If you haven't noticed already, I re-uploaded the October update over the weekend. The new version incorporates some fixes for various texture pathing issues, and also has a couple of new things added as detailed here. 

 

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.