Still running short on time and energy a lot these days. so not much progress to report as far as DMA goes, I'm afraid. There's some things that I'm dissatisfied with that I'm not sure if I have a good way to change, like finding decent hi-res tint masks for the Vanilla character faces I want to use without having to manually recreate all of them myself. There's also changes that I kinda want to make but dislike the effort and disruption involved, such as ditching the 'permanent modesty' versions of the all the D-type bodies, replacing them with removable modesty plates like I've already made in a limited scope for the Variable and Robot Limbed sets, and adding in R-types for all of the Fixed Weight body parts. I originally went with the permanently affixed plates to keep things simpler by avoiding people having to match up the right sets, but in my own play I've found that I rather prefer the removable ones. And only having a handful of the rubber bodies available has been annoyingly limiting, as I find them slightly more publicly presentable than bare skin sets for the followers I've got running around through town with me. But doing all that will take a lot of re-jiggering in the CK that I haven't had the focus to do, so I've just been spinning my wheels on it.

 

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.