So I've actually been getting a decent amount of work done on DMA lately, although it's been somewhat... unfocused in it's scope. Along with polishing up the new parts that I've been working on, I've also found myself revisiting various old ideas that I hadn't quite gotten working before and finding new solutions for them. I've also kinda given up on certain things in the process... 

 

First off, a brief update on the new robot parts using the Gigadeux meshes that I showcased last time. I've settled on calling them the HV set, from the source mod's 'Heavy Armor' name, and have them all pretty well integrated into the core mod at this point. I also went ahead and included the Ebony-esque variants via a texture set swap as an 'Improved' set, with somewhat higher stats. The way the darker material pairs up with the bright brass of the jointing is rather interesting, I find. 

 

 

It also works quite well with the rubber pelvises. 

 

 

Speaking of the rubber parts, I've mentioned it before but I'm pretty well committed to the idea of adding in the rubber variants for all of the fixed-weight parts, now. I initially passed on them because making them takes a lot of annoying Creation Kit work, but in my own gameplay following the Type XXX release I consistently found the small selection that I had put together far too limiting. They're not done yet, however, both because that CK work is so tedious and because I've quite effectively multiplied it by also deciding to include the beast race variants for at least all of the D and R bodies. (I may tag the S ones in too, depending on how sick I get of seeing the CK, but the M ones require a bit more work due to their normal map situation.)

 

An immediate consequence of that decision was that I had to figure out how I'd handle the tails. As I mentioned when I previously showed the beast varaints, the tail is a bit of an issue with the rubber bodies because the rubberized texture doesn't get applied to them, leaving them sticking out all naked. Making a rubberized version of the tail meshes wasn't difficult, but implementing it posed some challenges. Specifically, while it would be possible to second them into the pelvis models in such a way that they'd only be applied to their respective beast race characters in the same way the in-game tails work, there doesn't seem to be any way to do that without also blocking the tail slot from use on the non-beast characters, which would kinda bork the robotic tail pieces that I carried over from the -BAF- set in the first DMA release. So that wasn't exactly an ideal solution. 

 

The easier if less fancy way to work things was to just make the tails into equippable parts. That could have been done as easily as just slapping the existing in-game models into new playable armor entries in the CK, but it seemed like it would be much more interesting to properly integrate them into the mod and make add-on cyborg parts out of them. That was as simple as adding some metal bits to their bases to make 'connectors' for them. 

 

 

This... raised some further questions, actually. You see, that connector piece is a remnant from something I was working on when I was adding those other tails to the initial DMA set, and decided that a robotic tail with the Khajiit tail's weighting would be a fun thing to have. I mocked up a model, copied over the weighting, tossed it into the game and... it just stuck straight out. Didn't move in the least, annoyingly. I wasn't sure what the problem was and didn't care enough at the time to put much effort into fixing it, so I just dropped it and let it sit until now. But given that prior experience I was a bit surprised to find the base piece taken from it working just fine in this current application, until I noticed that there was a little extra line of data in the .nif files for the Vanilla tails that is evidently what tells the game to treat them like a tail. That earlier attempt was a victim of Outfit Studio's habit of invisibly handling stuff like that based on what the .nif first loaded in a given instance is; I had built that model by opening up some of the source .nifs for the Dwarven parts and then importing the tail mesh as a reference to get the weighting, which left the 'is a tail' data off of it completely. With the above model, I loaded the tail .nif first and then added in the Dwarven part, so it worked perfectly. So the obvious follow-up question was, what would happen if I loaded the Vanilla tail and then imported the abandoned DMA tail model on top of it? 

 

 

All of a sudden I've got a functional fully robotic tail, is what. 

 

This does need some further work, though. It was a rough first draft that never got any farther, after all. The general design of the cable with a weight at the end works well enough, but the Centurion armpiece base is a bit clunkier in motion than I'd like. This was even more glaringly evident on the beast tails, where the joint gap on the model let bits of the original beast tail meshes show through, and where trying to resize it to fit the Argonian tails just wasn't working out at all. So I decided to go for simplicity and replaced with with a sort of sheathing made from the central cylindrical element from the Spider model. Which works pretty well on the Argonian tail...

 

 

And even better on the Khajiit's. 

 

 

And obviously a side-effect of making these basic equippable items is that anyone can equip them, not just the beast characters. Just clip them on and go. As a result of that it made sense to include the non-rubberized versions as well, although stone and metal types are still in the 'maybe' stage. These are all tossed in under 'Type XXX Tail' to keep them towards the bottom of the bodypart list. I also intend to do some rehab on that robotic tail and toss it in, maybe along with some more takes on the idea if inspiration hits. That's pretty low on my priorities list, though.

 

Not that priorities always mean much when that inspiration hits. For example, I was finally getting around to adding that modified Ebony helmet from a few posts ago, now dubbed the Lancer, into the core mod when I thought to myself, 'hey, I could use a couple more things like this.' I even had a few sources in mind via the Bikini Armor sets that I thought would work out fine as brass castings.

 

 

The only problem with the Bikini Armor parts was that they were designed more like masks or circlets than as proper helmets, and as such had some issues when viewed from the back. So I fucked around a bit with the Sphere's lid piece and a head model and built a new helmet substrate for them.

 

 

This fits fine on normal character heads, but is a bit unprotected around the ears. This is largely because I didn't want to bother with trying to fit it around the various elf ears, but also because I wanted to leave it a bit open so that it wouldn't completely close off the insides of the DMA heads.

 

 

It's a pretty handy thing to have, and I may end up building more helmets around it in the future. The Plate and Dragonbone ones here are a good start. 

 

Aside from little distractions like that, the meat of what I've been up to has been getting the Vanilla faces going. 

 

 

I'm not going to try to get every Vanilla character's face in, but I have ended up with a decent if somewhat random selection taken from followers, wilderness encounter characters, and a handful of characters whose corpses I don't mind abusing. As I mentioned before, there's limits imposed by how well the face meshes manage to fit over the existing DMA head structures, which were never built with them in mind. I have tried to salvage some of the more minor misfits when it was a character of particular interest, though. You do end up with some slight distortion from the original, but honestly, you'd have to be looking pretty damn close to even notice.

 

 

I've also kind of abandoned my plans to keep the tintmasks on the Vanilla texture pathing, both because it would be a pain in the ass- I built these masks by making duplicates of the NPCs is a separate .esp file and exporting the facegens from there, and finding all the original tintmask pathing would have been a colossal chore- and because I had made some edits to clean the dirt off of certain characters that I didn't really want to lose. So the planned release has the custom tintmasks for all of these. I may put out a sub-in version with the Vanilla paths if there's any demand for it, or people can sub in their own if they want to. 

 

Regardless, The end product will have that assortment of Vanilla NPC faces...

 

 

Along with a bunch of the character faces I made for testing over the course of the DCC project...

 

 

And even a few brand-new ones made to fill in a few gaps.

 

 

Although those new ones come with a bit of an annoying story. You see, my Racemenu has been kinda borked ever since I tried playing around with subbing in mask-cut meshes for the game's default head models in an attempt to make fully animated faces. That never quite worked, and in the process a bunch of stuff just went weird on me as far as the RM sliders went. The expanded sliders all had their names messed up, for the main thing, the Vanilla eyebrows are completely missing, and scars slider just does not work at all and jumps to random multi-digit numbers as you move it. I have no idea what's going on with that and have no idea how to fix it short of a complete re-install, which I'm not keen on doing, and enough stuff does continue to work that I can still make new faces with it. But I can't add scars to them.

 

As it turns out, this might not entirely be a bad thing.

 

 

There's an unexpected and slightly annoying flaw with using scars on these masks. While the face meshes themselves can be pointed to their own dedicated tintmasks in the .nif's data, the scars... can't. They take their tint from the skin color of the character wearing the mask. So on my grey-skinned Dark Elf character, Umana and the Wilderness Encounter Nord's scars show up with a Dunmer grey tinge. Which actually isn't too bad, and only makes them slightly off. Compare that to when, say, a golden-skinned High Elf character wears Salma's face:

 

 

Yeah. Not a dealbreaker, but certainly a weird annoyance.

 

On the subject of High Elves and new faces, I've kind of ended up with a surplus of them. The reason for this actually goes back to A5-17 up there. The day before I created the original version of her as one of my DCC testing player characters I had been massing around with making quickie followers by duplicating and modifying some random NPCs I found interesting, including a couple of Altmer bandits from one of the bandit expansion mods. One of them worked out pretty well, and ended up hanging around as the A5-16 that's popped up here and there over the course of the Type XXX body's testing, in a large part because she was handy as someone to test the Altmer Charmers mask on, and later the Vanilla-based Altmer mask when I was first looking at replacing the Charmers faces. When the A5-17 NPC I made after making a mask of her face worked out so well and I decided to explore adding NPCs to the core DMA mod, I figured I might as well make one for A5-16 as well. The only problem was that I had some vaguely-formed headcanon about them being related (maybe mother and daughter?), but that generic Altmer face didn't really look the part. So I tired sculpting a new one... and went a little bit overboard with it. It wasn't completely terrible, just a little bit too... Too. But the third time I made a more concerted effort to keep A5-17's features in mind and ended up with something that works out quite nicely.

 

 

I'm somewhat inclined to keep the other two in as extra faces. The first one I've got some different skintones already made up for, so it'll be pretty easy to differentiate from hers. The second one I'm less keen on, given how overboard it turned out, but on the other hand it's already basically done, you know? Regardless, the third one definitely hits that somewhat more mature relative look that I was going for. You know what they say, the family that accidentally gets turned into pervy cyborgs together...

 

...

 

...Nobody actually says that, do they?

 

Moving right along, working with the idea of pre-built NPCs got me looking into rehabbing some other previously abandoned ideas. The hair pack has been kind of an albatross on this mod; I started working on it nearly a year ago, before I even had found the Charmers faces, and have yet to manage to actually get it out. It wasn't quite finished when CoR got pulled and I decided to release the Type XXX body parts without any new faces, so I've been holding off on putting it out until I could do it as a full face and hair appearance pack. That's obviously been taking longer than I might have wanted, and in the course of that I've been making all these other changes to the point that when I do get it out it will be alongside a heavily expanded and revamped body mod. But the hair set itself has been done enough for a while now for me to be using it in my own play, and I've found it... slightly lacking. 

 

The problem is that I had to be very restrictive in my selection just to winnow down the huge number of available hair sets in the packs I'm sourcing from to a manageable number of wigs. Disqualifications included having textures that were invisible from the interior of the head or with gaps through which the glow of the head inserts could be seen. Unfortunately this knocked out a lot of interesting styles, including most of the decent ponytails. Those problems could be remediated by adding in a hairline mesh, similar to the shaved head 'stubble' mesh that I'd previously used in the DCC extras, but those hairline meshes do not work at all well with the SeXtreme-based faces from the initial DMA release which have a forehead shape significantly off from the one on the Vanilla or Charmers faces. One of my other priorities was also getting wigs that worked tolerably well with those earlier faces, so anything that needed a hairline to work got nixed. 

 

But that left me with a somewhat more limited selection of hairstyles, and as I started looking at making NPCs from the various Vanilla-based faces I've been working up I found myself wanting to revisit some of those discarded wigs. So I dug a basic hairline mesh out of the KS set and got to rehabbin'. 

 

 

This hasn't been as simple as just tossing it in, mind you. Some of the hairstyles aren't shaped quite right for the hairline mesh, and it had to be trimmed to fit. And I sometimes found other little changes to make, like the Dwarven ring added to the ponytail up there. Some of these also still have the same fitment issues with the old face set that caused me to drop them, but I've decided to ignore that in interest of adding the styles back in. There's also the problem of one of the big reasons for using the hairline mesh, trying to fix the see-through interiors, not quite working. Going the other way works fine, and it's quite effective at blocking any sign of interior glowing bits in the head from showing through the scalp of the wig. But looking at the inside with the face off, in a lot of cases it just kinda makes the transparent section of the hair kinda hazy. 

 

 

This effect can vary a bit depending on the lighting behind the model, but it's a bit annoying that it doesn't perfectly block up those sections. Although it will help a lot more with that on the stone and brass versions. The other issue was more of a concern, though, so this is definitely worth moving forward on. And it gets me some options that I have definitely wanted in here.

 

 

And for one last bit of rehab for today:

 

 

Waaaaaaaay back when in the midst of the DCC project, Edhildil released an updated version of his Dwemer Cyborg that came outfitted with a cute brass bikini. I tried adapting it for the Extras pack, but while the bottoms worked fine, the top would consistently crash my game when equipped. I later found that this was a common problem when separating out some parts of Edhildil's meshes, where for whatever damn reason one part or another would turn into a CTD machine after being divided from the rest of the original model. I also eventually figured out a reasonably consistent way to fix it, much. much later, but never got around to applying that to the bikini top. Until now. 

 

 

You can kinda thank A5-16 for this. I've felt that the Type XXX bodies could use some kind of a clothing option aside from the modesty panels all along, but the complications of the fixed-weight parts and the lack of any options that were both on-theme and decently fitted to the boundaries imposed by the cutouts in the torso stymied me as far as that went. I did have some possibilities in mind, but they all required a fair bit of work to get to an acceptable state. I've known all along that these bottoms worked great with the Variable pelvises, though, so that kept trying out the top in the back of my mind. That came to a head when I decided that I wanted A5-16 to retain the Doll body with the huge... tracts of land that she's had since the initial Type XXX testing days, but that I also wanted something a bit more clothing-like for her than the panels. So that got me trying the fit on the UUNP reshape of the bikini top that I made all those months ago, and as luck would have it the straps fit perfectly within the cuts of the upper torso. After seeing that I ran it through the rehab process to get something that wouldn't CTD and got it into the game as fast as I could. And I didn't even consider restricting this to just the Variable version, or a handful of pre-selected fixed-weight parts. I dug out my size charts and fit this to everything. 

 

 

Well nearly everything. I don't seem to have bothered to write down the exact slider settings I used for the UUNP-Preg pelvis. Whoops. 

 

Getting this all in took surprisingly little time. I think it was maybe two and a half days between figuring out that it would work and having all the variants loaded into the core mod. So far everything's worked as well as I could've hoped for. It does have a few caveats, though. First is that they only work with the D and R models. Putting them on the stone or metal bodies would require making a whole duplicate set with the breast and butt weighting removed, and I'm just not keen on doing that. Second is that they can only really match up with the exact body type listed in their names. This will require you to actually pay attention to which top or bottom you're pairing with which torso or pelvis, or this'll happen to you:

 

 

Third, it has a ground model. This is it's ground model:

 

 

This is every type's ground model, because I honestly don't feel like putting in the effort of making a new one for each variation, here. I've already started that for the removable modesty panel project, and I'm kinda regretting it. 

 

Oh, and I know the radial pattern on the top isn't centered over the nipple. The mesh is centered over the nipple properly, but the pattern's center is a bit north of it for whatever reason, and I know nothing about UV mapping that would allow me to re-center it, nor do I care enough. The mismatch was covered by a metal cap on Edhildil's original model, but I pulled it when I did that initial UUNP conversion and I don't really feel like going back to add it in now. It looks fine even if it is a bit askew.

 

 

Also, one of those things that I've given up on? Keeping this mod's parts count to a reasonable size.

 

More to come.