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Nigh-Proof of Concept


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One thing that I was kicking around during the course of building the Type XXX updates that I still quite like the idea of was doing a 'head mesh' version of the mask-cut faces, which when implemented on a custom race would let users sculpt out their own fully animated disembodied face for use with the DMA parts. In theory. The main problem with the idea is that just about everything I'd need to actually get it working is well outside of my modding comfort zone and knowledge base. The basic concept of making a cut-down head mesh seems workable, as I found during the course of building the Charmers faces, but the number of malfunctions I encountered there also showed that there's a lot of layers to it that I don't yet understand. 

 

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.

 

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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. 

 

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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:

 

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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. 

 

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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.

 

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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.

 

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

 

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

 

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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:

 

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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. 

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