I have even the slightest bit of interest, experience, or motivation to do.

I've got Jeff Goldblum doing his 'You were so concerned with if you could you didn't stop to think if you should' line behind my shoulder, here. 

I may still do a low-rent version of this, although I've also been having issues with implementing that. I did a quick copy of a cell from Avanchnzel with an exterior exit near Deep Folk Crossing to give myself a space to drop completed NPCs into and test how well they spawned into the game, but it has this obnoxious habit of not visually rendering chunks of itself until the player is actually in them, requiring you to just dash into the grey void and hope the room appears around you. So that's obviously not usable. I'm left trying to find someplace I can copy that will work, or trying to hand-build a dungeon, neither of which fill me with happy anticipation. 

Regardless of how I end up getting them into the game, I've got a pile of NPCs to work with all of a sudden. The generics are pretty simple, as I can mostly just copy over all of their existing data. Building out a variety of outfits for them to use will probably be the bigger time-sink as far as they're concerned. My newly-built NPCs, however, require more care. I did eventually figure out the NifMerge stuff I mentioned earlier so I've been able to get their faces into the game easily enough, but actually deciding on things like their individual roles and settings and spell loadouts and so forth takes a fair bit of thought, so I've been lucky to manage two a day. And since I seem to be making followers out of all the non-Vanilla NPC masks I built, well...

It's pretty worthwhile, though. Some of these are faces that I made specifically for the masks, like A5-16 here, so it's quite neat to see them in motion.

Others are salvaged from my DCC testing characters, like 10-7 and 11-20, and it's nice to have them running around again.

And yet more are from that old personal corpse-salvaging project, like this Imperial here. She actually replaced the pre-desecrated Corpse NPC that the CK for some reason includes for the Kilkreath corpses; there was a mod dungeon that I had been playing with that had a bunch of them lying around for some reason, and my wanting a better-looking version to raise was what kicked off that whole project. Now here she is years later, getting to live yet again.

Sourcing from that project also lets me salvage a some characters that never really got to fulfill their intended roles. B17-1 was originally a replacement for the mage corpse that was supposed to be found near Deep Folk Crossing with the book that points you at the Aetherium quest. I picked her out more or less at random when I was skimming through the CK for corpses to upgrade, but I hadn't encountered her in the wild before then. Turns out, as I found after making the new face for her, that's because her body has an annoying habit of floating away to parts unknown before you can get to her. I think I only managed to find her properly placed once. So it's nice to have a place to use her independent of that, and as part of that I had actually been considering giving her the role of the introductory character instead of the Synod girl. And to that end I used her to test out something else I've had in mind for a while...

The problem with using clothing with the Type XXX body parts has always been that the modifications to the body severely limit the kinds of clothes that would fit over them. But in the Vanilla outfit system, the clothes simply replace the entire body. Part of the reason I included the Variable hands, feet, and neckplate was to account for that, as they can be equipped alongside a normal outfit to provide some suggestion of an Automaton wearing clothes. Of course for anything that shows much of the body the effect is ruined a bit by the very non-Automated body and legs being visible, but with a full-coverage outfit like the robes you can convey the idea of an Automated passing through society in disguise. 

Now you can use the existing in-game robes for this just fine, but I've been a bit hung up with them because I also want to use this on statue automata, and the UUNP-converted robes I use have too much breast bounce for that to quite work.  Taking the bounce out would require me to provide my own copies of the mesh with the bones removed, and that would limit their body-agnosticism, and I'd have to add them in to the Bodyslide lists, and so on and so on, so I'd kicked the idea to the back burner. But when it came up again while I was considering B17-1's outfit, I thought, 'Hey, why not just grab the Vanilla models and use them?' So I did. And it works. Mostly. 

Aside from that. That Vanilla neck seam does not seem to want to work with the Doll collar in a lot of places, surprisingly. I haven't quite figured out how to address that, yet. Having the skin there at all is a bit of a demerit for using this with the statues, although what I have in mind for them would see them wearing the hood full-time, so it's a bit less of a concern. It would be possible to replace that section of skin with a piece cut from a Type XXX torso, but that would have the same problem as far as the other materials go and I don't really want to have to do multiple versions of these to work with that. So I'm currently leaning towards replacing the entire section of skin with something mechanical. That would peg these more as 'alternate bodies' instead of 'Type XXX bodies wearing clothes', but I think I can live with that. 

And yes, by 'these' I do mean that I've already included a few others. 

I basically limited these to outfits with an associated hood and that the DMA parts happened to fit into well. That last point cut out the more common Apprentice Mage robes, as they had some issues around the wrist, but the Journeyman outfit both fits the parts quite well and looks very good with the Mage hood, which was a bit of a surprise as that combo is very rare in-game.

But while all this does look good on her, B17-1's face was always one that I had made to be just a little bit more sultry than most of the others, and it felt like a bit of a shame to bundle her up like this. That face seemed like it would be a particularly good fit for a Type XXX body, so why not have her... let loose?

Yeah, that's more like it. Going back to that vague storyline I've got in my head about all this for a bit, I'm thinking that part of the setting for the Automated has the conversion process messing with their heads a little bit. However, the machine that builds them wasn't quite finished before the Dwemer were wiped off of Nirn, and the reprogramming that was supposed to be done to their minds as a part of that process is incomplete. The primary directive to obey the Dwemer is present, but entirely irrelevant. The secondary directive to destroy the Falmer... Might be present. I'll have to see what I can do with factions, as far as that goes. But as for the additional directive to 'provide companionship', well... 

Some of the subjects were very receptive to it.

Anyway, that's going to be the default outfit for her. Deciding on these outfits is its own process, depending on the parts I have available and the idea I have in mind for the character. Sometimes I'll try out something new with the former, only to find out it doesn't quite work with the latter. For example, the Orc Subject, O11-10,

I threw together a few 'toned' body pieces using the 7Base parts and one of the muscular normal maps, which works reasonably well. Since I built them right before I put this Orc character together, I figured I might as well try them out on her. And they look pretty good! But the problem is that this face comes from a DCC test character who I had nicknamed 'the soft Orc', so... Not quite what I had in mind for her. So eventually she's going to end up with plusher body parts (and probably different hair), and these muscles will go to somebody else. This is the advantage of interchangeable parts.

Sometimes I won't have anything specific in mind when making the NPC and'll just toss whatever together for an outfit, and then go back and figure out what'll work best after seeing how the face looks in-game. N4-23's face has been hanging around in a few of these posts, as it was one of the last of the Vanilla masks that I made and was on one of the followers I was using to test various things. My initial thought was to give her a rubber body with the HV limbs that I had tested on her precursor...

...but after seeing how well that face worked with the hair I had picked out for her, she definitely felt like she needed something brighter.

That hair actually changed my plans for her quite a bit. I had been considering using her to showcase some of the new headgear, which her face is pretty well suited to...

But the hair just works so damn well. I really don't want to mess with it. 

...Okay, maybe a little.

But being Automated isn't all smut and glamour. I figure I ought to have a few people around who aren't adjusting all that well to their circumstances, and to that end I'm also adding some Worker Units who have clearly been having a rougher time of things. I'm starting them off with CL-22, who's based on the face I made for Larina, the NPC who gets ritually sacrificed in Hobb's Fall cave. Thanks to the NPC mood settings, it doesn't look like her successor is much better off.

With her we have kind of the reverse situation as with N4-23's hair, where I've given her a default hair set but don't really want it showing all the time. That one's from the Apachii set, and while it's great at presenting loose, unkempt hair, Skyrim's stupid multiple transparency bugs means that the part that goes over the right eye renders that eye invisible in chunks. That's less noticable on the Research Assistant, but it kinda stands out here. Using the TAWOBA crest also isn't great, because while it really showcases that the head is a hollow structure behind the face, it really showcases that the head is a hollow structure behind the face, with there just being nothing past the top edge of it. It's a little bit too disconcerting with the Live faces, honestly. But I do kinda want to show off the insides of her noggin a bit, since its contents tie into another angle from that head-canon story of mine. Having those various brain and crystal insert options for the heads raises the question of what exactly they mean for and to the Automated who have them. I figure they represent a sort of ranking; the Automated who possess a Brain Capsule, particularly the visible one, have a certain amount of assurance that they are still themselves, with their original minds and capacity for growth. Those whose minds are imprinted onto the Lexicon core could be said to have been paid a sort of a compliment, as this most complex of the crystals is often carried by those who were strong in magic or thought in their previous existence, but the question always lingers as to whether or not they are the 'real' them or just a copy. The workings of the machine that created them are too obscure for them to ever be sure. Those with a Black Soul Gem can at least assume that they are still being driven by their original spirit, but may find that their memories grow spotty over time. The Centurion core is the least of the lot, suitable only for the weak-minded, but it still may be preferable than the Grand Soul Gems. One of these gems is insufficient to hold a human soul, but the machine has a way to split the Automated between two of them, working in tandem to drive their new body. It's unclear why this option is chosen, but the results for those who were converted in this way can apparently be quite distressing. 

Which is all a long way of saying that the Grands will go to the sad sacks, the Lexicons to the mages, the Centurion cores to the low-level bandits, and so forth. I'm not quite sure how to present the Falmer and Meridian crystals yet, but they'll probably be the mid-range. The follower NPCs will tend towards Lexicon crystals and actual brains, while the enemies will get the lower-end stuff. 

And poor CL-22 will get a Gilded helmet for her final headwear. You can still see the crystals through the side-vents, but she wants to hide her shame at least a little bit.

Deciding to include NPCs with the pack has weighted a number of the things I've been working on, with a lot of my focus directed at new options aimed at specific character types not quite covered by the existing equipment. One of the things I wanted was a new set of arms tailored to spellcasters; sure, they could just use the normal human-like arms, but where's the fun in that?

Much better. 

These are fairly straight-forward, made by simply taking the cyborg blade arms apart and swapping in the Dwarven staff model. The problem was getting the arms' position to line up tolerably well with where the magic effects show up. It's kind of impossible to get it perfect, for various reasons, so I fudged it a bit by adding in some modified versions of the Centurion core crystal along the staff's shaft in the approximate position that the hands should be at to act as a sort of 'magic generator' thingy. It more or less works. 

Individual results will probably vary a lot given the exact animation sets people use, of course. There's way too much variety there to bother accounting for. And this isn't quite complete yet, as I only have this double-staffed version built up so far. I also intend to add a version that has the wand arm on the left and the blade arm on the right, to account for the common Spellsword style of combat. I don't see much point in doing one the opposite way around, though, since having magic in the right hand and a weapon in the left doesn't really happen in the game. I'll probably also do versions with the axe and hammer arms; the variants will be pretty trivial to make now that I've got the parts built, so that's not much of a burden. I'm a bit uncertain if I want to bother doing a version paired with a gauntlet, though, since I kinda see this as something that would only be equipped by dedicated combat automata. That said, I have been working on a version that uses a gauntlet, but it's not the one from the Type B arms set. You see, when I was turning the thigh armor into bicep armor for the Gigadeux-based limbs, I couldn't help but think that the bicep armor ended up looking awfully similar to that on a particular Figma I have on my desk. So given that this new weapon arm set had also given me a sort of arm cannon, I kinda went and ran with it.

Tee hee. 

This is a one-off with its own 'Type SA' designation, but it can pair up pretty well with some of the other robotic parts for a more complete galactic bounty hunter look:

The shoulders are a bit of an issue, though. I was able to transfer over the weighting from the Gigadeux armor's pauldrons to mostly decent effect, despite the mass of the things, but there's one oddity that I noticed when using a continuous spell like Sparks. The shoulderpad on the gun-arm will sort of slowly roll forward as the casting animation plays, only to suddenly snap back at what I'm assuming is the point where the animation loops. It's a bit annoying, but damned if I know how to fix it. 

A larger problem is that getting the magic effects to line up with the staff bits has proven to be even more of a pain in the ass than on the initial Wand set. It's kind of more vital that they do on a smaller arm like this, since it's supposed to end up much closer to the 'muzzle', but finding a point where it will line up has thus far evaded me. 

This is rather annoying, but I'm also not sure how much effort I want to put into what is basically a joke set, so. I'll poke at it some more when I have time, but it's not a priority.

Getting that basic set of Wand arms working was a priority, though, as I had them in mind for a specific NPC that I wanted to include in this. You might have noticed her lurking in the background in the last post. She's kinda hard to miss. 

Way back when I first started messing around with modding, one of the things I tried out was doing some visual improvements to various dead NPCs that I would then acquire into my household using the raise-paralyze-PAHE trick. Among those was Yisra, the apprentice from an unimplemented College questline who managed to immolate herself testing a flame cloak spell. She only exists as a burned corpse at a POI in-game, but she does have an unused full NPC model buried in the game data. When I revamped her I went all-out, giving her the Flame Spirit's fire body effect and the Flame Atronach's fire trail and spells, and finding that she was actually pretty entertaining to have around I ended up making a fully-functional follower out of her. Unfortunately I made those NPC edits in a kinda hackjob manner, getting in new hairs and eyes by tricking the CK into thinking that their .esp files were .esm files so I could use them without duplicating them into the .esp for the NPCs. I didn't want to do that again when I set things up on the new computer, but sadly that prevented the mod from working on the new setup. I was, however, left with all those head models sitting on the old hard drive that I could raid as sources for the Vanilla-based masks I ended up working on for this project, letting me resurrect a bunch of that old work. In light of that it just made sense to rebuild Yisra as a fire-based combat-centric automaton.

For some extra fun, I also used the subtle burned body textures Holzfrau made for the -BAF- set to make up a special set of parts for her to carry on the burntastic theme, in both business and casual:

The effect does get a bit washed out in the flames, sadly, but it amuses me that it's there.

Also of note is that while the flames are entertaining, they do make some activities a bit... Toasty.

(Hott.)

On the subject of Holzfrau's skins, there was another one that I felt could be useful for NPC use: the 'frankensteined' skin from their Halloween Pack. I would think the reasons why should be obvious.

This has been in my experiment list for a while. What I really wanted to do with it was make certain parts asymmetrical, to really sell the idea of it being made from stitched-together parts, but I couldn't find a viable way to do that in Outfit Studio. When was planning out the sort of NPCs I wanted to have in the pack, though, the idea of having a 'scraps' character was pretty appealing. So I put in a set using this texture on the Demonfet body parts, since it felt like the most unbalanced without getting completely silly about it (looking at you Manga body).

She doesn't actually have a full NPC built yet, for a few reasons. The first is that I'm not sure if I want her to be a unique NPC or a sort of mob character. The latter idea could be fun, but while making enemy types and populating dungeons would work pretty well with some of the vague ideas I've been having while plotting out NPCs, they would also require me to make a lot more investments in things I really have no experience in doing. Another was complicated by discovering the Live faces; my initial intent was to use a selection of the more shocked-looking SeXtreme faces if I were to make multiple characters out of this, but having faces that can actively emote would be pretty neat as well. But the old faces do still have their charms...

So yeah, not quite sure where I'm going to take this, yet.

The Live faces also add some complications to Yisra and her ilk. Since I do have all those old head models and doing the steps to get the modified mask texture on them is pretty trivial, I fully intend to give all of them back their mobile faces. Actually getting those old models to work with the new NPCs is kind of a pain, though. I'll have more to say about that in a future post. I'm also hitting some complications in regards to SoS support. I added the bikini pieces to this in part as another thing that I wanted for a specific NPC and figured that they'd work well as a sort of default outfit element, but there's a bit of an issue where including the panties in an outfit where the torso section has not already been registered with SoS as 'revealing' often results in this happening when the NPC is spawned:

The NPCs built for this pack will have their default 'nude' bodies replaced with the stripped DMA torso frame like this, so it isn't the entirely catastrophic result that it would be if that wasn't the case, but it does leave the bikini top just sorta bouncing out in space like that. Worse, in iAFT's system at least, setting them so the player can manage their outfit causes the proper torso to pop back on, but the equipped panties vanish from the game entirely. The only work-around I've found for that is including a spare set of panties in their non-outfit inventory, which is accessed by a different command than the outfit in iAFT.

Obviously, this isn't ideal. I did some digging around and found that there's an 'SOS_Revealing' keyword that you can add to armor parts to have the system automatically treat them as revealing armors, which should solve the problem. But I added that to all the Type XXX torsos and I'm still running into the issue, now with the added quirk of the parts being marked as 'revealing' in SoS's MCM, but not actually getting set as revealing until you click the toggle. This may just be the result of adding the keywords in mid-game like this; I'll have to find time to start up a new game and see if it keeps doing it. But it's been a definite annoyance, especially in light of my concurrent plan to ditch the 'permanent' modesty parts in favor of removable panels which also use slot 52. If it still doesn't work, I'm gonna have to have all these folks spawn bottomless.

As for that Dark Elf there, she's another salvaged NPC that I made loosely based on Sild's assistant, who regularly spawned as the dead female Dunmer bandit mage when I was looking around for corpses to revamp. In light of that I'm casting her as a unit built to assist around the lab, loaded up with various shock spells. She's also proven to be a useful testbed for some of the stuff I've had to figure out to get all this running smoothly, including how to change out parts of an outfit (you can right-click to bring up a delete command everywhere else, Bethesda, so why can you only use the actual delete key there?) and re-learning how to import the damn head models to get her Live face up and running:

Let's see, what else... Ah, right, the other-other skin thing. Let me preface this by mentioning that I'll sometimes skim over my old posts to remind myself of old ideas and concerns, which is part of why I get as wordy as I do. Anyway, in one of them I mentioned how the Stone and Metal bodies had a flaw consisting of noticeable texture seams at their hips, resulting from using a generic 'tile' texture instead of one designed specifically to map onto the body. I also mentioned how the only real way to fix that was to create a texture that was mapped to the body, which was a bit outside of my skillset. That's still true of the stone skin, but it occurred to me that getting a better metal skin might not be as difficult as I thought.

The thing about the Dwarven textures is that the bright golden shine on them comes entirely from their cubemap. Stripped of that, they're all just these dark, weathered bronze shades. Inspired by the help I got from Holzfrau with the bronze version of the PK faceplate, I realized that all I really needed was a version of the base skin texture with the color adjusted to mimic those bronze shades.

That said, actually getting it right took a lot of trail and error. How the textures and cubemaps react to each other in Skyrim's engine can be amazingly finicky, and finding the right color for the skin to get it to display a decent sort of polished brass effect was pretty difficult for someone like me who doesn't have the best color vision. More props to Holzfrau for helping me out with that. 

The previous version used the same 'dwemer tile 3' texture that I've used to bronze a number of different things, and was useful for its ease and color consistency with the other brass parts. This approach results in a distinctly more polished and oiled look for the skin parts, but I think that feels more appropriate considering what they are. More important is that this eliminates a number of flaws, such as those aforementioned seams around the hips and buttocks, one really blatant bit of color miss-match at the left hip's seam due to the mottled nature of the Dwemer tile texture, and all the distorted and stretched mottling on many of the chests caused by it trying to apply a small section of an already low-res texture to much too large of an area. This method also has the amusing side effect of allowing a hint of the areola texture to show through. That effect was more pronounced on an earlier version, though. I may go back and tweak that a bit at some point. 

That Dwemer tile method of bronzing continues to be useful in other places, though. I happened to recall my earlier statement about how the skullcap I made for the new TAWOBA-based headgear could be useful for future designs one day, and, well, I ran with it.

There's a bit more to the story of that last image. I realized after I first threw it together that the headgear made with the Wolf armor set's toothy mask would pair up pretty well with the beast limbs and tail parts already in the set, but it needed a little something extra to really sell it. Something like kitty ears. I was having a hard time figuring out how to build them, though, before I remembered the cowling piece from one of the DLC elements. That happened to be exactly the shape I was looking for... And I also remembered that I had intended to and then completely forgot about making a new helmet based around it. Whoops.

Combine that cowling, the new skullcap base, some parts taken from the Aster and a few bits of fill, and you get...

The Meteor.

Slotted between the Ripper and the Aster, with normal and 'Elf ear' versions like the former and glowing bits like the latter. The name is intended to relate it to the Aster, and also to serve as a subtle nod to how well it works with another part...

Yeah, it's not remotely on-model, but I like it.

As for the other stuff, it's mostly just a pile of the pieces that I felt worked best in the context, mostly taken from the TAWOBA circlets.

There are some further modifications on some of them, which you may have noticed. Many of them had to be reshaped slightly to fit over the skullcap, and in the course of that I found that the horns on the Steel Horned Helmet-based models tended to deform in annoying ways when the areas of the band near them were adjusted. I decided it would be easier to deal with that by separating them from the mesh... and then found that the models looked much, much better without them. So now they have a gladiator theme instead of a Viking one. The one based on the Ebony mask got a glowing eyeband, and was named the Javelin to put it in theme with the earlier Ebony-based headgear, the Lancer. And yes, that's exactly why. The last one is the only non-TAWOBA one from this set, using the horns taken from the Yngol helmet. If you get why it's called the Trickster, you win a No-Prize. ?

I also finished building the additional hair sets and added them into the mod, including the material variations. Some of the brass sets do a fun job of demonstrating why I wanted these particular hairstyles in there:

The key part to getting these to work was having that scalp mesh that I could freely manipulate, since without it there'd be all these weird gaps and holes visible from angles that looked inside the open structures of the robotic heads. But while I was making adjustments to various things by loading the hairs onto a head and face model in Outfit Studio, I couldn't help but notice something when the main hair meshes were turned off...

That, uh... That actually really works.

It works with some caveats, tho, given that it's completely accidental. First, it doesn't quite fit to the cut line on the face at the temples. There's a thin gap that any glowing element inside of the head can be seen through. Second, it's from a human-use hair, so the fit with the Elven masks is just a bit questionable in many respects.

I'm disinclined to make an Elven-fitted version, though, since it runs into the idea of the masks being swappable across races and because I already had to do some messing around at the back to get it to fit around the brain capsule that'll be even more difficult should the mesh be shrunk down to elf size. So that kind of limits it there, but not nearly as much as this does:

Yeah, this does not work with the SeXtreme faces, like, at all.  The shapes of their foreheads are just too different from the Vanilla heads. That's cropped up a few times in the course of selecting hair sets for this pack, and it's one of the things that I've sometimes just had to ignore. Which I'm going to have to do here, because with the regular human faces at least it really does give an ideal gynoid look. 

One that can only be improved by doing it live:

Yeah, that's the stuff. More of that later. 

Okay, nothing actually that over-dramatic, but still. I managed to figure out something that's been bugging me for a while, and I'm a little excited about it. So while I had a pile of other stuff that I've been working on banked for a post, I'm gonna skip over it for the moment and show off something that I worked out literally yesterday.

Pretty much right from the first point I started at making masks from in-game faces with the COR heads, I've also been poking at the idea of making 'living' faces that could be used with the DMA system. One of the biggest flaws with making equippable parts out of the games' head meshes is that they lose all of the facial animations. That was one of the first things I stumbled across during that abandoned 'detachable head' experiment early in the DCC project, and I've yet to find any reasonable way to add them back in while maintaining the parts' swappability. It just doesn't seem to be something the game's really built to do. When I was cutting the head meshes up into masks, however, it occurred to me that doing things the other way around and making 'mask' versions of the head meshes should be technically feasible. It would lose the capability to swap around faces, as they'd be treated just like the game's regular headparts and thus would be restricted to the single character that they were built for, but having a 'cyborg mask' with working facial animations was enough of a draw to make investigating the idea worthwhile. 

Now, there's two ways to approach this, design-wise. The first is what you could call the 'hardware' solution- physically chopping up the mesh in the same way I did for the masks and subbing that in for the character's existing head model. I've featured my attempts at this route before in this blog, but it never quite worked. While subbing the mesh in was possible, it turned out that having it mismatched with the head's .tri files resulted in a number of the facial animations and morphs going all, to use the technical term, 'wonky'. There didn't seem to be any way to remedy that short of making whole new .tri files for the mask-cut head meshes, which was well outside of what I know how to do, and I also had concerns about how those altered meshes would or wouldn't work with existing face presets. So after a last try around the time I was making the first batch of the Vanilla faces, I pretty much gave up on the idea.

The second route would be the 'software' solution, and was actually the first idea I had for approaching this because it seemed much easier... but then I could never get it to work. Theoretically, all you really need to do to achieve the effect I was looking for was to alter the head's skin texture by erasing everything except the face. Without a texture, the rest of the mesh should be invisible and thus function about the same way visually as the physically cut mask meshes. Problem was that it didn't. I could alter the texture all I wanted, but when I tried applying it to the mesh, the mesh would inexplicably continue to display the unaltered texture on the areas that should've been rendered transparent. I had no idea what was going on there and that last point was particularly weird, so I shied away from it and explored the hardware solution instead. But the other night, and I'm not even sure what exactly prompted this, I started thinking about it again. I'd had to figure out how to make headpart entries in the Creation Kit as part of getting the null heads for the DMA followers I've been messing around with to work, and it occurred to me that I should look at how the use of texture sets and skin swaps on headparts might affect things, especially in light of how I had to use them extensively to get the right skins on the Doll bodies. I also wanted to see how a non-Vanilla skin set like on the COR races worked, so I loaded up an early COR follower mod in the CK and started poking around at it. 

Turns out none of that actually mattered, though. No matter how I tried re-pointing the textures, it kept doing the same thing. So as a last-ditch effort I opened up the character's head model in Nifskope to take a look at things... And remembered all the 'NiAlphaProperty' tags that I had to pull from hair meshes to disable the transparency effects for the stone and brass versions. Surely, I thought, it can't be that easy.

It's that easy. ?‍♂️

Look, I still don't know how a lot of this stuff works, okay? I'm just high-level faking it. 

Lilitha had a bit of an issue as a test subject, though, as her hair's built in a way that makes it basically permanent. But there didn't seem to be any reason the same method wouldn't work on Vanilla faces. So I made dupes of a couple of my old NPC projects, good 'ol 12-16 and an appearance modification of the 'Swimmer' from the north Reach that I made ages ago, and applied it to their head meshes.

Now first off, this initial test clearly shows one of the problems with this method, which is figuring out exactly which parts of the texture need to be erased. This isn't helped much by the fact that the texture isn't mapped on all that evenly, so doing a quick and dirty oval cut-out of the face left me with jaggy edges and way more scalp than I expected, thusly:

But this was more than good enough to test out the concept with, and the details can be fixed later. The next problem is providing a robotic frame for this, as the ones already included in the DMA are set to a slot that would displace this face. But I already had some Crystal Frame heads set to alternate slots from the hardware solution's experiments, so that was a non-issue for now.

The exact logistics of those head frames are going to require more thought, though. Which slot they'll use is one concern; they need to be on one not really used by anything else to avoid them getting displaced at random. I've currently got one on slot 35 and one on 50, but I need to look around and see exactly how much competition those have. Another issue is the design of the frames, especially around the eyes and jaw. These were originally designed for the very non-Vanilla Sextreme faces, and while they happened to fit into the COR faces just fine I found out early on in the Vanilla face project that they were a bit too over-built for them and tended to clip through a lot of the thinner faces or ones with deep-set eyes. I made some changes to the frames which alleviated those issues, but they didn't completely resolve them and I'm leery of making further changes to those models because it'll start to affect how they look without a face attached. Here, however, the face itself is 'permanent' and the frames meant to go with it are not intended to ever have their front sides on display, so I should be able to make more drastic changes without them becoming all that noticeable. Maybe not enough to avoid all potential clipping, but altering the faces themselves is less of an option here, so it'll have to do. I'll also pretty much have to give up on the frame structures inside of the face, for much the same reason. But these are all worthwhile trade-offs to get the animations back.

The eyes are another concern. The lovely orb eyes I made for the Vanilla masks don't really transfer back over, sadly, and due to how the eye meshes incorporate the eyelashes it's not an easy proposition to just sub in the swirl texture I used on those, either. (It would be on the COR eyes where the eyeball and eyelashes are separate parts, but...) I've got plenty of options for Vanilla-type eyes to use, though, especially from the Portal Eyes and Holzfrau's Dwemer set, and even some of the nicer human eye textures. And these have their eye tracking back, the loss of which on the masks was the biggest reason why I ditched them in favor of the omnidirectional orbs in the first place. 

The eyes are a factor in how much of a pain in the ass these are going to be to implement, though. You see, until yesterday my plan for the DMA followers was to give them all the null heads and set their respective Vanilla mask as part of their outfit to build the character. I briefly considered including a copy of the full head model that I'd built the masks from as their default headmeshes, but it seemed like too much new work to learn considering that I've never built a follower for distribution before. But now I've got to basically do just that, which means I'm going to have to figure all that crap out. I probably won't do it for every single follower (and I wasn't planning on making NPCs for every Vanilla mask I've put into the pack anyway), but it's still quite a bit of extra work. I'll also have to figure out how exactly I'm going to handle their hair. The wigs, as-is, don't color match on the non-player characters (and it can be kinda spotty on the player, at that), so I was thinking about doing some character-specific alternate colors like the blonde Shero wig for 12-16 above. But as I'm already planning on leaving them with a 'real' head, I could conceivably include regular hair-part versions of the styles I wanted to use and let the game color them like normal. It's more work, but it would polish things off a bit. Not that the wigs don't work fine in their current state, provided you like brunettes...

But speaking of polishing things off, let's go back to that... Cut line? Erase line? ...Where the edges at. Like I said, for this first test I just plopped an oval down and called it a day, but that clearly isn't something I'd want in a proper release. The ideal would be to get it pretty much in-line with where the edges of the physically cut mask model are, for consistency with those since I don't intend to take them out at this point. (Maybe I'll stick each character's mask into their non-outfit inventory. That'd be fun.) The question was how to see where the edges from that mesh lined up on the texture. As it happens, NifSkope does have some texture mapping editing tools that are mostly way outside of what I want to mess with, but as a part of that display a visual overlay of the vertices on the texture, thus:

With that, it's just a matter of taking an isolated screenshot of the UV mapping window scaled to an even number of pixels, blowing that up to the texture's ratio, copying it in as a new layer over the skin texture, reducing its opacity and adjusting its position to get things to line up as well as possible, using the free select tool to trace the vertices around the outside of the mesh overlay, inverting that selection and erasing all the skin outside of it, making sure the image has a proper alpha layer, and then exporting it to a file that Skyrim can read. Simple, right?

Ha.

But in the end, you do get something that pretty much works.

It didn't come out quite even, both because tracing those vertices was kind of a pain and because it looks like they're on there a bit lopsided to begin with. Comparing it to the meshlines in NifSkope it's clearly not perfectly matched to them.

But this is definitely a case of the perfect being the enemy of the good the damned enough, and it looks fine as it is. There's some slight jags at certain points, but you have to look close to really see them in-game. 

I should also mention the question of the ear-caps. Keeping the rest of the robotic mask structures wouldn't really work that well, but I would like to retain those given that they're the element that mounts the face to the head frame. The problem is the variance in head widths between individuals and especially between the races. I've been manually adjusting them for each mask, but here I'd need more of a one-size-fits-most solution, along with a different way to implement them. My current thinking is to make slightly thicker caps incorporated into the alternate frame's model, with race-specific versions for humans, elves, and orcs. That should hopefully cover most of the potentials, but I haven't actually tried building that yet to see how it'd work out. This is all still very preliminary and there's plenty of possible stumbling blocks, but it's an infinitely more promising approach than the previous attempts.

I mean, hot damn.

But the most potentially interesting thing about this method isn't actually how I'll be using it for my own characters. It's how it works on any character with an exported FaceGen. Making masks out of personal followers was mentioned in comments before, but using the hardware solution it's a pretty laborious process. With this, once you have the altered texture it's basically three steps in NifSkope.

One, repath the skin texture to the mask-cut texture.

Two, right-click on the head mesh. Go to Node > Attach Property > NiAlphaProperty.

Three, go to the Lighting Shader line under the head mesh in the Block List. Go down to Shader Flags 2 in the Details pane and click 'Double Sided' to prevent the face from being see-through from camera angles behind the head. Do the same with the mouth mesh, if needed.

That's it. That's literally all the modifications you need to make to an NPC, and again this should work on any one with a head model that you can access. (I'm not sure where/how the player's head is stored, though, so I can't make any promises about using it outside of NPCs yet.) Once that file's saved the character will appear with a floating, disembodied face in-game, ready to be equipped with a proper head frame and DMA body. The hair probably shouldn't be messed with, as the game's expecting to see it and might do weird things if it's not there, but considering that a lot of the Vanilla hairs really aren't built with the idea of seeing them from the inside in mind...

...having some way to remove or swap them out in-game would be recommended. Like with the included wig sets! When I stop finding more things to do and get around to actually releasing any of this, that is. 

Speaking of those other things I found to do, I'll get back to those next post. Stay tuned.

(Huarache Lights intensifies)

Update: Gonna tack this onto here instead of making a whole new entry for it, since it's just a straight continuation of what I was talking about above. I mentioned needing to make modified versions of the head frames for this owing to some morphs of the Vanilla head models not really fitting over the existing ones. This was something I was aware of from when I first started working on making my own Vanilla-based masks, but it wasn't until I started looking at making masks from existing NPC's faces that I realized just how bad it could get.

Obviously, that needed to be addressed before I could really do anything with this whole 'live faces' idea, so that was my project for today. And like I stated above, since most of that structure was built to make the frames look good without a face equipped, for this application where the faces would be 'permanent' and the front of the frames will never be seen most of that could get shrunk down or removed. These are just going to reuse the Doll heads' ground models, so the sins that the edits introduce won't be seen.

The only real exception to that is on the Crystal Frame, whose open structure loses the brain casing that obstructs the view of the inside of the face from the back. In that case the Live version doesn't do anywhere near as good of a job of hiding the back of the eyes as the original version did, but it's still something that you generally have to be really looking for from weird camera angles to even notice. Considering that I have yet to run into a face that the modified structures clip through, I'll consider it an acceptable trade-off.

I also implemented the idea I mentioned above regarding the ear-plates, with race-specific versions added onto the models. These are slightly thicker than the ones used on the masks, and hopefully will work with most morphs, but I can't really guarantee it. For instance I could see there being problems on those more 'anime' styled follower faces that some folks like, where the effect is sometimes achieved by making the head wider than normal. But for the Vanilla ranges it ought to be fine. Probably. It's also far enough back that jaw movement doesn't seem to affect the clearance much.

While I was putting these together it did occur to me that there might be an issue with how tetchy Skyrim can get about handling layered transparencies, given how these faces work by making part of the head transparent and the Brain Capsule using a semi-transparent texture, but I'm happy to report that the two seem to be able to co-exist just fine.

This is a definite relief, as having the visible brain effect compromised would've been a major disappointment.

...It does occur to me that I still need to check out how the faces work when viewed through water, though.

But speaking of co-existing, I also took a minute to check out one of the other things that made the idea of Live faces so appealing: Gag compatibility!

Since the Live face is fundamentally just a standard head mesh with only some texture modifications, it'll work perfectly normally with anything that affects the head like this. It should also work just fine with any face-based tattoo overlays or the like. I'm slightly less certain about what will happen in decapitations; the face itself should go flying as if it were a normal head, but what will happen to the underlying mechanical frame is rather in question. Particularly since it's currently using one of the decapitation slots, number 50. 

I picked that one because it has fairly minimal conflicts, with the DD vaginal piercings being the only other thing I know of that uses it, and because some of the other viable slots put it right up against the gags and blindfolds, which I actually cared about. Everything else either has similar conflicts or is just full up. One slot that is fairly free is number 60, but I do have one thing that makes use of it and that item keeps getting mysteriously de-equipped so I'm not exactly trustful of it. That said I might include an alternate set of the frames on 60 for those who have some reason to want 50 free. Changing the slot assignments on all the pieces is a pain, but it's doable. One thing I'm definite on, though, is that I'm only going to make these with the Doll necks. They're mainly intended to be used with the Doll body parts, and that neck's base works fine with robotic torsos, so there doesn't really seem to be any reason to bother with the old large neck pieces.

Given that these faces do require actively modifying the character's FaceGen, though, I was especially curious to see how Paradise Halls' NPC cloning process would handle them. Using PAHE and HSH slaves to make Automatons can be a bit difficult due to some factor in their unique outfit system that makes them highly prone to having their original heads pop back in. That problem wouldn't come into play through this method, but I was unsure if the cloning process would copy over modifications made to the original's head model. So I made a copy of a Bandit and applied the mask effect to their head model, then spawned them into the room I've been doing this testing in, where the various followers made quick work of them:

And then after using the raise-then-paralyze trick to get them into PAHE, it turns out that the modifications to the head model get copied over without any issue. 

'Course, the obvious problem here is that without any DMA parts you're just left with a face creepily floating over an empty neckhole. You'll have to fill that in with one of the Live head frames and the Doll collar...

...Or you could just go ahead and replace everything else, while you're at it.

The only real problem I've run into with all this so far is that I can't think of any way to do all of this dynamically inside of the game, since it requires certain changes to be made to the .nif file for the character's head. So it can only really work on purpose-built NPCs like this, and not just any rando you run into in the wild, sadly. And those NPCs will have that weird floating face thing going unless their outfits are modified to have the DMA parts pre-equipped, which cuts down a bit on the ~~immersion~~, but considering that it took me the better part of a year to figure out how to do this at all I'll take what I can get. Just having some way to put an NPC's living face on an Automaton keeps me happy.

And speaking of, I chose that particular bandit model, one of the Bosmer Bandit Plunderers, for a very specific reason. Her face was on my shortlist for use in making the Vanilla NPC masks, and was actually once of the first ones I checked... and the first one that I found the clipping problems around the eyes on. So I particularly wanted to make sure that the new head frame structures were being cleared properly on her, and was quite pleased to see that everything fits just fine.

And, of course, with accessories:

Quite pleased.

First off, a brief update on the new robot parts using the Gigadeux meshes that I showcased last time. I've settled on calling them the HV set, from the source mod's 'Heavy Armor' name, and have them all pretty well integrated into the core mod at this point. I also went ahead and included the Ebony-esque variants via a texture set swap as an 'Improved' set, with somewhat higher stats. The way the darker material pairs up with the bright brass of the jointing is rather interesting, I find. 

It also works quite well with the rubber pelvises. 

Speaking of the rubber parts, I've mentioned it before but I'm pretty well committed to the idea of adding in the rubber variants for all of the fixed-weight parts, now. I initially passed on them because making them takes a lot of annoying Creation Kit work, but in my own gameplay following the Type XXX release I consistently found the small selection that I had put together far too limiting. They're not done yet, however, both because that CK work is so tedious and because I've quite effectively multiplied it by also deciding to include the beast race variants for at least all of the D and R bodies. (I may tag the S ones in too, depending on how sick I get of seeing the CK, but the M ones require a bit more work due to their normal map situation.)

An immediate consequence of that decision was that I had to figure out how I'd handle the tails. As I mentioned when I previously showed the beast varaints, the tail is a bit of an issue with the rubber bodies because the rubberized texture doesn't get applied to them, leaving them sticking out all naked. Making a rubberized version of the tail meshes wasn't difficult, but implementing it posed some challenges. Specifically, while it would be possible to second them into the pelvis models in such a way that they'd only be applied to their respective beast race characters in the same way the in-game tails work, there doesn't seem to be any way to do that without also blocking the tail slot from use on the non-beast characters, which would kinda bork the robotic tail pieces that I carried over from the -BAF- set in the first DMA release. So that wasn't exactly an ideal solution. 

The easier if less fancy way to work things was to just make the tails into equippable parts. That could have been done as easily as just slapping the existing in-game models into new playable armor entries in the CK, but it seemed like it would be much more interesting to properly integrate them into the mod and make add-on cyborg parts out of them. That was as simple as adding some metal bits to their bases to make 'connectors' for them. 

This... raised some further questions, actually. You see, that connector piece is a remnant from something I was working on when I was adding those other tails to the initial DMA set, and decided that a robotic tail with the Khajiit tail's weighting would be a fun thing to have. I mocked up a model, copied over the weighting, tossed it into the game and... it just stuck straight out. Didn't move in the least, annoyingly. I wasn't sure what the problem was and didn't care enough at the time to put much effort into fixing it, so I just dropped it and let it sit until now. But given that prior experience I was a bit surprised to find the base piece taken from it working just fine in this current application, until I noticed that there was a little extra line of data in the .nif files for the Vanilla tails that is evidently what tells the game to treat them like a tail. That earlier attempt was a victim of Outfit Studio's habit of invisibly handling stuff like that based on what the .nif first loaded in a given instance is; I had built that model by opening up some of the source .nifs for the Dwarven parts and then importing the tail mesh as a reference to get the weighting, which left the 'is a tail' data off of it completely. With the above model, I loaded the tail .nif first and then added in the Dwarven part, so it worked perfectly. So the obvious follow-up question was, what would happen if I loaded the Vanilla tail and then imported the abandoned DMA tail model on top of it? 

All of a sudden I've got a functional fully robotic tail, is what. 

This does need some further work, though. It was a rough first draft that never got any farther, after all. The general design of the cable with a weight at the end works well enough, but the Centurion armpiece base is a bit clunkier in motion than I'd like. This was even more glaringly evident on the beast tails, where the joint gap on the model let bits of the original beast tail meshes show through, and where trying to resize it to fit the Argonian tails just wasn't working out at all. So I decided to go for simplicity and replaced with with a sort of sheathing made from the central cylindrical element from the Spider model. Which works pretty well on the Argonian tail...

And even better on the Khajiit's. 

And obviously a side-effect of making these basic equippable items is that anyone can equip them, not just the beast characters. Just clip them on and go. As a result of that it made sense to include the non-rubberized versions as well, although stone and metal types are still in the 'maybe' stage. These are all tossed in under 'Type XXX Tail' to keep them towards the bottom of the bodypart list. I also intend to do some rehab on that robotic tail and toss it in, maybe along with some more takes on the idea if inspiration hits. That's pretty low on my priorities list, though.

Not that priorities always mean much when that inspiration hits. For example, I was finally getting around to adding that modified Ebony helmet from a few posts ago, now dubbed the Lancer, into the core mod when I thought to myself, 'hey, I could use a couple more things like this.' I even had a few sources in mind via the Bikini Armor sets that I thought would work out fine as brass castings.

The only problem with the Bikini Armor parts was that they were designed more like masks or circlets than as proper helmets, and as such had some issues when viewed from the back. So I fucked around a bit with the Sphere's lid piece and a head model and built a new helmet substrate for them.

This fits fine on normal character heads, but is a bit unprotected around the ears. This is largely because I didn't want to bother with trying to fit it around the various elf ears, but also because I wanted to leave it a bit open so that it wouldn't completely close off the insides of the DMA heads.

It's a pretty handy thing to have, and I may end up building more helmets around it in the future. The Plate and Dragonbone ones here are a good start. 

Aside from little distractions like that, the meat of what I've been up to has been getting the Vanilla faces going. 

I'm not going to try to get every Vanilla character's face in, but I have ended up with a decent if somewhat random selection taken from followers, wilderness encounter characters, and a handful of characters whose corpses I don't mind abusing. As I mentioned before, there's limits imposed by how well the face meshes manage to fit over the existing DMA head structures, which were never built with them in mind. I have tried to salvage some of the more minor misfits when it was a character of particular interest, though. You do end up with some slight distortion from the original, but honestly, you'd have to be looking pretty damn close to even notice.

I've also kind of abandoned my plans to keep the tintmasks on the Vanilla texture pathing, both because it would be a pain in the ass- I built these masks by making duplicates of the NPCs is a separate .esp file and exporting the facegens from there, and finding all the original tintmask pathing would have been a colossal chore- and because I had made some edits to clean the dirt off of certain characters that I didn't really want to lose. So the planned release has the custom tintmasks for all of these. I may put out a sub-in version with the Vanilla paths if there's any demand for it, or people can sub in their own if they want to. 

Regardless, The end product will have that assortment of Vanilla NPC faces...

Along with a bunch of the character faces I made for testing over the course of the DCC project...

And even a few brand-new ones made to fill in a few gaps.

Although those new ones come with a bit of an annoying story. You see, my Racemenu has been kinda borked ever since I tried playing around with subbing in mask-cut meshes for the game's default head models in an attempt to make fully animated faces. That never quite worked, and in the process a bunch of stuff just went weird on me as far as the RM sliders went. The expanded sliders all had their names messed up, for the main thing, the Vanilla eyebrows are completely missing, and scars slider just does not work at all and jumps to random multi-digit numbers as you move it. I have no idea what's going on with that and have no idea how to fix it short of a complete re-install, which I'm not keen on doing, and enough stuff does continue to work that I can still make new faces with it. But I can't add scars to them.

As it turns out, this might not entirely be a bad thing.

There's an unexpected and slightly annoying flaw with using scars on these masks. While the face meshes themselves can be pointed to their own dedicated tintmasks in the .nif's data, the scars... can't. They take their tint from the skin color of the character wearing the mask. So on my grey-skinned Dark Elf character, Umana and the Wilderness Encounter Nord's scars show up with a Dunmer grey tinge. Which actually isn't too bad, and only makes them slightly off. Compare that to when, say, a golden-skinned High Elf character wears Salma's face:

Yeah. Not a dealbreaker, but certainly a weird annoyance.

On the subject of High Elves and new faces, I've kind of ended up with a surplus of them. The reason for this actually goes back to A5-17 up there. The day before I created the original version of her as one of my DCC testing player characters I had been massing around with making quickie followers by duplicating and modifying some random NPCs I found interesting, including a couple of Altmer bandits from one of the bandit expansion mods. One of them worked out pretty well, and ended up hanging around as the A5-16 that's popped up here and there over the course of the Type XXX body's testing, in a large part because she was handy as someone to test the Altmer Charmers mask on, and later the Vanilla-based Altmer mask when I was first looking at replacing the Charmers faces. When the A5-17 NPC I made after making a mask of her face worked out so well and I decided to explore adding NPCs to the core DMA mod, I figured I might as well make one for A5-16 as well. The only problem was that I had some vaguely-formed headcanon about them being related (maybe mother and daughter?), but that generic Altmer face didn't really look the part. So I tired sculpting a new one... and went a little bit overboard with it. It wasn't completely terrible, just a little bit too... Too. But the third time I made a more concerted effort to keep A5-17's features in mind and ended up with something that works out quite nicely.

I'm somewhat inclined to keep the other two in as extra faces. The first one I've got some different skintones already made up for, so it'll be pretty easy to differentiate from hers. The second one I'm less keen on, given how overboard it turned out, but on the other hand it's already basically done, you know? Regardless, the third one definitely hits that somewhat more mature relative look that I was going for. You know what they say, the family that accidentally gets turned into pervy cyborgs together...

...

...Nobody actually says that, do they?

Moving right along, working with the idea of pre-built NPCs got me looking into rehabbing some other previously abandoned ideas. The hair pack has been kind of an albatross on this mod; I started working on it nearly a year ago, before I even had found the Charmers faces, and have yet to manage to actually get it out. It wasn't quite finished when CoR got pulled and I decided to release the Type XXX body parts without any new faces, so I've been holding off on putting it out until I could do it as a full face and hair appearance pack. That's obviously been taking longer than I might have wanted, and in the course of that I've been making all these other changes to the point that when I do get it out it will be alongside a heavily expanded and revamped body mod. But the hair set itself has been done enough for a while now for me to be using it in my own play, and I've found it... slightly lacking. 

The problem is that I had to be very restrictive in my selection just to winnow down the huge number of available hair sets in the packs I'm sourcing from to a manageable number of wigs. Disqualifications included having textures that were invisible from the interior of the head or with gaps through which the glow of the head inserts could be seen. Unfortunately this knocked out a lot of interesting styles, including most of the decent ponytails. Those problems could be remediated by adding in a hairline mesh, similar to the shaved head 'stubble' mesh that I'd previously used in the DCC extras, but those hairline meshes do not work at all well with the SeXtreme-based faces from the initial DMA release which have a forehead shape significantly off from the one on the Vanilla or Charmers faces. One of my other priorities was also getting wigs that worked tolerably well with those earlier faces, so anything that needed a hairline to work got nixed. 

But that left me with a somewhat more limited selection of hairstyles, and as I started looking at making NPCs from the various Vanilla-based faces I've been working up I found myself wanting to revisit some of those discarded wigs. So I dug a basic hairline mesh out of the KS set and got to rehabbin'. 

This hasn't been as simple as just tossing it in, mind you. Some of the hairstyles aren't shaped quite right for the hairline mesh, and it had to be trimmed to fit. And I sometimes found other little changes to make, like the Dwarven ring added to the ponytail up there. Some of these also still have the same fitment issues with the old face set that caused me to drop them, but I've decided to ignore that in interest of adding the styles back in. There's also the problem of one of the big reasons for using the hairline mesh, trying to fix the see-through interiors, not quite working. Going the other way works fine, and it's quite effective at blocking any sign of interior glowing bits in the head from showing through the scalp of the wig. But looking at the inside with the face off, in a lot of cases it just kinda makes the transparent section of the hair kinda hazy. 

This effect can vary a bit depending on the lighting behind the model, but it's a bit annoying that it doesn't perfectly block up those sections. Although it will help a lot more with that on the stone and brass versions. The other issue was more of a concern, though, so this is definitely worth moving forward on. And it gets me some options that I have definitely wanted in here.

And for one last bit of rehab for today:

Waaaaaaaay back when in the midst of the DCC project, Edhildil released an updated version of his Dwemer Cyborg that came outfitted with a cute brass bikini. I tried adapting it for the Extras pack, but while the bottoms worked fine, the top would consistently crash my game when equipped. I later found that this was a common problem when separating out some parts of Edhildil's meshes, where for whatever damn reason one part or another would turn into a CTD machine after being divided from the rest of the original model. I also eventually figured out a reasonably consistent way to fix it, much. much later, but never got around to applying that to the bikini top. Until now. 

You can kinda thank A5-16 for this. I've felt that the Type XXX bodies could use some kind of a clothing option aside from the modesty panels all along, but the complications of the fixed-weight parts and the lack of any options that were both on-theme and decently fitted to the boundaries imposed by the cutouts in the torso stymied me as far as that went. I did have some possibilities in mind, but they all required a fair bit of work to get to an acceptable state. I've known all along that these bottoms worked great with the Variable pelvises, though, so that kept trying out the top in the back of my mind. That came to a head when I decided that I wanted A5-16 to retain the Doll body with the huge... tracts of land that she's had since the initial Type XXX testing days, but that I also wanted something a bit more clothing-like for her than the panels. So that got me trying the fit on the UUNP reshape of the bikini top that I made all those months ago, and as luck would have it the straps fit perfectly within the cuts of the upper torso. After seeing that I ran it through the rehab process to get something that wouldn't CTD and got it into the game as fast as I could. And I didn't even consider restricting this to just the Variable version, or a handful of pre-selected fixed-weight parts. I dug out my size charts and fit this to everything. 

Well nearly everything. I don't seem to have bothered to write down the exact slider settings I used for the UUNP-Preg pelvis. Whoops. 

Getting this all in took surprisingly little time. I think it was maybe two and a half days between figuring out that it would work and having all the variants loaded into the core mod. So far everything's worked as well as I could've hoped for. It does have a few caveats, though. First is that they only work with the D and R models. Putting them on the stone or metal bodies would require making a whole duplicate set with the breast and butt weighting removed, and I'm just not keen on doing that. Second is that they can only really match up with the exact body type listed in their names. This will require you to actually pay attention to which top or bottom you're pairing with which torso or pelvis, or this'll happen to you:

Third, it has a ground model. This is it's ground model:

This is every type's ground model, because I honestly don't feel like putting in the effort of making a new one for each variation, here. I've already started that for the removable modesty panel project, and I'm kinda regretting it. 

Oh, and I know the radial pattern on the top isn't centered over the nipple. The mesh is centered over the nipple properly, but the pattern's center is a bit north of it for whatever reason, and I know nothing about UV mapping that would allow me to re-center it, nor do I care enough. The mismatch was covered by a metal cap on Edhildil's original model, but I pulled it when I did that initial UUNP conversion and I don't really feel like going back to add it in now. It looks fine even if it is a bit askew.

Also, one of those things that I've given up on? Keeping this mod's parts count to a reasonable size.

More to come.

The relevant consequence of all this is that I've been even shorter on time and energy for working on mod stuff than I already was... pretty much since New Year's, really. But I did feel like getting something done with the scraps of motivation I could eke out, so I started poking at something I had been working on before getting sidetracked by the Type XXX stuff. It ended up coming together a lot easier than I expected it to. 

I'd been inclined to try doing something with the Dwarven armor set in the Girl's Heavy Armor mod by Gigaduex pretty much from the first time I came across it. There's a lot of stuff to like about the design, especially around the legs and helmet which are already fairly robotic, and I felt that they would be a great base for a new set of robot limbs in the DMA collection. But I quickly ran into various complications. The legs are a great visual design, but the knee joints are for some reason modeled much higher than where the skeleton's actual knees are, resulting in the top of the calf armor getting bent in whenever the joint is flexed. The only parts of the arms I could really use were the gauntlets, as the upper arms were just bodysuit and pauldron meshes that wouldn't really fit into the DMA setup, so I needed to build entirely new upper arms. And the torso was a particular sticking point, as its waist-length armor and wide shoulders were guaranteed to interfere with the existing DMA jointing. I had only barely started addressing those problems before getting distracted the the Type XXX bodies, but in this second look I quickly managed to knock down just about all of them. 

For the legs, the first thing I discovered during the opening tests of that initial go at these was that the thigh armor was damn near a perfect fit to the existing Type E set of leg connectors. The pistons and rods at the top of the legs, added to fill in the space left between the parts, were about all I got built at that time. The disc at the top was added recently, mainly in consideration of sealing things off for the ground models, and gets buried in the leg connection when equipped. The knee structures were a major contributor to me setting that first go aside, as I had also been trying out some scratch-built limbs alongside these and found building a feasible joint to be a royal pain in the butt, so I put off doing it here to instead poke around at what became the Type XXX parts. On this revisit I decided that I'd be better off trying to do something simple, so I just slapped the Sphere's spinal piece in there. Add in a couple of ring elements to fill in the gaps, and it looks pretty good! But then I ran into that aforementioned oddity with the joint's positioning.

I built the initial version of these knees having forgotten about that issue, and hoo boy were the results not pretty in-game. The obvious solution was to reposition the knees, but the only real way I had to do that was by adjusting them on the Bodyslide model, using the Knee Height slider set to -200% to get the joint on the model more in line with the one on the skeleton. Unfortunately that came at the cost of distorting the detailing in the texture mid-shank. It's not particularly noticeable while you're playing, though, so I figure it's worth it. Even with the joint lowered that drastically there's still some clipping between the parts when the knees are at a fuller flex, but it's much more within tolerable limits. 

With the arms, my first attempt at building new upper sections for them involved simply copying over some slightly enlarged versions of the upper arms from the DD set. And that looked fine, but didn't really gel with the legs all that well. But you know what would? More of that lovely thigh armor! I got as far as getting that copied up there and repositioned with added in shoulders reused from the Type B arms before setting this aside, but on a second look the thigh pieces as-is were a bit too skinny in their new position. After reshaping them a bit so that they fit fully around the space a 100-weight arm would occupy and then adding in jointing and detailing to match that on the legs, the whole thing gels together much better than I had anticipated. 

The joints in particular turned out better than I thought they would, as the elbows specifically were what had been giving me trouble on those scratch-build experiments. Here they socket into the space on the gauntlets quite acceptably. 

You'd almost think they were meant to do that all along.

The torso I hadn't touched during that initial run. I kinda despaired of it. It turned out to be easier to deal with than I expected in some ways, but also even more of a pain in others. Its length ended up being less of an issue than I thought it would, as the model is actually built of various joined sub-meshes which could be much more cleanly chopped up than a completely single-piece mesh. And one of the points where it could easily be divided happened to be right at the mid-torso where the DMA connection point is. 

It's still a very tight fit on the Type G pelvis there and needs some remediation to stop a few bits of clipping, but it's it's drastically more usable than the full torso armor would've been. But while that turned out to be an easily solved problem, the broad shoulders and back were still an issue. There was basically nothing to be done there except hammering them in with the deflate tool until I ended up with something pretty much okay. And even then it only really works well with the arms with those simple spherical shoulders; the detailing on the Type G-based arms digs into the flashing left inside of the shoulder opening a bit, and the Type E arms... Well, it's fine if you don't move much, I guess? But it's the best I could do without starting to seriously distort the torso armor, so it'll have to be good enough. 

The last part of this set, the helmet, ended up not really giving me any problems at all, thank christ. To start with, it was nice enough to happen to fit exactly over the existing DMA head models:

You can't really ask for better than that... But I still did. You see, while the actual armor model from the Heavy Armor set is a solid piece with just an inverted cone at the bottom of the helmet once you remove the neckcloth, the ground model has this great bit of detailing hidden inside of it:

But more important than that is that nice and cleanly open bottom, which would pair up quite nicely with the open structure of the DMA heads. So I gave the ground model a quick skin and weight, repositioned it to the same space as the armor model helmet, set it to slot 31 and bam, I had a perfectly functional version of this for the DMA set. But if I was going to use it as a robot part, it needed a little something extra. 

Take a copy of the helmet, cut out just the eyeslit, slap an emmissive glow onto it and slap it back onto the in-game model just a hair forward of the underlying primary mesh. Instant ominous glowing robot eyes. The shading native to the texture even happens to give the brightest areas a vaguely eye-like shape. The whole thing just works out perfectly.

Put it all together and it just clicks, with charm points in those great legs, the substantial arms, the peek-a-boo cutout in the armor for the Heart to flash through, and that spectacular helmet model brought to life by that glow. The only real downside is that the original design doesn't really allow for a new pelvis piece to go along with it, but that's not a huge concern. Oh, and also that the sharp rake on the face of the helmet means that you can't use any faces at the same time as it without them clipping through, but that can be solved by blocking off the face slot. Although it'll still be an issue if you try to use it with a regular human head, but that can be said for a lot of things in here. 

While I was at it, I also did something similar with another suitably robotic existing Dwarven helmet variant...

This one differs in that it's actually a full head replacer on slot 30 like a regular closed helmet, as the design didn't quite fit around the DMA heads as well as the one from Heavy Armor. So it's just the Bikini Closed Helm with the same sort of eye glow trick as on the Heavy's, pasted onto the neck from a DMA Doll head with some bits of filler.

Simple, but an effective way to add just a bit more variation. 

And of course all this sticks to the 'modular' ethos of DMA, so you can mix things up. As mentioned above the sphere-shouldered limbs like the Type B work quite well with the Heavy torso...

...And the limbs also work very well with the Type XXX torso parts. 

So this is all pretty much a lock for getting added to a future update, which I did not expect to be the case when I picked it back up but here we are. Still need to figure out naming schemes for everything and maybe do a few tweaks here and there (and decide if I want to include the Ebony-toned variation as an alternate set), but nothing too major that would get in the way of putting it out at some point. 

No, the major stuff is things like getting the beast race support in, revamping the 'modesty' system to use all removable plates, adding rubber variants for all of the fixed-weight bodies, rebuilding the Charmers set as an optional(?) pack that uses CotR as a texture dependency, figuring which Vanilla character faces I want to actually use and resetting them to use their native tintmasks so I can stop angsting over find high-res ones for them and (hopefully) just let the end user see whatever they happen to have installed for them already... 

Oh, and continuing to figure out how to work those threatened followers. I've made some strides poking around at things there, having at least figured out how to change the default body and the obnoxiousness of the Outfit system. (Why can't you edit an existing Outfit set? Why does it only work as a drag-and-drop?? Why?!) That lets me set the 'nude' body to something like a bare torso core and load them out with a full kit of pre-equipped limbs.

(Ignore the forehead bug, didn't feel like doing the fix for that, considering)

The problem here comes with the head. I unfortunately can't load in one of the DMA heads as the default headpart. The game will only register and display one mesh from a multi-mesh model if you try to load one into that slot. I can, however, make alternate headparts that point to empty or no meshes and sub them in for the Vanilla ones, which almost works, except...

...for the mouth. The mouth isn't on the list with the other headparts in the CharGen tab, and if there's a place where you can manually change the one used I can't seem to find it. So I have no clue how to stop it from popping up. Having a DMA head included as part of the Outfit does displace it, but it pops back in if the Outfit is removed in some way, and thanks to how spotty Skyrim can be about actually keeping the headparts displaced when they're supposed to be displaced it'll sometimes find a way to sneak back in out of nowhere. 

But aside from that, this conceptually works pretty well. You can spawn them with a default outfit, change it with your usual follower mods...

...kill them if you want to be a jerk about it...

...and then strip them for parts leaving no 'human' body behind when they're empty.

If I can figure out that thing with the mouth, this will work fine. And if I can't... Well, it could still work. It'd be kind of annoying sometimes, but it'll still work. I'd just like it to work better. 

I'm also not 100% what the 'nude' body should be. I started out with the stripped frame, then switched to the Maiden Heart without any frame on the idea that it'd be more consistent with the Type XXX torsos, but it looks pretty goofy if you strip off just the torso and leave the other parts with the Heart just hanging out in space in the middle of them all so I think I might switch back to the frame. We'll see.

This most significant problem with these, though, is still placement. It's not too hard to drop them in various places already existing in the Vanilla game, of course. 

It's just the where and the why that get called into question. Where is a place that makes sense for them to be? Why would they be there? And what kind of an affect would they have on their surroundings, while I'm at it? It really makes more sense to have them in their own space of some kind, but that very rapidly gets into dungeon-building stuff that I don't have the skills or patience to do. Some ideas, maybe, but none of the other stuff that would bring them to fruition. But just slapping them into random places isn't particularly satisfying. Feh. 

It gives me something to think about, at least. When I have time to think.

But that's not really what I'm here to talk about today. I'm here to dredge something up.

The very first thing I ever shared publicly, mod-wise, was an 'open' edit of MaikCG's Dwarven Devious set. Messing around with that inspired me to start doing enhancements and changes to the other existing Dwarven Cyborg-themed mods out there, and that got us to where we are today, some two and a half years later. But that original, kinda half-assed edit to the DwarvenDD set was just left to sit in the mod's thread and never really got revisited. Part of the reason for that is that a number of other things have touched on the set over time- I even whipped up some ground models for it when it got incorporated into the PAHE Devious Devices patch- and I've been a bit loathe on fracturing its ecosystem further. Another is that a lot of what I've wanted to do with it hasn't quite been working out. 

I've been poking at one particular idea for a while. You see, back when I adapted some parts of the DwarvenDD set for use as DMA body parts, I tore this thing apart. The original model has the bulk of the pieces that make it up merged together in a single mesh, so I to the time to isolate and separate each and every discrete component. This left me with a Bodyslide model where I could remove parts at will, giving me a number of possible variants. I put a bit of time into fixing it up, added in an improved version of my original open concept, and then... never really did anything with it, because I was too busy with DMA to bother. And also because I wanted to try something a bit experimental with it, but wasn't at all sue it would work. Then someone recently brought up open versions yet again in the DwarvenDD thread, so I decided to give that experiment a try.

It didn't work.

I mean, it almost works. Just looking at that, you probably think it worked. But there's various problems that are just too much effort to fix. The root of the problem is that the bound human body central to the DwarvenDD requires a modified normal map to keep the shadows on the tied-back arms and legs from looking all weird. So that makes the core of this plan, which was to improve the open versions by modifying the bound body from a based UUNP HDT to something more like UUNP Special, more than a bit complex. Recreating the bound body entirely using the Special mesh was a bit outside of my capabilities, so I instead tried to swap out just the pelvic areas of the meshes using complimentary zaps on the bound and Special bodies in Outfit Studio. And again, it almost worked. 

Except that there's this frickin' inexplicable hairline gap between the two.

I'm not sure how the heck that got introduced, much less how to fix it. And it's also just the first of my problems. Most of the others go back to that customized normal map. An annoyance I've run into before with Skyrim's skin textures is that it's basically impossible to use multiple skin textures on the same model. I can incorporate the two pieces of the body onto the same model like this, but the game will force the customized texture set onto both of them. The first problem with that is that the custom normal lacks a vagina texture, leaving it oddly mis-lit. That could probably be rectified by pasting one into the custom normal, but it'll still cause problems for the other gimmick I kinda wanted to try out with this concept: Half-sets.

Theoretically, these could look pretty neat. In game? There's the obvious problem.

There are still ways around this, of course. Making variants of the custom normal map with the relevant limbs changed back to normal lighting would be the most effective, as well as the furthest outside of my skillset. Making the pieces that need the regular normal map discrete parts a separate slot would also work, but that adds a fair bit of complication. It also runs into an issue I've found in the course of working on the Doll bodies for DMA, where Racemenu and Slavetats overlays only get applied to skin meshes on a very limited set of slots. Except that as it turns out that is also a problem with my current concept of using multiple skin meshes on the same model and slot, as they'll only apply the overlay to one of them.  

Fucking hell. 

So that pretty well shot this whole concept down, but I figured at least some of the work I put into it could be salvageable. Turn off and hide all the zaps I made for the body mods, and I've still got a functional set of variants for the set. So I figured I might as well make a new mod incorporating them. Avoiding fracturing the ecosystem? What's that? Is it good to eat?

That last pair, the alternate Open set incorporating the Edhildil Dwarven Cyborg collar, were another complication. In fact, they were the original complication, as that was the first idea I had in mind for how to do an open set way back when but that I had to abandon and replace with the crossbar design when I found that having the collar added to the mesh caused the whole thing to crash. I later found that a number of the pieces from the Edhildil set would do that in certain situations and figured out how to fix most of them, but never got around to revisiting it here until a few months ago... and then stalled out on it again when I found that the collar wouldn't take the 'vertex coloring' trick used to darken the other parts. I'm still not happy about that, but fuckit. I also decided to include the 'bright' versions with that vertex coloring turned off, in part because of that and in part because the darkened ones cause issues for some people's lighting setups in the DwarvenDD thread, so I figured it was worthwhile to include both options from the start. That also led to all of these having the belly plate piece removed; I had originally considered having ones with and without it as separate sets, but quickly decided that making the plate its own equippable part would be much more efficient. I tossed it onto slot 54 to avoid the various issues with Devious Devices and SoS.

While I was parting things out, I also made the 'plugs' into their own removable pieces. Those come in anal, vaginal, or paired set versions, all on the Devious vaginal plug's slot as I was already using the anal plug slot, 48, to add in copies of the Edhildil breast caps. I borrowed the thin Edhildil collar from the -BAF- set to provide something to cover the inevitable neck seam with and carried over the shaved heads from the DCC Extras while I was at it, as well.

And there was one more thing that I managed to part out- The enchantment. The original version applied a 'blood & lightning' effect when the DwarvenDD body was equipped, but it wasn't to everyone's tastes. I don't always like using it, but also think it's too interesting to completely ditch, so I moved it. It's now on on an equippable copy of the 'heart' from my DMA sets, set to slot 60 to keep it out of the way, that gets buried in the chest when worn. And of course, the amusing side effect of that is that it can now be used with anything, not just the DwarvenDD sets. 

In all, this gives me at least part of what I would like to have done. The more ambitious stuff would've been entertaining, but also more effort than I want to put into this to fix. I'm just happy to have a pile of variations of this armor to use around my own game, and hope that others will be as well. I've also tossed in Bodyslide files pointing at the original DwarvenDD armor location with zaps for all of the various removable parts, for people who want to build one of these variants to be use by other mods that draw on the existing set. Those also have all the zaps needed to recreate my UUNP Special quasi-conversion left set to 'hidden' in them, if anyone feels like messing around with that. 

Picking up where we left off last time, I've been continuing to mess around with the Vanilla-based faces. I mentioned belatedly remembering that I had a fairly high-poly sphere model hanging around that I wanted to see if I could use for better replacement eyes. Turns out it works quite well.

I found a texture called 'darkswirls' floating around in the Vanilla folders that works rather nicely for giving the eyes some visual depth, and as it has a light grey base tone it's pretty easy to 'colorize' it by playing around with the emissive and specular colors. I can also rotate the spheres around some to change the visible pattern, giving me individualized glowing eyes for each face.

The overall effect worked out even better than I had hoped it would. I'm particularly taken with how the mask from my old A5-17 character turned out, to the point where I whipped up a quick custom follower of her for myself, based on the Falkreath housecarl so she could use her double weapons properly.

This had the additional purpose of letting me really see how well the eyes worked in various lighting conditions, especially when paired with the light on the Aster, which her face was sculpted to pair with originally. The effect is increasingly startling in dim to no lighting.

I've enjoyed having her around enough that I'm pretty tempted to include a more polished version of her- and maybe followers for some of the other faces I've been making- in a future update. I'm not entirely certain of how I'd go about implementing that yet, though. The first question is what I'd do for their 'substrate'; in-game they'd have the DMA body parts and faces as their default outfits, but I'm not sure if it'd make more sense to let them have 'regular' bodies when you take those off or to find some way to give them invisible base bodies. The latter would make more sense immersion-wise, but I'm not sure if it's possible to do it without having them all in a specialized race instead of their apparent one. But if I did the former I'd also kind of like to include the non-mask versions of their heads so you're not popping them off and seeing some random NPC's face, and that would add a lot more work and hassle to things. I'm also not certain of exactly how I'd put them into the game; the obvious answer would be to have them kicking around at the bottom of some Dwarven ruin, but exactly which one is a question. One where they wouldn't stick out too much or interact poorly with scripted events or boss fights would be preferable, but that thins things out, as does my personal preference that it not be one infested with Falmer for head-canon reasons. At that point it probably makes just as much sense to build some kind of stub dungeon specifically for them, but dungeon-building is not my forte, especially not with the Dwarven build set. And if I went to that much trouble I'd also really like to have some custom dialog for them, but that's way the hell out of my range. Although using the Vanilla voicetypes does give you the occasional bit of incongruity...

(Well I would hope so!)

And of course, since this is Lover's Lab building some followers specifically for use with these parts made me figure I ought to some removable versions of the modesty plates for, y'know, roleplay reasons. I've gone ahead and tossed those into the current core build of the mod, but kept them restrained to just the Variable versions and ones for the D/R parts of the dedicated robot limb sets in the interest of not completely overloading the mod with them. Shit's already complicated enough as it is...

Aside from what I do with this idea, however, I've still got various things to consider about the Vanilla-based masks and which faces I'm actually going to be able to use. I started out with the various character heads I had lying around from prior work, and some of them worked out pretty well. The face from my last character prior to getting into all this Dwarven stuff works quite nicely, and is a definite candidate for an additional follower, although I'll have to come up with a thematic name for her.

The 'Dwemer colors' version of Lydia that I did way back when for that first detachable head experiment also carried over rather well, although I do think I need to tone down her eyes a bit. 

I do find myself wondering just which faces I want to do like this, though. The process is reasonably quick and simple at this point so it's not hard to churn these out, so if I wanted to I could do, say, every major follower, or a grab bag of what I find to be the more attractive NPCs. 

There's some things that would impede either plan, though. First off is the honest fact that some of the major characters have pretty bland faces when removed from the context of their original hair or outfits. First time I tried this character's face on for size all I could think was 'Who the hell is this?'

It's honestly kinda hard to tell unless you're looking at her other appearance...

While corpse-salvage is an amusing idea, it might not carry over that well. That Burned Astrid face texture also has a poorly compressed normal map that results in the 'blocky face' bug at any kind of distance, so I'm not particularly inclined to use it as is. 

The bigger problem with using various NPCs, though, is that a lot of the faces simply won't fit. As I mentioned last time, the underlying structures for the head parts simply weren't built with the Vanilla designs in mind, and I had to compress various bits in about as far as they could reasonably go in order to get some of that initial batch I was experimenting with on them. Unfortunately, while I was randomly going through NPC heads for more test-shots I found entirely too many that even the modified head structures clipped through to some degree or another. The eyes in particular tend to be a problem, with all too many characters having them set too far back to clear the parts, and the High and Wood Elves especially tend to be absolute disasters.

Every single one of those two races I tried was unusable. The dark Elves fared a little better; Irileth was sadly a complete loss, but Jenassa I could salvage with just a little bit of touch-up at the outside corners of the eyes. 

So that limits what I can do with these in terms of selection, annoyingly, but there's also the question of scope. The specific-character faces are fun, but the original intent was to find a replacement for the range of faces I made using the Charmers of the Reach assets. And while the Vanilla-based faces turned out surprisingly good when using skin tones...

...The alternate-material versions turned out every bit as bad as I had feared they would.

The detail loss is simply excessive, to the point where they're hardly recognizable as the same faces. The Vanilla mesh uses a lot of lighting and texturing tricks to cover up its sins on the skin tone version, but they all shine right the fuck through when those tricks are removed. The comparison to the material variants of the Charmers faces couldn't be more stark.

The stone version fares a little bit better since it continues to use the original model space normal map, but even then it's noticeably less successful at pulling off the effect than the Charmers version, especially with how it no longer hides how the nostrils are just little divots. 

But with the metal and rubber versions turning out as bad as they did, I don't really find myself keen on pursuing the material variant concept for these at all. I do still like the idea of including a bunch of them as specific-character masks, but they just can't fill the niche as replacements for the Charmers masks. Which leaves me once again looking for a way to get those back in there. My current thinking is to change things around so that Charmers of the Reach is a requirement for them; I previously had the textures I'd be using re-packaged into my own folders for ease of use, but by having them depend on Charmers being installed for the textures to work it's not functionally all that different from how a CoR follower mod would work, with it's packaged headmesh pointing to CoR's textures. Just more, y'know, swappable. To that end I spent a full day the other week changing the textures on all the Charmers masks back to their original paths, which was fun. I also poked around at changing the (honestly kinda half-assed) eye textures I had on them to use the same 'darkswirls'-based idea that I'd been using on the Vanilla faces, but it still needs a bit of tweaking to get right. The emissives on the Charmers eye meshes seem to be more finicky, for some reason, and it's more limited in how much the texture can vary. But it's promising.

Still need to verify if this scheme will actually pass muster, though, so don't hold your breath on it. 

In work aside from the faces, I've finally- finally!- gotten all of the hair sets added into the core build. Only took six-plus months after I first decided on the idea to actually do it, but I've got a large selection of equippable hair sets picked for how well they fit with the DMA bodies...

...all with working ground models...

...in original, brass, and stone.

(Statuesque.)

Most of these are just straight conversions of the original hairs, with the only exception being that 'Dwarven Coffee' one. I ended up being lower than I liked on usable ponytail-type hairstyles, sadly, and the 'Midnight Coffee' one from the HG set fit all of my criteria aside from the bandanna used to tie off the tail. So i just swapped it out for a stack of the ever-useful astrolabe rings. Now it fits in perfectly. ?

I've also been poking at another provisional headpiece, after thinking that I could kinda use something halfway between a full expressive face and the depersonalization of the Peacekeeper masks. I was thinking that something like the Dwemer-ified 'sexy' Ebony helmet from the cyborg content in the old Fresh Woman Darkness mod would fit the bill, and then I realized that I could basically just do the same thing. So I did, but with more Dwemering. 

The Centurion jaw-guard bits that replace the Ebony helmet's 'ears' are a bit incongruous with the rest of it, but I had to keep the original Ebony normal map to maintain the shadowing effect on the 'brim'. It looks really frickin' weird without it. This fills the niche I had in mind pretty well, though, so I'm inclined to toss it in once I get a ground model built for it.

I've also been poking around with something that's been missing from the bodies: beast race support. Currently the D2 torso is the only part that will display the Argonian or Khajit skin textures, and even that is honestly an unexpected result of it being set to use the original default skin textures.

Beast race support was something that I just couldn't be bothered with when developing these parts originally. I've known for a while that the way I built them to use an isolated skin texture kind of borked things for the beasts, but the reasons for that outweighed my desire to go through the extra trouble of making beast versions. But I wanted to take a break from mucking around with the faces recently and... oh christ it's just as much of a pain in the ass as i thought it would be. 

Doing this is pure Creation Kit work, which immediately means it's cludgy and obnoxious. Basically you have to add in alternate Armor Add-on entries for the beasts, with the textures redirected to their skin textures and the race-use markers selected and deselected on each AA to filter out who wears what in-game. The first part of that has some logistical hurdles. I currently have things set up with beast-specific texture sets pointed at isolated copies of the Feminine beast skins that I've been using, much like how the humanoid skins are set up. The obvious problem with doing it like that is that there's a lot of variety to the beast skins out there, and this would require the end-user to manually copy in the textures they're using if they want them to match, which might be asking a bit much. I could also just set the beast-use AA's to use the default textures like the D2 torso, which should bypass that issue, but would solidly bork the whole 'body agnosticism' thing for CBBE users should I add the beast support to all of the parts. Currently I have not done that, and have only added it to the Variable parts and the arms because of the issues around the second part of how you build these; modifying race support in the CK is fucking tedious. It wouldn't have killed Bethesda to add in some kind of 'player race: beast/not beast' toggle instead of making you go through and select or deselect Every. Single. One. when you need to modify the race usage. Whoever designed the CK actively hates its users. 

So it's a royal pain in the ass, but when you manage to suffer through putting it together things do look pretty good.

The necks are still a bit of a problem on the non-D2 torsos due to the larger necks on the beast races not covering the torso's neck ring all that cleanly, but even that doesn't look terrible. The arms add another logistical issue if I do keep this restricted to the Variable models as I'm currently inclined, however. Specifically that unless I add beast-use versions of them, using the arms with the fixed-weight parts on a beast character will result in mis-matched skins between the two. Although on the other hand it's already not recommended to use the D-series parts on beast races due to how their skin tints make things go weird, so... But then, I didn't just do these for the D skin.

The R skins are actually the main reason I wanted to try adding beast support to begin with. I mean, if the idea with them is that the body parts have been rubber-coated, it doesn't really make sense for the beasts to lose their scales and fur and such. And the end result does look damn good. But there are some additional logistical hurdles here, the most glaring of which is that the tails don't get coated. I suspect that I'll have to make alternate versions for them as well, although I'm not at all sure how to implement that yet. Player-equippable tails? Race-specific add-ons to the pelvises? 

There's also the problem of how these most emphatically don't simply use the default textures, which means that the 'easy' way of doing beast support that I mentioned above can't work for them. I can probably change the texture sets to point at the default beast normal maps instead of these isolated ones, but that adds the body-agnosticism issue back in...

Also, one thing that I don't think I've ever really mentioned about the Rubber skins but that these pics show off really well: they do, in fact, still use the character's skin tints. They're still set to the Skin Tint shader so that they can use the skin swap function and so the specular gloss will work right, which means that the game is still applying the skin's color overlay as well. It's simply not usually that noticeable over the solid black base color, but a really strong tone like that Khajit's orange stands out more. You can also see it if you have two rubberized characters running around to compare. In the shot below Raev's rubber is kinda greyish, thanks to her base body's super-white skin tone, while A5-17's Altmer base gives her a bit of a golden hue.

This isn't anything particularly important, but it does amuse me.

And finally, another little bit of amusing mod integration that I came across when I was looking at female mannequin mods, in the form of the Cursed Mannequin Collars mod. It takes a bit of work to actually get it started, but it gives you a handful of collars that can turn any NPC into a functional mannequin when added to their inventory. (I found that using Manipulator's Open Inventory command works well for this, and also that giving them to active followers can do Weird Things so that's best avoided.) You only get a limited number, but it gives you a very good way to use the Pedestals on an actual NPC instead of a generic female mannequin without the bowed head of Display Model's 'stay' command. 

Très amusant. 

I also took some time recently to revamp my game a bit, finally installing several mod updates that I've been putting off while working on the Type XXX stuff and changing a few things around. One of those changes was switching over to Fair Skin entirely; I'd been using Mature Skin for a while now and generally feel that it's more suited for the overall tone of Skyrim, but having chosen Fair Skin to use on the Doll bodies for various reasons I kinda wanted to see how well they would pair up with the matching character/NPC faces. It works out quite well, as it happens, especially when paired with the new 'natural head' D2 chest.

I mostly like what it does for the general NPCs, although it can be a bit less... forgiving, in some ways, than the Mature Skin textures. On faces where some care was taken to refine the underlying design, it's wonderful. I don't think the remodel of Keeper Carcette that I made years ago when I was first experimenting with modding has ever looked better. 

On some of the Vanilla NPCs, though, specifically the ones that kinda look like they were built with the Oblivion 'randomize' button to begin with... Yeesh. They simply looked homely with the Mature Skin textures; these do them no favors at all.

I might seriously have to think about getting an NPC beautifier at this rate.

But this was actually something of a secondary consideration for the switch. The main reason was that I would need to have Fair Skin installed anyway to make properly matched replacements for the Charmers of the Reach faces. And I do still intend to replace them. Charmers is back up, yes, but the exact state of the permissions they can grant for derivative work is a bit less clear than I'm personally comfortable with. Those faces or others built from the Charmers mesh might still get released at some point, but I'm inclined to wait until CoR 2.0 goes public to see how and if that changes things. In the meantime I'm going to pursue my other options. 

One option that I've pretty well ruled out, though, is Citrus. I've mentioned my concerns about its rectilinear mesh layout before, and I just was not caring for the results I was getting in a large part due to the effects of that. The cut line was too unflattering, and a pain in the ass to find for each face model. And while it's technically even higher-poly than the Charmers mesh, the in-game results didn't really feel like enough of an improvement to make up for the other annoyances. So that got me thinking about resorting to the Vanilla faces again.

I've also mentioned before how the Vanilla faces had an unsatisfyingly jaggy cut line, but that's not quite the whole truth. The cut line where I wanted there to be a cut line is a mess, yes. But if you go forward one step, there's a line that works just fine. It just leaves you with a fairly minimal amount of face to work with. Significantly less than the SeXtreme faces, but also noticeably less than on the Charmers faces that I already felt had been pared down as far as was comfortable. 

But it's not like it doesn't work at all. At the very least it seemed like something worth exploring, and it had the bonus of letting me do something with all the various test characters I made over the course of the DCC's development. The obvious place to start there was with good ol' 12-16, who also survived the switch to Fair Skin quite well.

A quick face-ectomy later, and...

This worked out a lot better than I had honestly expected it to. I'm a bit too finicky about certain things sometimes, and a lot of the angularity and imperfections that bug me while playing around with the meshes in OS and NifSkope get toned down a lot when actually in-game. They're still there, but you have to be looking pretty damn close to really notice them.

It'll never be as smooth and forgiving as the Charmers mesh, but it's not like I can't get something acceptable out of it. And being a Vanilla mesh does make it easier to deal with in several ways, from sourcing (I can pretty much just grab any NPC face, if I feel like it) to building the skin tone variants (no more having to copy&paste the preset skin colors over to the Charmers faces). 

But you'll notice that one thing I did not keep from the original NPC in this test was the eyes, replacing them instead with an earlier version of the eyes I made for the Type XXX's Skull heads. That's because my early experiments with using head meshes to make outfit parts showed me very clearly that the Vanilla eye meshes become A Problem in that specific context. It mainly centers around how the Vanilla setup has the eyes and eyelashes on the same mesh; for whatever reason changing the mesh over to an outfit piece results in the alpha on the two parts interfering with each other, causing a slice of the upper eyeball to turn invisible. On top of that the eyelashes themselves displayed all manner of bizarre texture malfunctions, especially on the ground models where their texture routinely garbled itself. I never found any way to fix the latter issue, and the only way to counteract the former was to physically cut the eyelash section out of the model, which was obnoxiously finicky work. And which would have to be done over and over again for each face used, as the eyes get very specifically shaped to that model over the course of its build. Making an alternate eyeball mesh sans eyelashes to use when building the faces was a possibility, but honestly just feels like more hassle than it's worth. Putting in robotic replacements at the mask-building stage is a much simpler proposition.

This particular replacement wasn't long for the world, though. I grabbed them because they were handy, but I already expected they wouldn't work out. The main problem was the same reason why I've been going out of my way to replace the normal human-type eyes on the faces since the start: having a recognizable 'pupil' set in a fixed stare on an animationless face gets disconcerting real quick. Especially when it's glowing.

Having a large blank 'eye' that fills up most of the socket goes a long way towards eliminating that fixed-ness, because it becomes a lot less clear exactly where the line-of-sight is pointing. That was the theory behind giving the SeXtreme faces' replacement eyes that large central glow, and why I just did a solid recolor on the Charmers eyes. Obviously I'd want to do something similar here, so that nixed using the small central glow. It also helped nix using the rest of that Centurion mesh underneath it, as the lines on it provided a further fixed point. But that was already on it's way out, because it simply didn't fit very well. It's not really all that rounded of a mesh, despite its appearance, and finding ways to fit it within the eyelids without leaving big gaps was proving troublesome. So I switched over to the first thing that came to mind when thinking of an alternate spherical shape, which was the ball that I had pulled out of the Astrolabe model. 

This fits in much more cleanly. Still needs to get tweaked here and there to fit into each specific eye shape, but it's a significantly more functional proposition. 

Playing with it in-game, it is clearly a better direction.

(I see you thirstin' there, Ria)

That said, I'm not wholly wedded to this exact setup. The sphere just has the unaltered brass textures, which are interesting in their own way, but as such this completely loses the glowing eyes effect from the prior versions. I can pretty easily add on the blue emissive from the existing glowing eyes, or retexture it in a way that matches the way the Charmers eyes were set up. I might even sub out the model, since I realized later on that I have an even more perfect spherical mesh in the form of the Orb I took from the Sigil Stone model. That would need much more extensive texture work, but it'd probably be even easier to fit into the various eye sockets.

But that all will require its own set of experiments, and my main focus here was seeing how well the faces as a whole could work. One thing that was still kind of bugging me was how tenuously connected the skin was, with just the tiniest little bit notched into the earplate. So I did something for this that I had considered but never got around to doing on prior faces and built a sub-frame.

It adds a lot of tightness to the fit in various places, but having some internal structure really helps these feel like properly functional things. You'll notice that a lot of it doesn't quite line up with the existing head frame structures, though, particularly the eyes which are a fair bit higher. This is an unavoidable result of the fact that the heads were originally built for the very non-Vanilla SeXtreme faces. The eyes have always run high on Vanilla-based models, and pretty much the lowest you can get them is still higher than the SeXtreme faces' baseline, so it's pretty much inevitable that this would happen. Fortunately it's also usually obscured by the overlaying face, so it's not a huge deal. But there were some further problems with the head frames, entirely due to the elves.

The SeXtreme set obviously doesn't have any elves. And for my Charmers masks, the elves are actually just the base Breton mesh with skinnier chins and noses. The main upper skull shape is unchanged. With the Vanilla meshes, however, the elves' heads are distinctly thinner.

That necessitated a reshaped subframe to fit under them, but on testing their fit on the head frame I also found this happening:

This was annoying, but not entirely surprising as I had also seen something similar happening during my Citrus tests. I mentioned doing a modification to the head frame to accommodate that issue, and since it seemed like it would be even more pervasive here it made sense to go ahead and do those edits. Fortunately they were fairly simple ones. The parts sticking through the temples could be sunk in, as they had no surviving reason to be out as far as they were (they're the remnants of an earlier concept for 'mounting' the masks that had them secured by posts jutting out from those parts and through the mask mesh, it didn't actually look good in practice and was quickly abandoned), and some detailing in the eye support structures had to be pulled back to give clearance for the frequently more deep-set Vanilla eyes. While I was at it I also properly mirrored the hook that the earplates rest on, as these were originally built before OS had that function and it had bugged me ever since that they weren't.

It was pretty trivial to just swap the changes onto all of the game models for the head frames once they were done, so I went ahead and did that and will probably include them as drop-in replacements for the existing models when I release the faces pack. Changing the ground models to match would be more of a pain and have less benefit, though, so I might skip those. 

With those changes made, the elf masks should all fit without any further problems. And I just happened to have a couple of old Altmer to try it out with.

A5-17 is kind of the prefect example of why I've been so hesitant of using the Vanilla head mesh. Up close, her face is really fucking janky. Lots of sharp angles, that oddly protruding brow, the leftover low-res facepaint. But pull it back to an actual in-game view distance and y'know what? She looks fine. 

And what about that Dunmer up top? Well, I made her to test out Fair Skin in general, but she was also always intended to be a face donor as well. Maybe even a candidate for a racial representative, although I am getting a bit attached to her and might do her as a stand-alone. My current intent is to do that with a handful of more interesting faces, starting with 12-16 and A5-17 here. D11-4 fits in pretty well.

(Fun fact: Their names are just the dates that they were sculpted on. Saves me the trouble of coming up with real ones.)

Finally, you may have noticed something new behind the Doppelganger in those last few pics. That's another new addition with this revamp, and something that I actually feel kind of silly for not noticing the possibilities of earlier.

Let me preface this by saying that I haven't really thought about the game's mannequins for years. On my old computer the way they added to the NPC load in a room was more of a nuisance than anything, so I tended to prioritize player homes and spaces that had a minimal number of them. The room those screenshots were taken in is actually another one of my early forays into modding, a copy of the Silian Manor basement cell made specifically to take the majority of the mannequins out and replace them with usable space. There was also the fact that I almost always play female characters, so the male-only Vanilla mannequins had little utility for me. I'd thought off and on over the years about trying one of the female mannequin mods, but the majority of the ones I saw replaced them with regular-skin NPCs, which wasn't really appealing. So I just never bothered. 

Then the other day I suddenly thought to myself, 'Hey, couldn't I use those to display the DMA bodies?' So I went looking, found a proper wooden mannequin replacer that wasn't too objectionable, and whatd'ya know? 

It all just straight-up works, no problems. Even does the D2's default skin texturing without complaint, and gives the Fair Skin on the other Doll parts a neutral Caucasian skin tone that actually matches some of the SeXtreme faces reasonably well. About the closest thing to a problem I've come across so far is that it won't show the slot 48 items, but that's mostly the cyborg-use chest coverings that don't come into play as much here.

It's also a pretty ideal use-case for the pedestals, given that the mannequins are forced into a stationary neutral pose without any additional requirements. 

That skin tone thing is a bit of a problem for the racial faces, though, as the tone is baked into the NPC info and as such won't change to match the masks, meaning that using them with the Doll bodyparts on a mannequin will result in a mismatch the vast majority of the time. Using them with the Rubberized bodies works out pretty nicely, though.

The real prize here, though, is when you do have one of those home mods that loads up a room full of mannequins. One thing I've wanted to do with the Type XXX bodies right from the get-go was to use the S versions to make a full-blown Statuary Hall.  ?

Fucking. Mint. Only thing more I could ask for is some way to get them into individual poses. I should put this and Display Model into some sort of 'highly recommended companion mod' section. 

Aside from that fun, though, the success of making masks out of Vanilla faces gives me a path forward. Sculpting out decent looking ones takes longer than it did with the Charmers and there's a bit more prep work involved, but the results are more than adequate. I've also got a well of existing faces I can draw on. Tossing in ones made from in-game NPCs is an intriguing option, although I'm not yet sure what kind of criteria I'd use for inclusion. And getting a replacement Dibella is a priority, but one that I'm worried is going to take the most work to get right.

I've also got testing out the viability of the alternate materials to work on. Stone shouldn't be much of a problem, but the metal and rubber faces require me to make another 'regular' normal map from the face texture. That's mostly easy, but recreating the brow ridges for the elves might be a bit of an issue. And I do have some concerns about the low-poly state of the underlying meshes having more of a negative effect on those types, but hopefully those will get dispelled in actual practice. We'll see how it goes.

I found a few more of those layers while poking around in the assets for the Citrus heads, where I found even more .tri files associated with the head than I was previously aware of. Most of these contain the data for the sliders that stopped working on the Charmers attempt, which handily explains that problem.

The initial difficulty with this idea seems to be that the actual shapes have to match up between the head mesh and the meshes in the .tri files, so each one of the latter has to be cut down in the same way as the former. And doing that to all the Citrus .tri files I could find got me... Closer. It's still not quite working right. Part of the problem might be that my only tool to edit the files is Outfit Studio, which frequently does things in a slightly obscure manner, but the results I'm getting still have various disqualifying flaws.

One of the most immediately obvious is that while I have morph control for the face in this version, the eyes and eyebrows don't quite manage to match up. 

They're close, and they do move along with the face shape sliders, for the most part, but they don't move in quite the same way as them so bits of skin tend to clip through the brows and the lashes often become detached from the eyelid. And there are some sliders that they don't seem to work with at all; in particular, the lashes don't even try to follow the eye angle slider:

And there you can see one of the other oddities, which is that the names on a lot of the non-Vanilla sliders went all off-format. I would guess that has something to do with exporting them from OS, but again I have no clue where to even begin with fixing that. 

The biggest problem, however, is that a number of the facial sliders still don't seem to want to work right. It's only a relative handful compared to the 'nearly all of them' from the prior attempt, but some of them are pretty important ones- several related to the nose, including the one to adjust the depth of that area of the face, and the ones controlling how far the mouth protrudes. Worse, they seem to be stuck in a 'jutted forward' position, resulting in permanent ducklips. 

It gave me something worth testing despite those issues, though, so I threw together an alternate version of the head replacer to see how well the basic idea actually worked. You see, with this setup the 'mask' is the character's head, and the default occupant of slot 30. It won't work with the existing head frames, which also use slot 30, so a copy of one of those with all the slot assignments switched to slot 50 had to be made and added into my testing mod. It basically works fine, aside from the Vanilla-type heads being narrower at the temples than the faces the frame was originally designed for. If I ever get this going as a functional mod I'll have to make some changes there and to other sections behind the face, and maybe build in something more substantial to fill in the areas visible from the back.

But the main point of this experiment seems to have succeeded: I end up with the effect of a 'face mask' with fully functional expressions.

And as a result of that, it also has amusing things like gag functionality:

Although the duck-lip problem definitely raises its head here. With the ring gags in particular they end up being quite... pronounced. 

Honestly, though, while this is all interesting I'm not sure how far I can personally go with this train of thought. I have pretty much no idea how to fix the problems with the sliders, as I said, and kinda feel that the method I've had to resort to of altering each individual .tri file is the most hackjob way of accomplishing this effect. It would undoubtedly be cleaner and more effective to generate fresh .tri files straight from the cut-down head mesh, but I wouldn't even know where to start on that. 

There's also the fact that while this whole idea is pretty entertaining for making custom robotic player characters, it'd be a lot more effective on followers. You don't actually see your character's facial animations all that much, after all, much less see them talk, so not having NPCs using this would be missing half of the point. But building NPCs with this is its own whole project, especially with MAFKit being MIA lately and the various issues NifMerge has in parsing customized meshes. All of that headache is a large part of why I haven't built any quick NPCs into my mods. It's just not something I can really work up any enthusiasm for dealing with. And that's before considering all the time I'd have to spend sculpting new faces, as I'm not confident in being able to transfer my existing Vanilla-based presets over to an altered Citrus mesh without some disastrous results. 

And before even all that, I'm still not wholly keen on using Citrus in the first place. The best cutline I could find for it is still pretty wiggly, and the back of the jaw can go all weird on some of the existing presets. It's not even all that great to use for making masks, since it does this bullshit when you export the heads with Racemenu:

Having to manually realign all that stuff in OS for each face is super obnoxious. The Vanilla heads tend to do the same thing, which is one of the many things that made me abandon that 'detached heads' experiment a couple years ago. The way the Charmers heads exported everything into the right place was a decent part of why they were so welcome. 

The good news on that front is that it looks like COR Team worked something out with DAZ and are are going to be able to re-release their work! Don't know yet what that means for the stuff I've been doing, though. And even if it ends up that I can just switch back to them, pretty much all the concerns raised above will still apply to getting animated versions working. So this is all still well into the realm of 'things I would like to do', not 'things I am going to do'.

But it's definitely an interesting enough idea to keep hanging around in the back of my mind. 

This pairs particularly well with the robotic part sets.

In light of that I reversed my original plan to only include this in the Type XXX pack, and went back and re-did the Base pack with the faceplates baked into it. So should you wish to play the mod without the XXX content, these will still be available. 

But the main point of this update is all that XXX content, of which there is plenty.

Immediate future plans are... Well, first I've got a bunch of mods that I've put off updating while working on this and it wouldn't hurt to get a fresh new game going as I've been having some issues with stability in this branch, but after that the main goal is to get the Aspects of Dibella content that had to be pulled from this update out as soon as possible. The wig sets are mostly done, model-wise, but not added into the core mod. The replacements for the Charmers faces are still up in the air, with no recent news from COR Team that I've come across. I'd just as soon not have to use Citrus, but I'll have to start exploring that option at some point. And I did have some more ideas for robotic parts that I was working on before it got derailed by all this other stuff. Probably ought to get back to those eventually. Can't just stay standing still, after all.

Well, some of us can.

I decided I'd do that by taking all identity away. 

I'm actually a big fan of featureless faceplates like this (the chrome mask version of Cobra Commander was absolutely a favorite) and it's been in the back of my mind for a while that the DMA set could probably use one. I hadn't really prioritized it, though, and didn't get around to trying to make one until just now. But it felt appropriate to fill the void left by the Charmers faces with something like this. 

Finding a source for one once I actually started working on it wasn't too much of a question, as the helmet from Billyro's Peacekeeper armor immediately sprang to mind. Whether that would actually be usable was a bit more in question, as it was a fairly low-poly mesh that had to be cut out from the rest of the helmet model, then hammered into shape until it worked decently with the existing DMA headgear. Getting it to work with the Aster in particular was tricky, as I had to balance the tendency of its mid-line ridge to clip through the rather closely-fitted forehead of the Aster with some... other considerations that I'll get into later. Despite my doubts, I eventually managed to get a shape where everything fit together reasonably well on the Aster...

...as well as the other headgear... 

...and the Gynoid hair sets.

This might be the only face that I actually think looks good with the A-model hair. 

It's built to be used in pretty much the same way as the existing faces, with the model on slot 44 so it should be compatible with nearly any slot 31-based headgear. That pretty much covers all of the Vanilla 'open' helmets, as well as things like the mage hood, the instance of which from the DCC Extras pack it pairs quite well with.

It should also be generally usable with wig sets like the one I've been working on, although there are some parts of the upper edges that might clip through some of the more closely-fitted hairs a bit oddly. But on an adequately roomy design it works just fine.

(Vega!)

The one other point of conflict is with the Bikini Armor crests that retain the chinstrap element. Literally, as the bottom point of the Peacekeeper mask juts through the chinguard just a bit. (Told you that could be problematic.) I could adjust the point a bit, as this is still in the prototyping stage, but I'm not entirely inclined to as I managed to get an angle on everything that pairs rather nicely to the chinguards on the Aster/Ripper, and even more so with the faceplateless Gilded Helmet. Which makes this also the only thing I think looks good with that, so I'm not keen on messing with it.

I'm slightly unsure on what direction to take the textures, however. It's a bit more reliant on retaining the original textures than I had hoped it would be, particularly in that the eyes are entirely texture-based. My original conception of this kind of faceplate involved open eyeholes that the standard DMA glowing eye elements could shine through, but that's basically impossible here. I had also considered giving up on the eyes and going full Cobra Commander by doing the usual Dwarven tile texture swap, but for whatever reason that texture does not work out all that well here.

The defects and roughness in the textures is way too prominent, and losing the eyes really took something away from the character of the base mask. And I honestly like the way the contrasting steel face looks amid all the Dwarven brass, so I'm probably just going to carry over the original textures as-is. For at least one version. I do kinda think that there's some value in having a Dwarven-colored version as well, but I haven't quite figured out the best way to get that. Simply swapping in the bronze cubemap texture kiiiiiinda works but it tends to do some weird things color-wise as the light moves, with the base steel color showing through at some angles. So I'm probably going to have to do some experiments with editing the original textures to see if I can get something that works better.

But this is actually the most recent and probably last of the last minute additions I wanted to tuck into the mod before releasing the update. As for the others, well, let me get this one out of the way first.

The original Dwarven breastplate from the Remodeled Armors mod is an interesting design, but it's also quite difficult to work with. It's extremely low-poly, which may have something to do with why it was completely replaced for the BodySlide-capable versions of that mod. That's less of a problem in fixed-weight applications, which is why I dug it back up when I was sourcing parts for the robotic DMA chests. I even finished off a full robot chest using it, after entirely too much hassle, only to find during testing that the much more close-fitting collar conflicted terribly with the large baseplates of the existing DMA replacement heads. Since that collar was also one of this mesh's charm points, that chest got quietly abandoned. But while working on the Doll bodies I couldn't help thinking that a couple of slightly more armored options would be nice, and that the new necks that I had to develop for the Dolls would work just fine in this mesh's collar. That BodySlide-unfriendliness was a problem, though, along with my disinclination to pump up the parts count too much and the fact that the mesh wasn't designed for the UUNP family bodies. So with those limitations in mind I just found ones that were close to the breastplate's high and low weight models and then hammered it down to fit. Well, with an added caveat after finding that the high weight model fit best on the UUNP base shape chest.

Given that this was one of the body sets that I had used for the robot-legged pelvises, it only made sense to fit the low-weight model onto a chest using the UNPF-based waist shape to match up with the other robo-leg set. Thus the UNPetite High version was dragooned into service. For these I've limited them to use on just the flesh and rubber versions of the torso, both to keep the model and parts counts down and also because the stone and metal versions don't really need the extra defense. These also have the breast motion removed, as the breastplate does not have enough polys to support it even if I didn't hate jello-metal. I did experiment with reducing the bounce to just the exposed underboob, but it... did not turn out well, and had to be abandoned. 

I've got some more pictures of these, but first... I want your skulls.

[Danzig Intensifies]

Well, I mean, I am planning on releasing this around Halloween. And I mentioned above how I liked the idea of doing something that exemplified how the Charmers faces got ripped out of the mod. A skull head is something I've been half-considering revisiting since the original DCC version. That was one of the earlier things I did for that mod, and it had a slight flaw in that when I built it I made no real effort to fit it to the actual human headshape. The skulls there are just the clutter models with only very minimal adjustments and alterations, roughly positioned into the head's space. Their shape didn't work well at all with most human-use headgear, which resulted in me having to do versions of several parts fitted specifically to the skulls. That redundancy always kind of annoyed me, but I simply never got around to reshaping the skulls to fix it. 

Here, I did. 

The changes are quite extensive. The face had to be shortened, the eye sockets enlarged, and the cranium especially had to be ballooned out some to actually fill the head space's volume so it now actually fits helmets properly. It's pretty much matched to the volume of the DMA Preserved Brain, and uses a lot of parts taken from that model for its robotic fittings. And like the Brain and the DCC skulls, this continues to be a head replacer using slot 30, so there shouldn't be much in the way of slot 31 equipment that it really conflicts with. The face is a bit more of an issue, as it has a lot of jutting elements that couldn't really be toned down without detriment to the model. As such it has poor compatibility with almost all of the face parts. The existing DMA faces certainly won't work on this, as they tend to be much shorter, and I can't make any promises in regard to whatever ends up happening with the planned Dibella pack faces. But there is one bit of compatibility that will not actually matter for you guys: I used a couple of the Charmers masks to find the bounds of the skull's face. As such...

Those faces were ripped away, indeed. But that trick is one that I'm sadly going to be the only one who gets to play with. So instead I made the effort to build in a different trick:

Boo.

Yep. Not only did I have to reshape the Peacekeeper mask so that it would work with the DMA headgear, I also went out of my way to shape it so that it could be used on the skull heads. Finding the point where it would fit between the two was a pain. But the result amuses me. 

As for the skulls themselves, they're matched to the material variants of the Type XXX bodies; stone, brass, rubber, and the original bone texture for the flesh version.

There's some texture-based limitations on how well these match their bodies. The texture mapping joins along the top of the cranium in a fairly noticeable way, and the normal maps smooth out there in a way that becomes especially obvious on the shinier versions. The stone texture maps rather poorly to the model, with the marble veining becoming quite obscured. Messing around with various settings netted some pretty good lighting response, although it continues to be a little bit off from the body parts.

The rubberized version was even harder to get matched, largely due to the effect of the skull's original normal map which had to be kept to retain the detailing. Frankly, after a certain point I just stopped trying. It looks good enough.

They're just the full human skull, at least for right now. I may carry over the bloody and partial variants at some point in the future, but as the models need pretty extensive reshaping I'm not exactly in a rush about it. They do have one option part specific to them, a pair of more eyeball-shaped glowing eyes on slot 44 that tuck into their sockets.

(Skeletor? Is that you?)

I'm honestly a bit iffy about those- I feel the creepy skull effect works better without them- but since I already went to the trouble of building them I figured I'd toss them in. They can also be used with the existing DMA head types, although they're just a little bit too close together to fit into the detailing right. Conversely, the existing 'Null face' set of eyes can work with the skulls, but again the fit isn't perfect. I'm also not entirely sold on keeping the skull eyes red. That bit uses the same Dwarven button mesh as the existing eyes, just with the color of the emission changed, but for whatever reason the red just doesn't want to work out as well as the original whitish-blue. Might change it back, if I can be bothered. 

All of this stuff will be part of the Type XXX update. The skulls and the Peacekeeper mask work very well with the robotic parts, yes, but for various reasons I'm not going to include them as part of the robotic parts-only .esp file. The main one honestly being that I already baked that off and redoing it with these included would be a pain, but also, for the skulls specifically, because there's a bit of a hidden intent for them to pair up with some of the other Type XXX parts. I didn't bother to make versions of these fitted with the large baseplate of the original DMA heads, only ones using the rebuilt Doll-fitted neck. As a result of this the skulls by themselves can't be used on a non-DMA body without risking a giant gap at the neckline... Unless you use it with the slot 45 Doll collar I built specifically for this kind of use. Pair that with the Variable models of the feet and the Variable hands that were tossed in for just this sort of situation, and...

Can't keep a cyborg down. 

But there's a lot planned this update besides the faces. I had only just started putting the hair sets into the mod when I found out that I wouldn't be able to use my current batch of faces from Charmers, but nearly everything for the new bodies was done. Since remaking the faces is going to take a while whatever happens with Charmers, and since the hairs will need to be re-checked for fitment issues with the remade faces no matter what happens (and also to avoid having to go through and pull out the ones with the fit issues on the SeXtreme faces that I've been ignoring), I've decided that I'm going to initially release the stuff that's already done sans any new hair or faces as a 'Type XXX Body' pack following the pre-setback 'very soon-ish' timeline. Once the situation with the faces is resolved, I'll release them and the hair sets packaged together as the proper Dibella-themed update that I had been intending the Type XXX set as a whole to be. To that end I've also pulled the Fragment of Dibella head insert from the current pack so as to maintain the thematic continuity, and of course the Busts of Dibella that used the Charmers face as well. 

Structurally, I'm planning on doing these as sort of cumulative updates. The existing DMA stuff still works fine on its own, obviously, and will be getting an updated version with the few changes I made to its content, specifically the new Centurion arms and the glow animations on several parts. The Type XXX set adds enough new and functionally independent content that it almost could work as a stand-alone mod- or, well, it was going to before I lost the faces. Even before those were gone I hadn't seriously considered fully splitting it off due to the interaction with the robotic limbs that I had designed into it, but now that it's back to relying on the existing faces I really can't separate them. And as for the Dibella pack there's absolutely no point in making that stand-alone. It'd also be kinda nice to avoid increasing the .esp count as much as I did with the DCC sets, even if it does come at the cost of an eventual third page on AddItemMenu.  

So to that end I'll be setting things up so that the packs are downloaded individually, but the .esp bundled into each successive one replaces the one previous. You'll download the base pack, which will just have the existing robotic-themed content, and you'll be able to use that as-is. Adding the Type XXX pack will replace the base .esp and add in all the Doll-based bodies and other more fetishy content, but will need to have the base pack downloaded beforehand or the robotic parts won't show up in-game. The eventual Dibella pack will replace the .esp from both and add in the new faces and hairs. This will also help keep the file sizes palatable; with 7zip compression the base and Type XXX packs come in at around 100 and 140MB respectively, keeping them well under the point where LL's upload system likes to choke which will hopefully mean that I can avoid having to off-site them. I'm also a bit inclined to only put the update on LL, at least initially, and put off uploading it on Nexus. Part of the reasoning there is that the SE version is still TBD, which is to say that I haven't even started looking at building one yet. Heck, I still haven't figured out why the pony mask in that version is broken. Just hasn't been a priority, honestly.

Also low on my priority list is a "CBBE" version. I put that in scare quotes because it isn't entirely necessary to do one, given how this stuff is built. The primary conflict between CBBE and UUNP is the mismatch in the way the textures are mapped onto the models, but with these the skin textures are all on their own isolated paths so that conflict doesn't come into play. The majority of the parts here are going to look the same regardless of the body type you're using, because they were intentionally built to ignore it. The only caveat is with the Variable parts, which are intended to conform to your body preset and are built using the UUNP meshes and sliders. They have the same isolated textures, so those aren't a concern, but I don't know how well they'll conform with CBBE presets. Rebuilding them entirely to the CBBE meshes would be A Pain so I'd like to avoid that, but I have started some experiments with transferring the CBBE sliders onto the existing Variable Doll meshes. Don't know how well that'll actually work yet, though, as everything else kinda derailed the testing.

Some of that everything else was finishing off the aforementioned 'nearly' for the Type XXX content. This has mostly just been polishing off the earliest work from the whole line of experiments for a 'salacious' update that got wholly subsumed by the Doll stuff, by getting their ground/inventory models and whatnot finished. 

Finding an adequate collision donor for the Pedestals here was a bit less of a pain than I expected, as the first one that came to mind, the one for the large shovel, ended up working out pretty well. It's not without problems, as it's quite a bit thinner than the pedestal models which can lead to them clipping through the ground at some points, but it's actually a bit less bad about that than I was expecting it to be. 

Aside from on the Sphere pedestal, of course. That one was pretty much hopeless. 

It's also set up so that it's damn near impossible to get the things to stand upright, which is annoying. But there's not much of anything else that would be the right size for these that would let them do that, so this is good enough for now. 

The other main target was the original Milker-type chests that led to this whole line of development in the first place. These along with all the other Type XXX chests were switched over to using the collision from the Imperial Heavy Armor instead of the Iron Armor's that was used of the robotic DMA chests, in part because it tended to fit the range of sizes that the chests were built to a bit better but especially because using it didn't result in the inverted lighting bug that I was getting on the earlier versions built with the existing DMA collision. Don't ask me why the hell that is, I just welcomed not having to do the extra step to fix that. 

You'll notice that the orientation on the Harness chest is different, though; both this and the Manga body-based fixed-weight chest are set up like this because it's the only way they'd fit into the collision. Otherwise those ginormous hooters would be well outside of its bounds and clip though everything. Trying to find a better orientation setting for them is on my list of maybe-to-do's, but as I've touched on before messing around with those is a really obnoxious process. And honestly, this doesn't look bad. The important part about it is the ground model's orientation, which worked out great.

I also finally got around to adding in a harness-less version of the expanded chest, which has been on my list for months. I had been considering doing multiple sizes of this both with and without the milker, but the Doll set kind of displaced those as well. 

This whole set comes in both flesh and rubber. Stone and brass versions are a bit pointless here, as these are more explicitly designed as humanoid body parts stuck onto a robot. The rubberized versions work as a slight (the slightest) concession to modesty, as well as a stopgap replacement for the beast race-compatible versions that I've entirely been putting off doing for the whole set. (It's not that it would be entirely hard to do them. It would mainly just involve a lot of tedious CK work to build the alternate Armor Add-ons and texture sets that they would need. But to maintain the existing CBBE 'compatibility' they would also need to have their textures on isolated paths instead of the user's defaults, like the rest of the bodyparts, and there's a lot of different options for beast textures which leads to a high likelihood of a much more drastic change from the user's textures than switch to Fair Skin on the non-beast characters causes. It's still something that I should do, since as-is using the fleshy parts on beast characters just results in very weirdly-colored human skin, but I'm dithering.) 

There's also no modesty plated options on these. Partially because I didn't feel it fit the theme, but in a much larger part because I kinda lost the slider settings I used to make the expanded chest. Whoops. 

There's one more batch of minor extra things that're getting added into the base part of the mod. It occurred to me one day that the only thing that I had as far as head coverings go that still showed off the 'brain' parts was the old modified Dwarven Bikini crest that I carried over from very early on in the DCC project, but that it wasn't really all that optimized for this. Particularly in that it was still the original unpolished version, without the re-chroming that I added during the course of the DCC's development, and also that it had the largely unnecessary head and chin strap. That chin strap has the potential to be a problem with certain head shapes, and it didn't really need any straps at all as an add-on to a robot. So I took hardly any time at all tossing chromed and strapless variation in, and then did the same with the Bikini Armor's original crestless version as well, because why not? 

Showing them on the Dibella face there is a bit pointless, though, since you guys won't be getting that one. So here it is paired with one of the existing faces and the unharnessed Milker chest to give you a better idea of what you'll be getting with the pack as it's currently formulated.

Even without the new faces, I like this. It's silly.

The UNPFx- based pelvises work particularly well with a robotic chest like this. The humanoid waist on those is cinched down very closely to the internal piping, which gives it a thinner and much more intentionally artificial look especially from the back. It's fun.

So that's the current plan. Future plans depend a lot on how I can salvage the situation with the faces. I intend to get some kind of new set of those out and restart the whole Dibella theme again at some point, but right now I can't really give any sort of timeline for that. I'd also kind of like to revisit the idea of having a pre-cut base head mesh that I could use to both build new static faces without having to repeat the cutting process over and over again, as well as to maybe create a dedicated Doll race to let people build original Doll characters with working facial animations. Both of those are a fair bit outside of my wheelhouse, though. I have a general idea of how new races work and the various challenges I'd have in adapting one to work with the DMA parts, but I've never gotten into the nuts and bolts of it. And as for the pre-cut head mesh I already ran into issues while experimenting with the idea on the Charmers faces, where a lot of the sliders up and stopped working right. I have some suspicions about what went wrong, but those suspicions involve the technical aspects of how the Racemenu sliders work so I'm well and truly at sea there. It's probably worth trying to figure out, though, since it would provide a massive improvement over the previous process. 

I've also got a couple other little ideas that I want to try poking around with to see if I can tuck them into the mod quickly, but nothing much that should be a major hangup should I have to skip over it. Aside from that it's pretty much down to the testing and error-checking. So expect to be able to do this to your own followers sooner than later.

And as an added bonus, have a bit of headcanon I wrote up as some background lore for this initial release. The original intent was to use it for the 'lore' section when I do the update for the main page, but it ended up much larger than what I wanted there. That'll end up using a vastly truncated version instead, but I figure it can't hurt to put the fuller one up as well. (The 'd/m' notations are placeholders for the dates, didn't want to take the time to figure out the exact timeline for this after deciding not to use it)

B--, I am sure you are aware by now that our colleague failed to return from his last expedition. What you may not yet know is that the team we sent to resupply him found his encampment burned out and the path he was using to enter the ruins collapsed beyond all hope of reopening. What exactly happened is unclear, and some of what was found is unsettling. Our colleague's recent theories about Dwemer technology at the end of their existence may have been bizarre, but it seems that he came across something that exceeded even his expectations. I enclose a transcription of the legible portions of a damaged journal recovered from the camp, so you can judge for yourself.  --S

d/m - Reached the site without incident. The locals seem to avoid this region, so we'll have to make do with the people we brought along. Did hire on the 'bandits' who sold word of their find to us, but I don't know how useful they'll be. Couldn't have been all that good at banditry, considering how starved they were, but there's always room for a few more hands at a dig site.

d/m - Don't know how they found this route into the ruin. The surface portions are long collapsed, and there's no real indication that this cave would be related to them. The hidden path at the back...

...long passage through the rock, ending in a cracked wall...

...Will enter to...

d/m - The initial rooms are in decent shape. Appear to have been ore and ingot storage, no traps or automatons. Further rooms partially collapsed, will have to dig out as much as possible but...

...in the last week. Not sure how extensive the collapse is. Our hired hands were worried that their discovery would prove fruitless, had to reassure them that this was normal for Dwarven ruins...

d/m - At last! Finding mangled scraps of automatons in the rubble. Doesn't match any of the major types, but also not quite what I was expecting. Not sure...

...hand. Very clearly a carved stone hand, in a bright white marble. Only partially reconstructed, but...

...did the Dwarves go in for this kind of work? They were certainly master sculptors, but they usually produced blocky, abstract designs, while this is perfectly lifelike. Have I lucked out and found the location of that Dibe...

...one of the areas suggested by my prior research, but I hadn't given it that high of a probability. Was it even more widespread than...

d/m - Metal arms, now. So far nothing but arms, first in stone, and now in the usual Dwarven metal. But instead of the armored design that I was expecting, they're cast to the same feminine shape as the stone arms. They are clearly meant to be parts of an automaton, but they don't seem to be the combat-focused automatons mentioned in the...

...appear to be a series of storerooms, if the structure follows normal Dwarven conventions. Will try the room one down and across the hall next, it seems to be...

...feet this time. Made from a dark, resilient material, rubber I think it's called? But why? And why is it in such a strange sandal? It almost looks...

...is definitely flesh. Or something that looks like flesh. It seems too real to be fake, but also too fake to be real. This almost tracks with...

...the bodies described there were intact with mechanical limbs, this is a mechanical limb with sections of...

...arms, feet, and now a leg. I'm a little bit concerned about where this is going. I'm afraid the status of Dwemer studies will take a hit when we open the next room...

d/m - I understand it now. It all makes sense. 
           The Dwarves were perverts.

The major things I had left to do were loading all the hairs into the core mod, and some various bits of fixes and cleanup. I was planning on finally getting this out sometime around Halloween.

Was.

It occurred to me as I was getting ready to start my work for the day that I hadn't checked on Charmers of the Reach in a while to see how their planned updates were progressing. So I made my way over there... And found that DAZ had pulled its permissions to use its assets and forced Charmers to remove their public distribution.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucccccccccccckkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk.

Obviously, this is A Problem. It's terrible for COR Team to have the project that they've been putting so much effort into banjaxed after-the-fact like this, mainly, but it's also a very direct problem here because being able to create truly high-quality face masks from the Charmers head mesh kind of became the center of gravity for this project as development went on over these past several months. With Charmers gone like this, I can't continue to use the parts I developed from its assets.

I've lost my Dibella.

My available Plan B's... Kinda suck. The easiest option is to just pull the Charmer content in its entirety and leave the existing face masks as the only options. This would be deeply unsatisfying and potentially problematic for many reasons, not the least of which being the fact that a number of the hair sets don't really work all that well with the existing masks, so those would also have to be pulled, plus the additional complication that a few of the existing masks don't really work well with much of any of the hair sets. It's one thing to pass it off as 'oh well, legacy content, the new parts are mainly meant for use with the new content, sorry' when the new content is actually there, but that's a lot harder to justify when it's not. Relying on the existing faces would also mean losing all the effort that went into making color-matched faces for the Doll bodies. Having to go back to that glaring mismatch between the face and body skintones after seeing how good things looked with them matched up would be deeply annoying.

The other option involves going back to the plan that I very quickly abandoned when the Charmer faces first became available. Actually, it's far too generous to even call it a plan, it was more of a 'well, I guess I could do this if there's no other choice'. I've mentioned in passing how it's technically possible to do the same process I used to make masks from the Charmer faces to make a mask out of a Vanilla head mesh. The biggest problem there (aside from how generally fugly the Vanilla heads are in comparison) is that the low-poly Vanilla mesh does not have a very clean cut-line around the face. There's basically no way to excise the face from the mesh without the edges being all jagged and awful. The obvious follow-up is to find a non-Vanilla option, but of those the only one that seems to still be standing is the five-year-old CITRUS head mesh. I've seen mentions of others, but none of them seem to still be going concerns. So I grabbed it- I'd never really bothered to use it before- and whipped up a very quick test mask using one of the Vanilla presets, but, well... 

Citrus (I am not typing that in all caps all the time) is... Well, it's better than nothing. If Charmers hadn't existed, it might have been what I ended up with in the first place. But it's got some issues as far as my needs go, particularly in comparison to Charmers. First of all is that matter of the cut-line. Citrus is actually higher-poly than Charmers, but its polygons are highly rectilinear, where the Charmers mesh is much more contoured. 

This meant that on the Charmers mesh I could cut out a mask with a relatively low forehead angled down to the section of mesh that wrapped around the ears, which then swept back into the jaw. It was a very easy aesthetic sell. 

Doing the same thing on the Citrus mesh... Isn't really possible. It's mostly rectangles, with cross-bars dividing them into triangles that largely don't line up in a way that promotes angled cutting. To get a clean cut of the face you pretty much have to go straight down, and that in turn leaves you with very little of the mask coming into contact with the ear-plates that it's putatively mounted to. On top of that a clean line for the jaw is very hard to find; the one on this test is a god damned mess, but I got tired of taking the time to redo it when I just wanted to bang out a quick test-shot. 

And then there's the various further problems derived from the fact that this is still aping and incorporating the Vanilla head mesh system. It still uses the original mouth/teeth mesh, which is, frankly, garbage. It uses the original eye meshes which incorporate the eyelashes and caused me all sorts of problems with that old detached head experiment, so those'll have to go. What exactly would be best to replace them I'm unsure of, and is complicated by how the more deep-set eye morphs intrude into the structural eye-mount parts of the mechanical replacement heads, as seen here, which will make finding usable face shapes all the more difficult. And sculpting those faces in the first place will be a royal pain in the ass; getting really good faces out of Skyrim is giant time-sink at the best of times, but meeting the bar set by how easy it was to get good-looking faces out quickly makes it a task I honestly dread. I just don't know if I can work up the energy to do it.

The one bright spot is that doing the skin tone-related stuff will be a bit easier. The Citrus head replaces the head mesh for the Vanilla races, so I can just directly export the model and texture file for each preset tint instead of having to save each color and apply it to the Charmers race, as I tediously had to do to get those skin tones. And I'll have access to the Vanilla makeup options, although I don't know if that's really a selling point. 

As for how I'm going to move forward, what I'd like to do is have some degree of replacements for the Charmers faces in the actual release, but it's pretty much guaranteed that will significantly extend the development time. I'll be recreating work that took me weeks in the first place using worse tools and with much less enthusiasm, so I can't really expect that it'll go by quicker. The other option is to go the sans-faces route to begin with, to get the finished and otherwise functional parts of the mod out, and then add the replacement faces in later as an update. The latter will at least get the mod out in the wild in some form, but it will be deeply unsatisfying to leave it 'unfinished' like that.

There's also the fact that the COR Team says that they're working on a DAZ-less version of their mod, which would presumably make any effort put into the Citrus faces wasted, as I'd be inclined to immediately replace them with the new COR. But that also kind of depends on when the new COR comes out and what form it'll take, which are questions I can't yet answer. And even when it comes out, I'm still going to have to re-do every single bit of work on the faces. There's no quick fix, here.

I had planned to spend the near future charging forward to the release of this mod, but this development leaves too many things up in the air to do that. For the moment I've just got to wait and see how things pan out. 

I want my Dibella back.

*Ba-dum tishhh*

Figuring out how to fix the lighting on the ground models put me in a pretty good mood, and I've been making some solid progress on them. About 85% of the items from this project now have ground models built and added to the mod. Mainly just the more esoteric things like the Milker chests and the pedestals left, and for the latter I'm going to have to do some experiments in sourcing collision as I haven't quite managed to find an existing one that they fit into. I might be able to find a way to modify one but that's a bit of a tricky prospect, as even aside from the fact that I don't have any tools to edit the collision mesh itself a lot of the things that I can manipulate on it using NifSkope are under-documented numerical values that I usually end up having to plug random integers into and pop in and out of the game to check the results of, repeating that process until I either find something that works or something that breaks the model. Which is a giant pain. Although with that process I did manage to find positioning values that make the Phalluses display in-inventory the way I wanted them to, so that's a plus. 

The whole ground model thing is really quite a bit of work in general, but I genuinely feel that it rounds off the mod. The inventory display aspect makes it much easier to discern between the various parts than trying to decode my out-of-my-ass naming schemes, and being able to drop the items into the world, especially when they're things like a detachable penis or a robot butt, honestly amuses the hell out of me. I can only hope that the rest of you find it as entertaining as I do.

It's not all sunshine and roses, of course. I've run into various limitations and oddities with making ground models out of meshes intended to be bodyparts. For instance, consider the wigs:

The interiors of these can be a bit of a problem. The original meshes were designed with the intent of always being around a head model, so they can get a bit... messy... on the inside. And there's a number of them with original hair textures that are invisible on the inside in a way that can't really be fixed by setting the mesh to double-sided, which made a lot of my original selection of hairs unfeasible. But also note how the regular hair version is that bright blonde-ish color. For that version, I didn't actually mess with the original hair's color settings. In-game it shows up as your character's hair color when used on the player, or a dark brown/black when placed on an NPC. (If there's a way to get it to color-match on the NPCs, it's beyond my scope.) But on the ground models, Skyrim completely ignores any color tint settings built into the mesh when displaying it in-game so you get the original texture color. It's the same thing that happens with the fleshy bodyparts, where they show the original skin texture unaffected by any skin tint shaders. And then there was the further complication of the rubber-skinned versions, where there was no clear way to use the texture set trick that creates the body-use version from the regular-skinned models. For those it turned out to be just as easy to build copies of the ground models with the black texture subbed in. 

Doing that got me thinking about a suggestion from a few entries ago, though. Y'see, the above-mentioned inability to use body-related color effects on the ground models also meant that the skin specular effect used to make the rubber body coating glossy is also MIA. It can, however, be somewhat replicated by playing with the ground mesh's specular strength settings, which produces that sheen above. That skin specular effect also caused me a bit of grief back during the -BAF- project where I first used the rubber skins. I had been considering including full NPCs built using the 'elemental trooper' concept I had going there, but during early experiments in that vein discovered that the game treats the specular on the head mesh completely differently from the one on the body mesh. The results produced a pronounced neckseam, and worse came out kind of flat instead of glossy, which put a kibosh on that whole idea. So when the question of rubber faces to go with the bodyparts was raised, that past experience was on my mind. Trying to do it directly on the existing face mesh would likely have the same result. But after seeing the faux-gloss effect on the converted skin meshes for the ground models, I couldn't help but wonder how it'd look on a converted face mesh.

Not bad, actually. It's not perfect, as it doesn't quite match the body and is more of an approximation of the effect, leading to it to be more or less accurate depending on the type and angle of the lighting, but it's serviceable enough. 

For now I've just got it on the two Dibella masks. It wouldn't be particularly hard to add to the other racial masks, but I'm not sure I'm committed enough to it to bother. It does give me the full range of material types for Dibella's face, though.

That variety of materials is particularly well-served by having individualized ground models. You can leave whole sets lying around and immediately know if they're rubber...

Brass...

Stone...

...Oh, yes. I should mention her, shouldn't I?

Her.

Her.

Back when I first brought up doing a set of wigs built for use with the Doll-type bodies I mentioned how any hair mesh that covered the breast would be hard to use given the wide array of chest sizes I intended to include in the range of fixed-weight models, and how I still kinda wanted to use at least one for a set specifically built to represent the Statue of Dibella theme I've had in the back of my mind while working on the stone versions of the parts. I also mentioned how, considering the breast issue, it would probably be easier to combine it with a specific chest model as its own separate armor piece. In the original idea it would have been just the chest and the hair; this was before the Charmer mod came out, and before I made a specific face to represent Dibella. In fact, this idea was a large part of why I explored making faces from the Charmer mesh in the first place. Even for a while after I had a Dibella I was figuring that it would be better to leave the face and head mounts out of the piece so people could choose their own, but while building the other ground models I realized that by packaging them all together in one armor piece I could use the ground model to do this:

I mean, how could I not?

The hair I ended up using is also not what I originally had in mind. I intended to use something that fully covered the breasts, as a sort of attempt at semi-modesty, but none of the hairs I tried really worked. Some of them were nice enough, but none of them really felt right. None of them really felt... Goddess-y. Until I tried Sky285 from KS Hairs.

This felt right. It was also the most completely immodest of all the hairs I tried out. But y'know what, screw modesty. This is Dibella. She's supposed to have her tits out. 

There are some problems with this, though. First, you keeners out there might have noticed that I have a bit of a pet peeve regarding excessive clipping on the things I build. Well, with that permanent wind-blown look, combat makes the arms clip through the hair mesh like woah.

Which is annoying, but I'm willing to ignore it. A somewhat larger problem comes up in the consideration of using this with the other material types. A brass one would be pretty easy to do, but the original hair has this going on:

This hasn't been exactly an uncommon problem in the hair aspect of this project, annoyingly. There's several hair types that depend on an underlying scalp mesh to fill in gaps along the hairline, most of which I've ended up having to ditch as that scalp mesh doesn't really pair well with the robot heads and material conversions. There's a couple that I left in because the style was nice and the gap wasn't too bad, but this one is terrible. Quite possibly the biggest I've seen. So that makes doing a flesh-body version of the Dibella bust a bit untenable and leaves me inclined to only do the statue. But a brass version wouldn't have that gap to worry about and would be pretty simple to do... Aside from then kinda needing to include a brass version of the UNP pelvis to go with the UNP Perky chest that happened to fit the best into the hair mesh's curls. 

A much easier consideration as far as variants go? The Corrupted version. Simple matter of swapping out the mask, that.

But back on the subject of alternate versions via differing materials, I've been resisting doing metal and rubber versions for the full set. Just doing flesh and stone for everything produced a crazy inflation in the parts count from the original DMA. Including the other two would damn near double that, so I've reserved them to the Variable set and a handful of the fixed-weight models, in particular the Type E and B-compatible robot legged versions (as well as the legless 'unassembled' type, tossed in because that's what I used to build the other two) made using the base UUNP and the UNPFx L pelvis, as they had the best compatibility with the existing robot thigh pieces. I figured I should probably have a full range of options available for those, since while the 'doll' look was the base idea for this part of the project, the human-based parts do look pretty kick-ass with robot limbs. 

But given all that I kinda needed some fixed-weight chests to pair with them. With the Variable set I have no say in what the end user's result will look like, so I couldn't really count on them matching well. Adding variants to the UUNP base shape set was easy enough, though, given that it's just the one very static size. The UNPFx version was where the problem lay. I chose it in part so I would have a version with that amusingly cinched waistline, but I didn't have rubber or metal versions of any of the chests I built to match that waist. So obviously a few of those had to go in.

I intentionally kept it to literally a few in the interest of containing the parts bloat. Between 7Base, UNP High, and UNPetite Low there should be plenty of range even if I skip UNPB or the Expanded types. Of course, now I'm wondering if I need to include rubber and metal versions of the human-legged UNPFx L pelvis to match these.

I have a problem.

Well, several problems, if you consider the other little amusement I have to show off today. While making these ground models has been amusing in and of itself, while putting them together I couldn't help but wonder what other uses the Dwarves might have had for disembodied chunks of torso. 

Well, I mean obviously there'd be a fuckdoll. I think if there's one thing that's been firmly established, it's that my Dwemer are perverts.

This is made from the models for the cinched-waist 7Base chest and the 'unassembled' UNPFx pelvis, but it's not an armor piece. It's a misc item, and exists solely to be dropped into the world and left lying around somewhere.

And you can't actually fuck it. It's a purely decorative item. You could put those parts paired with the Null head and limb tokens onto an actor and fuck them, but you'd have to find some way to force them into a lying state at all times or else you'd have this torso just floating around the place. Or hey, maybe that's your thing. I won't judge. 

I mean, I'm the one over here with a pile of flesh.

So yeah, the bodies are pretty much done, aside from a handful of errors to fix and possible additional variants. Right now I'm back in the weeds of the frickin' hair section of the project. I've got a pretty much final selection of models and even managed to bang out the ground models for them in pretty quick succession, but now I'm trudging through adding them into the mod in the CK. And dreading whether or not they'll kick me over to a third page in AIM, because, well...

And this isn't even all of them. The constraints that I gave myself (nothing covering the chest, nothing with see-through sections of the interior, minimal gaps) managed to rule out an annoying number of the more interesting types and left me a bit over-represented in terms of short bobs. I was already going back through things to see if there were some of the more interesting models that weren't too bad that I could use, when I noticed that summerdew had snuck an update of their HG Hairdos set past me. So of course I had to skim through that and pull out anything that seemed like it might be of use. Just started that yesterday and I've still got plenty of converting and testing to do, but on first blush...

Heh. Heheh. Bwa-HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Oh yes, this does look promising. This is absolutely a gap I wanted filled. The perfect combination of the mesh 'ribbons' and the brass texture conversion. I needed something completely un-staid like this.

...I wonder how it'd look with the brass Redguard face?

Yeah, that's what I'm talkin' about. 

Still looking at the bottom, but this barrel's pretty damn deep. 

This damn problem. Lacking any solution for this bizarre 'inverted lighting' on the ground models' skin meshes, I put an ask about it into the Outfit Studio thread and got some helpful information about the cause. Specifically that it was due to the normal maps somehow getting 'flipped' during the build process. Using that as a keyword I found a way to un-flip them using NifSkope, but unfortunately that by itself wasn't enough of a solution. The issue is the 'model space' normal maps that the skin mesh uses. As far as I can figure, NifSkope doesn't treat them the same as regular normal maps. That program has a 'flip normals' command under the mesh tools, but it doesn't display on the model space meshes. It does have a 'face normals' command that appeared to fix the issue in-program, but oddly had no noticeable effect in-game, so that was a bust. Digging further into the mesh settings showed that the model space meshes actually have their 'has normals' flag set to 'no', which is apparently why the flip command wasn't present. Switching that flag on restored the flip command, but also activated another familiar problem with trying to change the normal maps on the skin meshes: it seems to make the mesh act as if it did have a regular normal map, but trying to use a regular normal map on a mesh that's been built to use model space maps simply results in weirdness. The mesh takes on a translucent appearance while the lighting goes all flat and drastically changes the brightness of the mesh as it moves around. It's bizarre and completely broken, and I could not remember how the hell to fix it. 

I've fixed it before, when I did the bodysuits for the -BAF- set. I even mentioned that there was a trick to it in one of the blog entries I made while developing that set. But I didn't bother to mention what that trick was, and was damned if I could recall the process. I'd been trying to since early in the Doll development when I was exploring the idea of a full-brass variant and ran face-first into the issue, but I'd pretty much given up on it as a tertiary priority until I saw that same issue crop up at that point in trying to get the ground models to work. I still hadn't remembered what the trick was, though, and was about ready to shelve the whole thing and just go with the inverted ground models, but instead I just set it aside for the day and gave the whole thing a think.

The core of the problem was that there's something in the settings for the skin meshes that indelibly ties them to the model space maps. Simply turning off the 'model space normals' shader flag does nothing to undo those ties. What exactly would, I don't know enough about the molecular structure of the models to affect. I had been thinking in terms of 'fixing' the existing meshes, but the problem was clearly far too baked into how the mesh was built for me to be able to do anything with them. So what I needed was a mesh that didn't have all that crap baked-in. And hey, wasn't that old .nif>.obj>.nif conversion trick actually really useful for getting a clean copy of a mesh without any weird game-breaking stuff hooked onto it?

Yes. Yes, it was. I still don't remember clearly if this is the method I used for the bodysuits, but I feel it has to be because it works so cleanly. You end up with a perfectly functional copy of the mesh that lights properly and that will take regular normal maps without complaint. Of course, the next problem was getting a regular normal map to use for a skin texture. Trying to use a model space map on a mesh built to use regular maps has pretty much the same problem as trying to do it the other way around, just in reverse, with the lighting going all weird and glow-y. I first ran into that issue during some experiments a couple years back, which caused me to abandon them as I had no idea how to make a non-model space skin normal map at the time. But since then I'd figured out how to generate workable normals from the main textures in the course of the Bikini Revival project, so that wasn't really a problem anymore. Open the skin textures up in GIMP, run the filter, play around with the settings and re-run the filter until you end up with some combination that doesn't make the skin look like it's made of glossy plastic, and boom:

One perfectly workable non-model space skin normal map. Loses some of the depth of detail from the original, but it's functional. From here, fixing the ground models was fairly straightforward. A bit involved due to the need to run the .obj conversion on all of the skin meshes, but once the working mesh is generated it's only a matter of adding on a couple of textures and changing a few settings to get a properly-lit version that can quickly be subbed back into the full model. They do tend to fall victim to that initial lighting inversion if you do the process before building the ground model in OS, but unlike the original skin meshes they respond just as well to the 'edit alpha' fix as the Dwarven meshes. The skin tones still seem to be a lost cause, sadly, but as of now I have everything I need to build ground models for all of the Doll parts.

Although as to those skin tones, it's worth noting again that the problem there seems to be that the game's engine refuses to process the 'skin tone' shader flags and data on ground-type models. It instead shows whatever the base skin texture applied to the model is. That means that it's technically feasible to cheat around it for the racial masks by making copies of the base texture with the colors properly altered, but getting those to match up correctly to the in-game results is waaaaaaaaay beyond the level of effort I'm willing to or capable of putting into this. This particular quirk won't stop the Corrupted masks from being distinguishable, though, since they're already using alternate skin textures. 

And on the subject of alternate textures, I've been leaving a pretty big one hanging. I mentioned above how I had earlier ran into the model space issue when I was playing around with the idea of a brass-skinned variant for the Doll. Well, obviously if I found a way to fix the problem on the ground models then I can do the same thing to make brass skins, right?

Right. Once the .obj conversion is done it's a pretty trivial matter to load the environment map settings and textures to generate a brass variant. And the .obj conversion itself goes by pretty quickly, with the most annoying part being the transfer of the weight painting onto the new mesh. So while it was easy as pie to do it to the test ground meshes I had already built, it was just about as easy to run the process on the body-use Charmer masks. 

That gave me the brass mask variants to match the SeXtreme set, suitable for use with the more fully-robotic body builds:

But why would I ever stop with that? Of course I whipped out a full set of matching Doll body parts.

And when you put them all together, well now.

The brass tile texture gets a bit more noticeably stretched on some parts than I might like, but it matches well with the hair and faces and is just generally amusing to look at. So I'm pretty happy to have this in here. But there's the question of how much of it should be in here. The faces and the variants for the arms and feet were quick to do and don't add much bloat to the item count, but the main body parts are a bit more of a problem. Part of the issue there is that making these requires adding new copies of the skin meshes to the existing models. For fixed stuff like the faces and arms that's just a matter of a straight swap, but on the parts that are more reliant on Bodyslide/bodymorphs to build it's necessary to add the duplicate skins to the Shape Data model. The problem is that adding new parts to the Shape Data model after you've already added zaps and built variant outputs for Bodyslide is Kind Of A Pain. It was much easier to just give these their own independent Data model and project files with the original and stone skin meshes deleted, which let me quickly add in a Variable set for the torso and pelvis.

(How can a metal body get pregnant? Magi- wait, I did this joke already)

I'm largely inclined to just leave this as a Variable set variant in interest of controlling the parts count bloat, but the way that the ground models are going to be built actually impacts upon the consideration of adding fixed-weight versions of this. You see, this all would have been much, much easier if I had realized that I needed those converted skin meshes for the ground models right from the start. If I had I could've included them in the combined base models I used to generate the meshes for Doll and Statue versions of the fixed-weight variants and have a ground-use copy of the variant right at hand. Instead I'm basically going to have to recreate the process I used to create the fixed-weight variants using a new base model with a set of converted skins. For the other parts it was easy enough to build the initial converted mesh and then save off copies with the texture setting changed for the respective skin types one by one, but the sheer number of fixed-weight variants makes doing that for the main body parts far more of a chore. Piling on a full set of converted skins makes it much easier to generate the ground models for all of the skin variants all at once, where I can then pull off the meshes I don't need for each type... but it also means that in the process I could pretty easily generate fixed-weight variants for the metal body as well, since I've already got its skin tossed onto the pile for the Variable version's ground models. 

I'm a bit inclined to split the difference and just do metal versions for a handful of the body variants. Probably at least the robot leg-equipped pelvises and some of the UNPF-styled chests, since they're not entirely doable with the standard Bodyslide settings on the Variable body. Gonna have to have a bit more of a think about the logistics there.

Either way, it's nice to have this in here at last. Some early considerations about doing a 'brass doll' set based on the more easily-retextured SeXtreme models were what got me started down this particular route, so I'm happy to finally have something along those lines running around the game in a workable state. 

(Other people might not be)

I mentioned in the comments of the last post that there were various issues with trying to use clothing with the Doll bodies. The fixed-weight versions are something of a lost cause, given that as the game treats them as clothing/armor pieces themselves, there's no way to get an overlaid clothing piece to automatically conform to them. The statue versions have the additional problem of having the breast and butt bounce removed, so they'd need alternate versions of the clothing that also have those removed to avoid motion clipping. About the only place where clothing use is feasible is on the Variable version, as that's intended to be built to your Bodyslide preset same as any other type of outfit, but that feasibility comes with several restrictions. First, as the upper torso Core has to occupy slot 32 for the body replacement function to work, any clothing has to either be built onto the Core mesh itself, as I did for the modesty-plated versions of all the Doll bodies, or an overlay outfit using an alternate slot. The number of those are fairly limited, being mainly the original Dwarven Bikini cyborg-use set, the batch of overlay outfits I made for the DCC Extras pack, and the slot 48 versions of the bikini tops from my Bikini Revival set. But then you run into the next set of problems, which is coverage and weighting. 

The coverage problem involves how the Doll bodies chop up the regular human bodies and replace sections of them with robotic parts. Finding outfits that will actually fit into the areas of human body left has been the first difficulty. The bikini top mesh from BR, annoyingly, ends up with the back of the straps buried in the neck and mid-torso rings. The deep cuts at the shoulders are particularly restrictive, as many, many outfits end up with bits floating over the gap, thusly:

The mid-torso gap is also a major problem, although I found that depending on the particular design of the outfit it can have less impact than I might have expected. The dress piece from the Ancient Nordic set, for instance, almost works fine.

The main problem it runs into is the biggest one: the weighting. I had to remove the lower spine and clavicle bones from the Cores to keep them from causing all sorts of clipping and distortion in the mechanical parts, but the direct result of that is that the outfits, which assume that they're on a body that does still have that weighting, can display all sorts of clipping around the back and shoulders. In cases such as this where the outfit covers the full torso that most frequently expresses itself as clipping around the upper mid-torso ring, as visible above. But you can also have cases where an outfit was fairly closely fitted to the upper back, and in those cases you get, well, this:

So, y'know, that's clearly un-ideal. The combinations of all those restrictions severely limits the number of tops that are really usable. The bottoms are less of an issue; the hips retain the original weighting so the only real restriction on them are the physical constraints imposed by the Gynoid parts. As such pretty much any bottom that would work with the DCC's Gynoid set will work here. but for the tops... The only one I've got in the Extras pack that really works without any major issues in the Hakama top. It's low and thin enough to clear the cut lines without any real issues, and seems to have managed to avoid the majority of the weight-clip areas as well. 

But for pre-existing stuff... That and the stringier of the Dwarven Bikinis are about it. I spent some time looking for an alternative, but have yet to come across anything I'm entirely satisfied with. One problem is permissions. There's this 'strap bikini' that works fairly well, although the bottoms have a little less coverage than I'd like for a 'modesty' outfit. The top fits into the space restrictions well enough, and displays relatively minimal clipping. But given that the provenance of it is a bit less than clear, I'm leery of using it.

It also runs into my other concern, which is morphability. This looks nice at moderate weights, but those clasp elements do not like getting pulled around by Bodymorph mods, and can look particularly bad at higher or lower weights. And that's also a problem with most of the other outfits I checked out, particularly as far as the lower weights went. A lot of them just look terrible when asked to fit on something like a UNPetite chest, and that's kinda been the final wall for one idea. I had a thought that I could, if I found a suitable outfit, add in a version of it with the top de-boned in the same way as the cores, and include pre-sized versions matched to all of the fixed-weight torso parts. They'd only work with the fleshy Doll bodies, and add parts bloat and complexity, but it'd be the only really feasible way to give them a clothing option aside from the modesty plates. But I've yet to find something that actually works the way I want it to, so that idea had to go back on the shelf for the time being.

As far as the bodies themselves go, I've finally gotten the stone and flesh versions of all the fixed-weight variations loaded into the mod. This, unsurprisingly, kicked me over to two pages in AddItemMenu. Considering that I'm still not done adding parts, this is kind of scary. The rubber versions are done entirely in the CK and don't require additional meshes, but I've been wavering a bit on doing them for all of the fixed weight versions both out of concern for the ballooning parts count, and also because working in the CK is so fucking tedious. I'm kiiiiiiinda inclined to reserve the rubber skin as a Variable body variant alongside the Gynoid legs. There's just a point where I've got to stop, after all. I've already gotten a boatload of variations out of the body shapes as it is.

The chests and pelvises of these are mostly but not quite exactly paired. There were some parts that I ended up pulling because they were functionally identical to other parts. In the case of the UNP and UNPB pelvises they were exactly the same, and there were a couple of chest presets where one of the ends of the weight spectrum was pretty much the same as the UNP Low chest. I also didn't bother including the Low version of every preset, and as mentioned before the original UNPF-series tops were ditched in favor of approximations made using some of the other chest presets as bases. This lets you combine the UNPF's wasp waist with some otherwise plumped-up parts, to an amusing effect.

This part of it at least, the idea of being able to display Dolls with multiple body types at the same time, has worked out pretty much perfectly. It just costs a lot in parts bloat. But it gets results.

Also effective was the project to add skin tone variants to the Charmer faces, although it also contributed to the parts bloat and was suuuuuuper tedious to do. The elves had five skin tones each and the humans ten, and I had to export a head out of Racemenu for each one of them. But it worked!

Being able to match up the face and body tones really improves the whole look of the thing. That Wood Elf from the previous post no longer looks dippy:

Although the Wood Elf in particular has a bit of an annoyance as far as the tones go. The last two of its tone presets are, as near as I can tell, damn near identical. My color vision's not the best so at first I thought it might just be me, but after poking around at the outputted textures it honestly looks like they have only the most marginal of differences.

So that's something of a 'What the hell, Bethesda?' moment. Left them both in there because I just couldn't be bothered, but if you find yourself thinking they're identical know that it's not just you. 

I also revised the Wood Elf face for the third damn time, as my previous attempts kept coming out looking older and more shrewish than the 'pixie' look I was going for. The third try still ain't really there, but it's good enough to be getting on with. 

And one more fix for the faces in the 'tiny thing that bugged me every time I noticed it' category: I made the eyelashes double-sided. I honestly think it really improves things. I may be a bit too detail-oriented.

The increase in number for the faces from the variant skin tones helped kill my interest in doing alternate expressions, though. The tones and the statue versions increase the count of the racial faces more than enough, thanks. (And no brass versions for now, I tried and as expected I'm having the same issues getting the environment mapping to work as I was having with the bodies.) But when I was digging around through the Charmers assets I found that it had a whole slew of alternate face textures for some reason, including a few with some entertaining features. I figured I could combine those and one of the more unusual morph options on the Charmer heads to at least generate an alternate version of the Dibella mask...

...The Corrupted Aspect of Dibella. With obligatory Statue version. For pure shits and giggles. And speaking of shits and giggles, while I was finally getting around to adding the 'pedestal' pieces from way back at the start of this project into the main mod it occurred to me that there was one more variant on that idea that I could add. You see, while the pedestals are amusing they are also somewhat limited by the user's access to a method to force an actor into a good static pose, given that I have no clue how to attach a forced pose onto an outfit part. What I needed was a take on the idea that wouldn't look as out of place in motion. There was one obvious way to do that.

Mind you, this is still victim to my limitations. Like the other pedestals, it's completely static from the base of the spine down. I have no idea how to add the Sphere rolling animations onto it, or if that's even possible, and it certainly doesn't compact into a ball or anything. I couldn't even find the rolling sound in the footsteps options, annoyingly. And the bottom will clip through the ground in some situations, particularly crouching. But even given all that, this is quite amusing.

One other recent addition was a more fully realized 'insert' for the Phallus Attachments. I'd had some cables leading up into the body from the start, but I realized they really needed to actually connect to something. Thus:

The dildo model isn't actually new, I just don't think I've brought it up before. It's actually half of the double-dildo model from one of the Leito animations, IIRC. I had originally intended to use a dildo model from the SeXtreme assets, but when I tried changing the textures I found that it had an extremely weird and noticeable sort of join line exactly on the top and bottom of the shaft. Digging around more netted this, and it takes to new textures beautifully. I'm including the original fake flesh tone as well as the brass, along side...

One stone dick. 

Of course, the insert is just something of an affectation on the on-body model, given that it's literally buried in the torso. What it really needed to be there for was for the ground models. 

Dicks, dicks everywhere.

Yes, I'm finally getting a start on this, the final major part of the project. Unfortunately this may also be the part where I end up having to make some major and very annoying compromises.

When I was building the ground models for the earlier DMA stuff the main problem I was running into was figuring out which borrowed collision boxes would work best for each type of part. That's less of a concern here, as I can mostly just reuse the same collisions from those ground models. I say 'mostly' as the phalluses have been of some concern. I don't have anything else that's quite the same size and shape, and the closest matches both have issues. The one I used for the tails is much too large, but it displays well in-inventory. The glove collision I used for the forearm armors fits a lot better and looks good on the ground, as seen above, but the inventory view... Does this:

So yeah, not quite right. But that I can probably fix by just digging around and experimenting until I find a collision that works the way I want.

My bigger problem is a matter of lighting. I build the ground models like I build all of my models, by using Outfit Studio. This... isn't exactly something OS was designed to do, given that it has no actual ability to see the collision model (which often makes things a pain in the ass), but I have no capability with other modeling programs and have figured out ways to bodge it into doing more or less what I wanted it to do. But it does this inexplicable thing where, entirely too often, it will 'invert' the lighting on a ground model built with it. That is to say, the parts that are supposed to be lit will show up as shadowed in-game, and vice-versa. It will also sometimes do this to meshes that have been mirrored using its mesh transform commands, as I found out very early on in this project, and I discovered that it could be fixed by giving the model a once-over with the 'edit alpha' brush in OS's color tools. I don't know the details of why that works any more than I know why it's doing this in the first place, but it's managed to fix the problem when it crops up so far.

Until now. 

The problem has been consistently showing up when I try to generate ground models for the Doll parts, with the inversion appearing on the entire model. Giving it the once-over with the alpha brush fixes it... but only on the brass parts. The lighting on the skin meshes for both the flesh and stone versions stays inverted, and I'll be damned if I can figure out how to fix it. 

This is Very Irritating. Having the detached body parts lying around was something I was looking forward to seeing, so having it compromised in this manner is a major disappointment. They're still functional as models, so if I have to I can proceed with them even with this obnoxious bug, but I'd be much happier if I could find some way to squash it. It's just that everything I've tried so far hasn't worked, and I don't know enough about what's causing it in the first place to know what else to try.

But you can still get the idea of what I was going for, even if it is just a bit off. 

It does get a more ridiculous if you enchant one of these, though. The effect shader combines with the inverted lighting to do, well, this bullshit:

Yeah.

Sadly the ground models for the new faces display the same issue, as well as one that's almost as annoying but that I was actually expecting. I've brought up that experiment with 'detachable heads' from a couple years ago before. There were a few things that kept me from proceeding with it, and one of them was that the skin tones absolutely, positively would not show up on the ground models. It can have the shader set to face tint, with the tint mask properly linked in the textures and everything else set up the same as the properly functioning body models, but for whatever reason Skyrim refuses to accept it on a ground model. Instead you just get the flat base skin texture.

Obviously this is also quite irritating, but it's not a surprise. I'm still annoyed, but I'm also far too committed to the new faces to abandon them over this. And these haven't displayed some of the other weirdnesses that the detached heads did, like the severely malfunctioning eyelash textures. But this does mean that you won't be able to see which tone is which in-inventory, which makes using them slightly more difficult. And again, they still have the inverted lighting on the skin meshes, with the added bonus that doing the once-over with the alpha brush a bit too enthusiastically apparently makes the eyebrows show up as white-ish. Yay. 

So yeah, that's where I'm at right now. I'd love to get the ground models' skin issues fixed before release, but given that I have no idea how to do that I might have to release it despite them. I've also got to get around to actually finishing the hair side of this project. That all turned out to be more of a pain in the ass than I initially expected. Did another cull through just recently and marked off the ones that were having major problems, although during that I found that there's some of the SeXtreme masks that don't really play well with the hairs in general. Mostly stuff like the foreheads being too high or the cheekbones being too wide. Can't really be helped considering that those face models are extremely non-native to Skyrim, though, so most of that's going into the 'you're just going to have to put up with it' box. The ones that had issues with the Charmers faces, however, got ditched, or had the issues fixed if they were minor enough. Still need to check that work and then collate the survivors so I can get them into the main mod and see what their contribution to the parts count is.

Maybe if I try hard enough, I can reach three pages!

A-durrrrrrrr

Anyway, fix that, and everything works fine. Huzzah!

With that issue resolved, I could move on to the second thing that appealed to me about using the COR head to make new masks: racial variation.

While I like the SeXtreme faces and found them well-suited for their use in the all-robotic body phase of DMA, as I started working on Doll bodies the fact that those faces are largely Caucasian with with skin tones that don't quite match the game's was a bit dissatisfying. I mean, I like the whole mix and match idea for the parts, but it'd also be nice to sometimes have ones that match more than mix. Especially for the Redguards and the Elves. Being able to use COR to generate new faces quite handily solves that problem.

This... Gives me range.

There are some caveats involved, though. First is that many of the faces did admittedly come out a bit same-y. This wasn't really intentional, and I did in fact make an effort to distinguish their shapes a bit more as I was building them: 

But, well, I was also trying to give them looks that I found attractive, as I figured I could tie these in to that initial Dibella face and present them as her race-specific Aspects, and that seems to have kept me from getting too adventurous with them. 

I was also a bit constrained in that by the current limitations of COR. It's not a full multi-race mod yet; it has multi-race support, but those all use the same sets of meshes and skin tones as the main Breton-based race. Well, no, the elves do use a slightly different head shape, but it tends to clip through hairs even worse than COR's basic DAZ-based head so I didn't use it for creating these. All of the elves here are actually heavily-modified COR Bretons, and are particularly similar in shape because once I got that elfish jaw sculpted out I didn't want to fuck with it too much. This also means that they use the same human-type normal map specific to the COR head model- Vanilla-based normals absolutely don't work on it, I tried and it was terrifying- and thus don't have the brow ridges present in the Vanilla elves. It doesn't look that bad, but it'd be nice to fix, and there is technically an option for that via this mod. But while it does restore the brow ridges, they unfortunately managed to re-introduce the early Vanilla-style blocky compression artifacts, so I can't say it's exactly usable. 

Things are further complicated by the skin tones. The COR races have a fairly limited range of them, and when I built the first face for this batch, the Redguard, I just sorta manually close-enough'd the color selection. And it came out fine, but a bit too dark-chocolate for the existing Vanilla skin tones. 

For the subsequent faces I first loaded in the Vanilla race and used Racemenu's 'save color' function to copy the original tints over, which is a functional but fairly clunky process. I just randomly selected whichever tone per race that I liked, figuring that it'd be fine as long as it was in the range, but then it turned out that I had picked exactly the right skin tone for Jenassa. And that when the parts match, it works really well. 

This also had the effect of locking me into using Fair Skin as the pack-in texture on the Doll parts. I had already been inclined to it and its well-defined areolae after seeing it used on the COR races, and had tossed it onto the Dolls for testing before making these faces. Seeing just how drastically differing skin textures can affect how the skin tone is presented like this convinced me that matching to the faces was a must, and the COR faces are currently only matched to the Fair Skin texture. But it's really good at giving that smooth, possibly artificial look I was shooting for with the Doll skin, so that's fine. 

The core problem, though, is when you don't luck into a skin tone match.

I wanted to build a Diversity Squad set of followers to test these, but there's not much in the way of Bosmer in the game to recruit in the first place, much less ones that're decent at combat. So I took a shortcut by using the console to generate a copy of the Wilderness Encounter Wood Elf... And did not luck into a match with the tone I had picked for the mask. Sometimes it looks fine, but sometimes it's really fucking glaring.

Fixing this is tedious, but not really difficult. It's simply a matter of loading in the Vanilla race in Racemenu, saving the color, loading the COR preset made for each of these masks back in and applying the color, and then exporting the mesh to save off the tintmask. The tintmasks are interchangeable, so different ones can be applied to the same mask. I did this to fix the earlier issue with the Redguard mask, and the WE Redguard I grabbed to test with it worked out a lot better, although I still feel it's about a shade off.

The obvious complication is that this only works once per skin tone. The tones of the mask and body are completely independent of each other, so to match the various possible bodies a new copy of the mask has to be made for each skin tone. And while I had hoped that I could do this by means of texture sets like how I'm subbing in the Rubber Body skin, tintmasks don't seem to be swappable using those. My experiments with the Nord mask all just ended up using the tintmask pathed in the mesh. So unless I can figure out a way to get that working, each skin tone variation will have to be a completely separate mesh.

There's usually about ten skin tones per race. So this could turn into yet another source of parts bloat real damn quick. 

But man, they look so damn good all put together like this.

You'll note that I've been using the fixed-weight body parts for the Squad, here, and there's a few things to mention about that. First is that it does work out quite nicely for providing that extra bit of diversity between each Doll, despite the fact that I've only got a fraction of the models added into the game so far. Another is that this is why there's only a fraction of those in so far:

That's 280 meshes produced by my spree of generating fixed-weights from the UUNP presets available in OS, with some customized 'pre-expanded' versions as displayed on the Redguard and Altmer models. Add in another 140 for the Rubber versions, if I were to do those for each body type. But not all of these are going to actually end up in the mod. I've already pulled some of the UNP weight variants due to them being too similar to other versions, and pulled CHSBHC entirely due to various issues with gaps in the skin. And all of the UNPF chests are gone because, as I mentioned before, the breasts do this sort of thing:

I do like the wasp-waist style of the preset, however, so I tried to fake up a version of it using various regular UNP chests to replace these, many of which you can see in the list and an example of which, the UNPetite High-based model, you can see on Jenassa above. But I'm going to have to go back and re-do those as I got the waist a bit too tight and the pipes at the sides of the pelvis connector clip through sometimes. This after I already had to re-do all of the pelvises with a further remodeled connector when I found that the sides of the initial take were clipping though the base ring of all the UNPF-style chests. 

This is a large part of why it's still going to be a while before this stuff actually gets released. I keep having to rate my completion percentage downwards. 

You'll also note that several of the Squad are using robotic limbs. The arms are pretty much freely interchangeable with the existing DMA parts, but there is a sort of a limit with the pelvises imposed by the fact that the existing robotic thigh parts don't really work well with some body presets' hip shapes. Since I don't really feel like rebuilding the thighs for each type of pelvis and because it gives me an easy way out of expanding the parts count even more exponentially, the robot legs/human pelvis combo will be limited to the two presets that the thighs fit best on, the base UUNP shape and the UNPFx Low. B-Type and E-Type connectors were provided for both of them. The Doll chests can also be mixed with the robotic DMA pelvises, as demonstrated by the Nord model, with the caveat that the G-Type pelvis' larger torso connector is likely to clip to some degree or another. It'll work fine with the Milker type chests, however.

I also feel that I should specifically mention something about the Breton mask. I based it on the second COR preset, as I felt that it suited a sort of youthful and fresh-faced Aspect of Dibella, but when paired with the short in-game height of the Breton races and the preset's low, 20-something weight, it comes out looking, um, really young.

And if you pair it with the UNPetite body on a Breton NPC, well...

All I'm gonna say is please be aware of the laws applicable to your local jurisdiction. 

Finally, I mentioned above how my realization about the face tints came after a long day of failures. Well, a lot of those failures related to the idea of subbing in a mask-cut version of the COR head model to get a mask with working facial animations. This wouldn't have helped me get the interchangeable race-based masks I've showcased here, as it would be limited to purpose-built NPCs, but it would have bypassed the tint issue and the idea of getting facial animations is appealing on its own. I showed how in my previous attempt I found that trying to combine the altered head mesh with the existing .tri files produced a bit of a disaster, but right after posting that I happened to get around to checking for a new version of Outfit Studio and found that a recent update had quite handily added in the ability to edit headmesh .tri files. Couldn't seem like better timing, that. So I updated OS, made the edits to the relevant files, subbed those in for the COR originals and boom, I had a perfectly decent floating mask on my COR character. 

Even had what appeared to be intact facial animations. Success!

Except something seemed a bit off. This floating face was supposed to look the same as the one I used to build the first Dibella mask, with the slight smile that I built into it (and all the subsequent masks). But here, no smile.

Going into Racemenu I found that pretty much all of the expression sliders simply didn't work. Moving them around produced no changes to the model. On top of that a lot of the other sliders had noticeably reduced effects, producing only minimal alterations in the affected facial parts. So I couldn't even use this for my hoped-for secondary purpose of quickly producing new static masks for statue versions. All of those racial masks had to be individually cut from the full head meshes. 

This is a disappointment, but I have no idea what exactly went wrong, much less how to fix it. So I'm probably going to have to continue to bin the idea for now. I did have a thought about trying to sub it in on an NPC, but trying to do that directly on an existing Charmer NPC mod didn't work at all. Producing my own would require me to have something like MAFKit, I'd expect, but actual download sources for MAFKit appear to have gotten vanished so that's no help. 

I'm having a similar 'I have no idea what I'm doing'-based problem with getting the HDT vagina effect to work. Specifically, it doesn't. The models lost the bit with the .xml file at some point during the build process, and trying to simply paste it back in produced no effects. (Oddly the prototypes for the new faces picked up that .xml file somehow, but that also seems to have no effect on anything.) I don't even begin to know enough about how that stuff works to fix it at this point, and it's a bit of an annoyance that it vanished. But considering that my main reason for including it was to get anatomically correct statue models, I'm not really inclined to go out of my way for it. 

Function's nice, but it's alright as long as it looks good.

(Also, never tell someone to start dancing while they're sitting down. It's silly.)