Whew. been a while. I've had various other things taking up my time so I haven't had as much focus on progressing this mod as I might've liked to, lately. But that's not to say I haven't gotten anything done with it in the last couple of months.

 

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.