I think I'm starting to see bottom here. 

 

*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.