In case you missed it, I added an update to the previous post with a bit more progress on the Live faces. I've probably gotten enough further work into those to do another post already, but as I mentioned I skipped over a bunch of the other work I've been doing to get that post about the faces out, because they were just that damn interesting. So since I've got this pile of screenshots that I've been sitting on, I might as well get that back on track.

 

Deciding to include NPCs with the pack has weighted a number of the things I've been working on, with a lot of my focus directed at new options aimed at specific character types not quite covered by the existing equipment. One of the things I wanted was a new set of arms tailored to spellcasters; sure, they could just use the normal human-like arms, but where's the fun in that?

 

 

Much better. 

 

These are fairly straight-forward, made by simply taking the cyborg blade arms apart and swapping in the Dwarven staff model. The problem was getting the arms' position to line up tolerably well with where the magic effects show up. It's kind of impossible to get it perfect, for various reasons, so I fudged it a bit by adding in some modified versions of the Centurion core crystal along the staff's shaft in the approximate position that the hands should be at to act as a sort of 'magic generator' thingy. It more or less works. 

 

 

Individual results will probably vary a lot given the exact animation sets people use, of course. There's way too much variety there to bother accounting for. And this isn't quite complete yet, as I only have this double-staffed version built up so far. I also intend to add a version that has the wand arm on the left and the blade arm on the right, to account for the common Spellsword style of combat. I don't see much point in doing one the opposite way around, though, since having magic in the right hand and a weapon in the left doesn't really happen in the game. I'll probably also do versions with the axe and hammer arms; the variants will be pretty trivial to make now that I've got the parts built, so that's not much of a burden. I'm a bit uncertain if I want to bother doing a version paired with a gauntlet, though, since I kinda see this as something that would only be equipped by dedicated combat automata. That said, I have been working on a version that uses a gauntlet, but it's not the one from the Type B arms set. You see, when I was turning the thigh armor into bicep armor for the Gigadeux-based limbs, I couldn't help but think that the bicep armor ended up looking awfully similar to that on a particular Figma I have on my desk. So given that this new weapon arm set had also given me a sort of arm cannon, I kinda went and ran with it.

 

 

Tee hee. 

 

This is a one-off with its own 'Type SA' designation, but it can pair up pretty well with some of the other robotic parts for a more complete galactic bounty hunter look:

 

 

The shoulders are a bit of an issue, though. I was able to transfer over the weighting from the Gigadeux armor's pauldrons to mostly decent effect, despite the mass of the things, but there's one oddity that I noticed when using a continuous spell like Sparks. The shoulderpad on the gun-arm will sort of slowly roll forward as the casting animation plays, only to suddenly snap back at what I'm assuming is the point where the animation loops. It's a bit annoying, but damned if I know how to fix it. 

 

 

A larger problem is that getting the magic effects to line up with the staff bits has proven to be even more of a pain in the ass than on the initial Wand set. It's kind of more vital that they do on a smaller arm like this, since it's supposed to end up much closer to the 'muzzle', but finding a point where it will line up has thus far evaded me. 

 

 

This is rather annoying, but I'm also not sure how much effort I want to put into what is basically a joke set, so. I'll poke at it some more when I have time, but it's not a priority.

 

Getting that basic set of Wand arms working was a priority, though, as I had them in mind for a specific NPC that I wanted to include in this. You might have noticed her lurking in the background in the last post. She's kinda hard to miss. 

 

 

Way back when I first started messing around with modding, one of the things I tried out was doing some visual improvements to various dead NPCs that I would then acquire into my household using the raise-paralyze-PAHE trick. Among those was Yisra, the apprentice from an unimplemented College questline who managed to immolate herself testing a flame cloak spell. She only exists as a burned corpse at a POI in-game, but she does have an unused full NPC model buried in the game data. When I revamped her I went all-out, giving her the Flame Spirit's fire body effect and the Flame Atronach's fire trail and spells, and finding that she was actually pretty entertaining to have around I ended up making a fully-functional follower out of her. Unfortunately I made those NPC edits in a kinda hackjob manner, getting in new hairs and eyes by tricking the CK into thinking that their .esp files were .esm files so I could use them without duplicating them into the .esp for the NPCs. I didn't want to do that again when I set things up on the new computer, but sadly that prevented the mod from working on the new setup. I was, however, left with all those head models sitting on the old hard drive that I could raid as sources for the Vanilla-based masks I ended up working on for this project, letting me resurrect a bunch of that old work. In light of that it just made sense to rebuild Yisra as a fire-based combat-centric automaton.

 

 

For some extra fun, I also used the subtle burned body textures Holzfrau made for the -BAF- set to make up a special set of parts for her to carry on the burntastic theme, in both business and casual:

 

 

The effect does get a bit washed out in the flames, sadly, but it amuses me that it's there.

 

 

Also of note is that while the flames are entertaining, they do make some activities a bit... Toasty.

 

(Hott.)

 

On the subject of Holzfrau's skins, there was another one that I felt could be useful for NPC use: the 'frankensteined' skin from their Halloween Pack. I would think the reasons why should be obvious.

 

 

This has been in my experiment list for a while. What I really wanted to do with it was make certain parts asymmetrical, to really sell the idea of it being made from stitched-together parts, but I couldn't find a viable way to do that in Outfit Studio. When was planning out the sort of NPCs I wanted to have in the pack, though, the idea of having a 'scraps' character was pretty appealing. So I put in a set using this texture on the Demonfet body parts, since it felt like the most unbalanced without getting completely silly about it (looking at you Manga body).

 

 

She doesn't actually have a full NPC built yet, for a few reasons. The first is that I'm not sure if I want her to be a unique NPC or a sort of mob character. The latter idea could be fun, but while making enemy types and populating dungeons would work pretty well with some of the vague ideas I've been having while plotting out NPCs, they would also require me to make a lot more investments in things I really have no experience in doing. Another was complicated by discovering the Live faces; my initial intent was to use a selection of the more shocked-looking SeXtreme faces if I were to make multiple characters out of this, but having faces that can actively emote would be pretty neat as well. But the old faces do still have their charms...

 

 

So yeah, not quite sure where I'm going to take this, yet.

 

The Live faces also add some complications to Yisra and her ilk. Since I do have all those old head models and doing the steps to get the modified mask texture on them is pretty trivial, I fully intend to give all of them back their mobile faces. Actually getting those old models to work with the new NPCs is kind of a pain, though. I'll have more to say about that in a future post. I'm also hitting some complications in regards to SoS support. I added the bikini pieces to this in part as another thing that I wanted for a specific NPC and figured that they'd work well as a sort of default outfit element, but there's a bit of an issue where including the panties in an outfit where the torso section has not already been registered with SoS as 'revealing' often results in this happening when the NPC is spawned:

 

 

The NPCs built for this pack will have their default 'nude' bodies replaced with the stripped DMA torso frame like this, so it isn't the entirely catastrophic result that it would be if that wasn't the case, but it does leave the bikini top just sorta bouncing out in space like that. Worse, in iAFT's system at least, setting them so the player can manage their outfit causes the proper torso to pop back on, but the equipped panties vanish from the game entirely. The only work-around I've found for that is including a spare set of panties in their non-outfit inventory, which is accessed by a different command than the outfit in iAFT.

 

 

Obviously, this isn't ideal. I did some digging around and found that there's an 'SOS_Revealing' keyword that you can add to armor parts to have the system automatically treat them as revealing armors, which should solve the problem. But I added that to all the Type XXX torsos and I'm still running into the issue, now with the added quirk of the parts being marked as 'revealing' in SoS's MCM, but not actually getting set as revealing until you click the toggle. This may just be the result of adding the keywords in mid-game like this; I'll have to find time to start up a new game and see if it keeps doing it. But it's been a definite annoyance, especially in light of my concurrent plan to ditch the 'permanent' modesty parts in favor of removable panels which also use slot 52. If it still doesn't work, I'm gonna have to have all these folks spawn bottomless.

 

As for that Dark Elf there, she's another salvaged NPC that I made loosely based on Sild's assistant, who regularly spawned as the dead female Dunmer bandit mage when I was looking around for corpses to revamp. In light of that I'm casting her as a unit built to assist around the lab, loaded up with various shock spells. She's also proven to be a useful testbed for some of the stuff I've had to figure out to get all this running smoothly, including how to change out parts of an outfit (you can right-click to bring up a delete command everywhere else, Bethesda, so why can you only use the actual delete key there?) and re-learning how to import the damn head models to get her Live face up and running:

 

 

Let's see, what else... Ah, right, the other-other skin thing. Let me preface this by mentioning that I'll sometimes skim over my old posts to remind myself of old ideas and concerns, which is part of why I get as wordy as I do. Anyway, in one of them I mentioned how the Stone and Metal bodies had a flaw consisting of noticeable texture seams at their hips, resulting from using a generic 'tile' texture instead of one designed specifically to map onto the body. I also mentioned how the only real way to fix that was to create a texture that was mapped to the body, which was a bit outside of my skillset. That's still true of the stone skin, but it occurred to me that getting a better metal skin might not be as difficult as I thought.

 

 

The thing about the Dwarven textures is that the bright golden shine on them comes entirely from their cubemap. Stripped of that, they're all just these dark, weathered bronze shades. Inspired by the help I got from Holzfrau with the bronze version of the PK faceplate, I realized that all I really needed was a version of the base skin texture with the color adjusted to mimic those bronze shades.

 

 

That said, actually getting it right took a lot of trail and error. How the textures and cubemaps react to each other in Skyrim's engine can be amazingly finicky, and finding the right color for the skin to get it to display a decent sort of polished brass effect was pretty difficult for someone like me who doesn't have the best color vision. More props to Holzfrau for helping me out with that. 

 

 

The previous version used the same 'dwemer tile 3' texture that I've used to bronze a number of different things, and was useful for its ease and color consistency with the other brass parts. This approach results in a distinctly more polished and oiled look for the skin parts, but I think that feels more appropriate considering what they are. More important is that this eliminates a number of flaws, such as those aforementioned seams around the hips and buttocks, one really blatant bit of color miss-match at the left hip's seam due to the mottled nature of the Dwemer tile texture, and all the distorted and stretched mottling on many of the chests caused by it trying to apply a small section of an already low-res texture to much too large of an area. This method also has the amusing side effect of allowing a hint of the areola texture to show through. That effect was more pronounced on an earlier version, though. I may go back and tweak that a bit at some point. 

 

That Dwemer tile method of bronzing continues to be useful in other places, though. I happened to recall my earlier statement about how the skullcap I made for the new TAWOBA-based headgear could be useful for future designs one day, and, well, I ran with it.

 

 

There's a bit more to the story of that last image. I realized after I first threw it together that the headgear made with the Wolf armor set's toothy mask would pair up pretty well with the beast limbs and tail parts already in the set, but it needed a little something extra to really sell it. Something like kitty ears. I was having a hard time figuring out how to build them, though, before I remembered the cowling piece from one of the DLC elements. That happened to be exactly the shape I was looking for... And I also remembered that I had intended to and then completely forgot about making a new helmet based around it. Whoops.

 

Combine that cowling, the new skullcap base, some parts taken from the Aster and a few bits of fill, and you get...

 

 

The Meteor.

 

Slotted between the Ripper and the Aster, with normal and 'Elf ear' versions like the former and glowing bits like the latter. The name is intended to relate it to the Aster, and also to serve as a subtle nod to how well it works with another part...

 

 

Yeah, it's not remotely on-model, but I like it.

 

As for the other stuff, it's mostly just a pile of the pieces that I felt worked best in the context, mostly taken from the TAWOBA circlets.

 

 

There are some further modifications on some of them, which you may have noticed. Many of them had to be reshaped slightly to fit over the skullcap, and in the course of that I found that the horns on the Steel Horned Helmet-based models tended to deform in annoying ways when the areas of the band near them were adjusted. I decided it would be easier to deal with that by separating them from the mesh... and then found that the models looked much, much better without them. So now they have a gladiator theme instead of a Viking one. The one based on the Ebony mask got a glowing eyeband, and was named the Javelin to put it in theme with the earlier Ebony-based headgear, the Lancer. And yes, that's exactly why. The last one is the only non-TAWOBA one from this set, using the horns taken from the Yngol helmet. If you get why it's called the Trickster, you win a No-Prize. ?

 

I also finished building the additional hair sets and added them into the mod, including the material variations. Some of the brass sets do a fun job of demonstrating why I wanted these particular hairstyles in there:

 

 

The key part to getting these to work was having that scalp mesh that I could freely manipulate, since without it there'd be all these weird gaps and holes visible from angles that looked inside the open structures of the robotic heads. But while I was making adjustments to various things by loading the hairs onto a head and face model in Outfit Studio, I couldn't help but notice something when the main hair meshes were turned off...

 

 

That, uh... That actually really works.

 

 

It works with some caveats, tho, given that it's completely accidental. First, it doesn't quite fit to the cut line on the face at the temples. There's a thin gap that any glowing element inside of the head can be seen through. Second, it's from a human-use hair, so the fit with the Elven masks is just a bit questionable in many respects.

 

 

I'm disinclined to make an Elven-fitted version, though, since it runs into the idea of the masks being swappable across races and because I already had to do some messing around at the back to get it to fit around the brain capsule that'll be even more difficult should the mesh be shrunk down to elf size. So that kind of limits it there, but not nearly as much as this does:

 

 

Yeah, this does not work with the SeXtreme faces, like, at all.  The shapes of their foreheads are just too different from the Vanilla heads. That's cropped up a few times in the course of selecting hair sets for this pack, and it's one of the things that I've sometimes just had to ignore. Which I'm going to have to do here, because with the regular human faces at least it really does give an ideal gynoid look. 

 

 

One that can only be improved by doing it live:

 

 

Yeah, that's the stuff. More of that later.