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You're Gonna Carry That Weight


AVS

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So, shit's been crazy lately, huh? My life's been particularly hectic since all the panic buying started. Without going into too much detail, my job is a small cog right on the middle of the food supply chain, and for the last few weeks that machine's been going full-fucking-tilt. Six-day weeks, and twelve or even sixteen hour days on the regular, all in service of people hoarding enough food to last them until the next god damn apocalypse. No worries about work-from-home or furloughs for us, that's for sure. It's only just now starting to calm down a little, at least to the extent that the strain on the system has become normalized enough that it's no longer about to crack. Things are still tense as hell, but the business is starting to understand how to manage expectations. And on the upside, the flaky coworker who was the major contributor to workplace stress prior to all this bullshit happening up and bailed the instant things turned grim, so there's at least some good that has come of all this.

 

The relevant consequence of all this is that I've been even shorter on time and energy for working on mod stuff than I already was... pretty much since New Year's, really. But I did feel like getting something done with the scraps of motivation I could eke out, so I started poking at something I had been working on before getting sidetracked by the Type XXX stuff. It ended up coming together a lot easier than I expected it to. 

 

I'd been inclined to try doing something with the Dwarven armor set in the Girl's Heavy Armor mod by Gigaduex pretty much from the first time I came across it. There's a lot of stuff to like about the design, especially around the legs and helmet which are already fairly robotic, and I felt that they would be a great base for a new set of robot limbs in the DMA collection. But I quickly ran into various complications. The legs are a great visual design, but the knee joints are for some reason modeled much higher than where the skeleton's actual knees are, resulting in the top of the calf armor getting bent in whenever the joint is flexed. The only parts of the arms I could really use were the gauntlets, as the upper arms were just bodysuit and pauldron meshes that wouldn't really fit into the DMA setup, so I needed to build entirely new upper arms. And the torso was a particular sticking point, as its waist-length armor and wide shoulders were guaranteed to interfere with the existing DMA jointing. I had only barely started addressing those problems before getting distracted the the Type XXX bodies, but in this second look I quickly managed to knock down just about all of them. 

 

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For the legs, the first thing I discovered during the opening tests of that initial go at these was that the thigh armor was damn near a perfect fit to the existing Type E set of leg connectors. The pistons and rods at the top of the legs, added to fill in the space left between the parts, were about all I got built at that time. The disc at the top was added recently, mainly in consideration of sealing things off for the ground models, and gets buried in the leg connection when equipped. The knee structures were a major contributor to me setting that first go aside, as I had also been trying out some scratch-built limbs alongside these and found building a feasible joint to be a royal pain in the butt, so I put off doing it here to instead poke around at what became the Type XXX parts. On this revisit I decided that I'd be better off trying to do something simple, so I just slapped the Sphere's spinal piece in there. Add in a couple of ring elements to fill in the gaps, and it looks pretty good! But then I ran into that aforementioned oddity with the joint's positioning.

 

I built the initial version of these knees having forgotten about that issue, and hoo boy were the results not pretty in-game. The obvious solution was to reposition the knees, but the only real way I had to do that was by adjusting them on the Bodyslide model, using the Knee Height slider set to -200% to get the joint on the model more in line with the one on the skeleton. Unfortunately that came at the cost of distorting the detailing in the texture mid-shank. It's not particularly noticeable while you're playing, though, so I figure it's worth it. Even with the joint lowered that drastically there's still some clipping between the parts when the knees are at a fuller flex, but it's much more within tolerable limits. 

 

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With the arms, my first attempt at building new upper sections for them involved simply copying over some slightly enlarged versions of the upper arms from the DD set. And that looked fine, but didn't really gel with the legs all that well. But you know what would? More of that lovely thigh armor! I got as far as getting that copied up there and repositioned with added in shoulders reused from the Type B arms before setting this aside, but on a second look the thigh pieces as-is were a bit too skinny in their new position. After reshaping them a bit so that they fit fully around the space a 100-weight arm would occupy and then adding in jointing and detailing to match that on the legs, the whole thing gels together much better than I had anticipated. 

 

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The joints in particular turned out better than I thought they would, as the elbows specifically were what had been giving me trouble on those scratch-build experiments. Here they socket into the space on the gauntlets quite acceptably. 

 

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You'd almost think they were meant to do that all along.

 

The torso I hadn't touched during that initial run. I kinda despaired of it. It turned out to be easier to deal with than I expected in some ways, but also even more of a pain in others. Its length ended up being less of an issue than I thought it would, as the model is actually built of various joined sub-meshes which could be much more cleanly chopped up than a completely single-piece mesh. And one of the points where it could easily be divided happened to be right at the mid-torso where the DMA connection point is. 

 

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It's still a very tight fit on the Type G pelvis there and needs some remediation to stop a few bits of clipping, but it's it's drastically more usable than the full torso armor would've been. But while that turned out to be an easily solved problem, the broad shoulders and back were still an issue. There was basically nothing to be done there except hammering them in with the deflate tool until I ended up with something pretty much okay. And even then it only really works well with the arms with those simple spherical shoulders; the detailing on the Type G-based arms digs into the flashing left inside of the shoulder opening a bit, and the Type E arms... Well, it's fine if you don't move much, I guess? But it's the best I could do without starting to seriously distort the torso armor, so it'll have to be good enough. 

 

The last part of this set, the helmet, ended up not really giving me any problems at all, thank christ. To start with, it was nice enough to happen to fit exactly over the existing DMA head models:

 

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You can't really ask for better than that... But I still did. You see, while the actual armor model from the Heavy Armor set is a solid piece with just an inverted cone at the bottom of the helmet once you remove the neckcloth, the ground model has this great bit of detailing hidden inside of it:

 

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But more important than that is that nice and cleanly open bottom, which would pair up quite nicely with the open structure of the DMA heads. So I gave the ground model a quick skin and weight, repositioned it to the same space as the armor model helmet, set it to slot 31 and bam, I had a perfectly functional version of this for the DMA set. But if I was going to use it as a robot part, it needed a little something extra. 

 

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Take a copy of the helmet, cut out just the eyeslit, slap an emmissive glow onto it and slap it back onto the in-game model just a hair forward of the underlying primary mesh. Instant ominous glowing robot eyes. The shading native to the texture even happens to give the brightest areas a vaguely eye-like shape. The whole thing just works out perfectly.

 

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Put it all together and it just clicks, with charm points in those great legs, the substantial arms, the peek-a-boo cutout in the armor for the Heart to flash through, and that spectacular helmet model brought to life by that glow. The only real downside is that the original design doesn't really allow for a new pelvis piece to go along with it, but that's not a huge concern. Oh, and also that the sharp rake on the face of the helmet means that you can't use any faces at the same time as it without them clipping through, but that can be solved by blocking off the face slot. Although it'll still be an issue if you try to use it with a regular human head, but that can be said for a lot of things in here. 

 

While I was at it, I also did something similar with another suitably robotic existing Dwarven helmet variant...

 

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This one differs in that it's actually a full head replacer on slot 30 like a regular closed helmet, as the design didn't quite fit around the DMA heads as well as the one from Heavy Armor. So it's just the Bikini Closed Helm with the same sort of eye glow trick as on the Heavy's, pasted onto the neck from a DMA Doll head with some bits of filler.

 

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Simple, but an effective way to add just a bit more variation. 

 

And of course all this sticks to the 'modular' ethos of DMA, so you can mix things up. As mentioned above the sphere-shouldered limbs like the Type B work quite well with the Heavy torso...

 

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...And the limbs also work very well with the Type XXX torso parts. 

 

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So this is all pretty much a lock for getting added to a future update, which I did not expect to be the case when I picked it back up but here we are. Still need to figure out naming schemes for everything and maybe do a few tweaks here and there (and decide if I want to include the Ebony-toned variation as an alternate set), but nothing too major that would get in the way of putting it out at some point. 

 

No, the major stuff is things like getting the beast race support in, revamping the 'modesty' system to use all removable plates, adding rubber variants for all of the fixed-weight bodies, rebuilding the Charmers set as an optional(?) pack that uses CotR as a texture dependency, figuring which Vanilla character faces I want to actually use and resetting them to use their native tintmasks so I can stop angsting over find high-res ones for them and (hopefully) just let the end user see whatever they happen to have installed for them already... 

 

Oh, and continuing to figure out how to work those threatened followers. I've made some strides poking around at things there, having at least figured out how to change the default body and the obnoxiousness of the Outfit system. (Why can't you edit an existing Outfit set? Why does it only work as a drag-and-drop?? Why?!) That lets me set the 'nude' body to something like a bare torso core and load them out with a full kit of pre-equipped limbs.

 

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(Ignore the forehead bug, didn't feel like doing the fix for that, considering)

 

The problem here comes with the head. I unfortunately can't load in one of the DMA heads as the default headpart. The game will only register and display one mesh from a multi-mesh model if you try to load one into that slot. I can, however, make alternate headparts that point to empty or no meshes and sub them in for the Vanilla ones, which almost works, except...

 

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...for the mouth. The mouth isn't on the list with the other headparts in the CharGen tab, and if there's a place where you can manually change the one used I can't seem to find it. So I have no clue how to stop it from popping up. Having a DMA head included as part of the Outfit does displace it, but it pops back in if the Outfit is removed in some way, and thanks to how spotty Skyrim can be about actually keeping the headparts displaced when they're supposed to be displaced it'll sometimes find a way to sneak back in out of nowhere. 

 

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But aside from that, this conceptually works pretty well. You can spawn them with a default outfit, change it with your usual follower mods...

 

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...kill them if you want to be a jerk about it...

 

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...and then strip them for parts leaving no 'human' body behind when they're empty.

 

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If I can figure out that thing with the mouth, this will work fine. And if I can't... Well, it could still work. It'd be kind of annoying sometimes, but it'll still work. I'd just like it to work better. 

 

I'm also not 100% what the 'nude' body should be. I started out with the stripped frame, then switched to the Maiden Heart without any frame on the idea that it'd be more consistent with the Type XXX torsos, but it looks pretty goofy if you strip off just the torso and leave the other parts with the Heart just hanging out in space in the middle of them all so I think I might switch back to the frame. We'll see.

 

This most significant problem with these, though, is still placement. It's not too hard to drop them in various places already existing in the Vanilla game, of course. 

 

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It's just the where and the why that get called into question. Where is a place that makes sense for them to be? Why would they be there? And what kind of an affect would they have on their surroundings, while I'm at it? It really makes more sense to have them in their own space of some kind, but that very rapidly gets into dungeon-building stuff that I don't have the skills or patience to do. Some ideas, maybe, but none of the other stuff that would bring them to fruition. But just slapping them into random places isn't particularly satisfying. Feh. 

 

It gives me something to think about, at least. When I have time to think.

 

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Excellent! Also, dropping them in Dwarven ruins would be ideal, I think. Ruins have lots of empty rooms in them that just have treasure, what would be better than finding one of your followers in one of them. Just a thought!

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