Screenshot-heavy post this time. (I mean, they always are, but still.)

 

Since figuring out how to get the Live Faces to work, I've been spending a lot of time on developing the various possibilities they open up. Part of that involved getting the faces for my own NPCs set up, but I actually put that off for a while because it required me to figure out how to get frickin' NifMerge to do what I wanted it to do again. Instead, I took a while to explore one of the most interesting aspects of the Live Face process: Just how damn easy it is to apply it to an existing FaceGen head model.

 

So.

 

 

Fucking.

 

 

EASY.

 

 

Seriously, this is all just laughably simple to do. Make a duplicate of the NPC inside the DMA .esp file, swap out their default outfit for one built of Automaton parts, remove the hair and modify the eyes in the head parts tab as needed, and then just export the FaceGen to run the mask retexturing process on it. Doing that I can make an 'automated' version of basically any female NPC I want. I tried to just keep it to a light skim of the ones I found interesting and decent-looking, but I still ended up with... Well, let's just say a bunch. An assortment of enemies, various wilderness encounter characters such as the generic mercenaries/adventurers and the hunters, even a couple of the cut characters that were lying around in the CK, like the Automated Pit Fighter built from the abandoned Windhelm Arena character, Liesl. I also sourced from various in-game corpses, like the Liar's Retreat barmaid here...

 

 

Grabbed a few player pre-sets to provide some race generics...

 

 

And I also tossed a copy of Salma in as the Redguard generic, since I had already done that in the prior mask project. What can I say, I like her face. I don't really have plans to do the reverse and make equippable masks out any of the faces generated here, though, as making those is much more of a pain. 

 

 

These were all made pretty quickly, so the changes are a bit haphazard. Most of them have their original hair removed, but I left it in some cases where I felt it suited the face well enough. Some of them retain their original eyes, biased a bit towards the neutral characters, with those of the rest replaced with either one of the Portal Eyes sets or with Holzfrau's Dwemer Eyes. The Portal eyes were just copied en masse into the DMA .esp, but I actually found it a bit easier and more flexible to apply Holzfrau's at the .nif level, but because they require some shader changes to get the glow mask working right and because it simplified using them as single-eye replacements. Doing that in the CK requires making a new eye part for each combination, which is a pain, but like this all I have to do is give them one of the existing half-blind sets and edit the FaceGen model in NifSkope as needed. 

 

 

The CK's annoying UI is also a limitation on doing custom or fancier hair for these guys, as building the hair sets is also a pain. For the most part I'll just let the randos here use the DMA wigs or helmets. But I have been adding in a small handful of hair sets based on the wigs to give to my hand-made followers so I can give them proper hair colors, which one or two of the generics could also take advantage of.

 

 

A side note about those hairs and the Portal eyes: while I have them loaded into the mod, my current intention is to have all of the eyes and most of the hairs marked as unplayable, with the exception of the few hair sets that I modified with Dwarven ring accessories. This will keep them from being available during the player's character creation. I'm doing this in part to keep from completely stealing the original mods' thunder, but also because this whole thing is still pretty much NPC-exclusive. I had some hopes that I might be able to set a modified head mesh as a preset, but it won't even let you produce a FaceGen to modify if that tag is set. About the only other method I can think of that might work is directly modifying the base headshape model, but that's a bit more drastic than I'm willing to do. Especially after all the headaches messing with that for the hardware version of this concept gave me. So I'm gonna keep that set aside for now. 

 

Anyway, you may be wondering what I'm going to do with all these Automated NPCs. Well, so am I! Seriously, I haven't a clue. I mean, I do have some vague ideas, which are at the moment largely based around this girl:

 

 

It's been in the back of my mind since early in the DCC project that, should I ever get around to making cyborg NPCs, they should come from a long-forgotten Dwarven facility that had been quietly producing cyborgs from various lost wanderers for centuries. The general idea would be that the facility itself would be deeply buried and all the access routes cut off over time, aside from something akin to the pit trap in that one in-game Dwarven ruin that keeps dropping anyone who happens upon it to their almost-certain doom. The facility would salvage and recycle the remains, but with all the exits blocked up and no Dwemer around to give them directives, the resulting cyborgs are simply left cooped up in the tunnels trying to make the best of their strange new lives. 

 

From there, the general outline has this Synod Researcher, who is a relatively recent addition to the Automated, manage to find a way out which leads to them encountering the Dragonborn in some manner. Following that the player gets back into the ruin, where my conversion spree here has given them various enemies, neutrals, and allies to encounter. It could be a pretty neat little setup, except for the fact that it would require me to do a lot more in terms of dungeon-building, quest-making, and dialog writing than I have even the slightest bit of interest, experience, or motivation to do.

 

I've got Jeff Goldblum doing his 'You were so concerned with if you could you didn't stop to think if you should' line behind my shoulder, here. 

 

I may still do a low-rent version of this, although I've also been having issues with implementing that. I did a quick copy of a cell from Avanchnzel with an exterior exit near Deep Folk Crossing to give myself a space to drop completed NPCs into and test how well they spawned into the game, but it has this obnoxious habit of not visually rendering chunks of itself until the player is actually in them, requiring you to just dash into the grey void and hope the room appears around you. So that's obviously not usable. I'm left trying to find someplace I can copy that will work, or trying to hand-build a dungeon, neither of which fill me with happy anticipation. 

 

Regardless of how I end up getting them into the game, I've got a pile of NPCs to work with all of a sudden. The generics are pretty simple, as I can mostly just copy over all of their existing data. Building out a variety of outfits for them to use will probably be the bigger time-sink as far as they're concerned. My newly-built NPCs, however, require more care. I did eventually figure out the NifMerge stuff I mentioned earlier so I've been able to get their faces into the game easily enough, but actually deciding on things like their individual roles and settings and spell loadouts and so forth takes a fair bit of thought, so I've been lucky to manage two a day. And since I seem to be making followers out of all the non-Vanilla NPC masks I built, well...

 

It's pretty worthwhile, though. Some of these are faces that I made specifically for the masks, like A5-16 here, so it's quite neat to see them in motion.

 

 

Others are salvaged from my DCC testing characters, like 10-7 and 11-20, and it's nice to have them running around again.

 

 

And yet more are from that old personal corpse-salvaging project, like this Imperial here. She actually replaced the pre-desecrated Corpse NPC that the CK for some reason includes for the Kilkreath corpses; there was a mod dungeon that I had been playing with that had a bunch of them lying around for some reason, and my wanting a better-looking version to raise was what kicked off that whole project. Now here she is years later, getting to live yet again.

 

 

 

Sourcing from that project also lets me salvage a some characters that never really got to fulfill their intended roles. B17-1 was originally a replacement for the mage corpse that was supposed to be found near Deep Folk Crossing with the book that points you at the Aetherium quest. I picked her out more or less at random when I was skimming through the CK for corpses to upgrade, but I hadn't encountered her in the wild before then. Turns out, as I found after making the new face for her, that's because her body has an annoying habit of floating away to parts unknown before you can get to her. I think I only managed to find her properly placed once. So it's nice to have a place to use her independent of that, and as part of that I had actually been considering giving her the role of the introductory character instead of the Synod girl. And to that end I used her to test out something else I've had in mind for a while...

 

 

The problem with using clothing with the Type XXX body parts has always been that the modifications to the body severely limit the kinds of clothes that would fit over them. But in the Vanilla outfit system, the clothes simply replace the entire body. Part of the reason I included the Variable hands, feet, and neckplate was to account for that, as they can be equipped alongside a normal outfit to provide some suggestion of an Automaton wearing clothes. Of course for anything that shows much of the body the effect is ruined a bit by the very non-Automated body and legs being visible, but with a full-coverage outfit like the robes you can convey the idea of an Automated passing through society in disguise. 

 

Now you can use the existing in-game robes for this just fine, but I've been a bit hung up with them because I also want to use this on statue automata, and the UUNP-converted robes I use have too much breast bounce for that to quite work.  Taking the bounce out would require me to provide my own copies of the mesh with the bones removed, and that would limit their body-agnosticism, and I'd have to add them in to the Bodyslide lists, and so on and so on, so I'd kicked the idea to the back burner. But when it came up again while I was considering B17-1's outfit, I thought, 'Hey, why not just grab the Vanilla models and use them?' So I did. And it works. Mostly. 

 

 

Aside from that. That Vanilla neck seam does not seem to want to work with the Doll collar in a lot of places, surprisingly. I haven't quite figured out how to address that, yet. Having the skin there at all is a bit of a demerit for using this with the statues, although what I have in mind for them would see them wearing the hood full-time, so it's a bit less of a concern. It would be possible to replace that section of skin with a piece cut from a Type XXX torso, but that would have the same problem as far as the other materials go and I don't really want to have to do multiple versions of these to work with that. So I'm currently leaning towards replacing the entire section of skin with something mechanical. That would peg these more as 'alternate bodies' instead of 'Type XXX bodies wearing clothes', but I think I can live with that. 

 

And yes, by 'these' I do mean that I've already included a few others. 

 

 

I basically limited these to outfits with an associated hood and that the DMA parts happened to fit into well. That last point cut out the more common Apprentice Mage robes, as they had some issues around the wrist, but the Journeyman outfit both fits the parts quite well and looks very good with the Mage hood, which was a bit of a surprise as that combo is very rare in-game.

 

 

But while all this does look good on her, B17-1's face was always one that I had made to be just a little bit more sultry than most of the others, and it felt like a bit of a shame to bundle her up like this. That face seemed like it would be a particularly good fit for a Type XXX body, so why not have her... let loose?

 

 

Yeah, that's more like it. Going back to that vague storyline I've got in my head about all this for a bit, I'm thinking that part of the setting for the Automated has the conversion process messing with their heads a little bit. However, the machine that builds them wasn't quite finished before the Dwemer were wiped off of Nirn, and the reprogramming that was supposed to be done to their minds as a part of that process is incomplete. The primary directive to obey the Dwemer is present, but entirely irrelevant. The secondary directive to destroy the Falmer... Might be present. I'll have to see what I can do with factions, as far as that goes. But as for the additional directive to 'provide companionship', well... 

 

 

Some of the subjects were very receptive to it.

 

Anyway, that's going to be the default outfit for her. Deciding on these outfits is its own process, depending on the parts I have available and the idea I have in mind for the character. Sometimes I'll try out something new with the former, only to find out it doesn't quite work with the latter. For example, the Orc Subject, O11-10,

 

 

I threw together a few 'toned' body pieces using the 7Base parts and one of the muscular normal maps, which works reasonably well. Since I built them right before I put this Orc character together, I figured I might as well try them out on her. And they look pretty good! But the problem is that this face comes from a DCC test character who I had nicknamed 'the soft Orc', so... Not quite what I had in mind for her. So eventually she's going to end up with plusher body parts (and probably different hair), and these muscles will go to somebody else. This is the advantage of interchangeable parts.

 

Sometimes I won't have anything specific in mind when making the NPC and'll just toss whatever together for an outfit, and then go back and figure out what'll work best after seeing how the face looks in-game. N4-23's face has been hanging around in a few of these posts, as it was one of the last of the Vanilla masks that I made and was on one of the followers I was using to test various things. My initial thought was to give her a rubber body with the HV limbs that I had tested on her precursor...

 

 

...but after seeing how well that face worked with the hair I had picked out for her, she definitely felt like she needed something brighter.

 

 

That hair actually changed my plans for her quite a bit. I had been considering using her to showcase some of the new headgear, which her face is pretty well suited to...

 

 

But the hair just works so damn well. I really don't want to mess with it. 

 

...Okay, maybe a little.

 

 

But being Automated isn't all smut and glamour. I figure I ought to have a few people around who aren't adjusting all that well to their circumstances, and to that end I'm also adding some Worker Units who have clearly been having a rougher time of things. I'm starting them off with CL-22, who's based on the face I made for Larina, the NPC who gets ritually sacrificed in Hobb's Fall cave. Thanks to the NPC mood settings, it doesn't look like her successor is much better off.

 

 

With her we have kind of the reverse situation as with N4-23's hair, where I've given her a default hair set but don't really want it showing all the time. That one's from the Apachii set, and while it's great at presenting loose, unkempt hair, Skyrim's stupid multiple transparency bugs means that the part that goes over the right eye renders that eye invisible in chunks. That's less noticable on the Research Assistant, but it kinda stands out here. Using the TAWOBA crest also isn't great, because while it really showcases that the head is a hollow structure behind the face, it really showcases that the head is a hollow structure behind the face, with there just being nothing past the top edge of it. It's a little bit too disconcerting with the Live faces, honestly. But I do kinda want to show off the insides of her noggin a bit, since its contents tie into another angle from that head-canon story of mine. Having those various brain and crystal insert options for the heads raises the question of what exactly they mean for and to the Automated who have them. I figure they represent a sort of ranking; the Automated who possess a Brain Capsule, particularly the visible one, have a certain amount of assurance that they are still themselves, with their original minds and capacity for growth. Those whose minds are imprinted onto the Lexicon core could be said to have been paid a sort of a compliment, as this most complex of the crystals is often carried by those who were strong in magic or thought in their previous existence, but the question always lingers as to whether or not they are the 'real' them or just a copy. The workings of the machine that created them are too obscure for them to ever be sure. Those with a Black Soul Gem can at least assume that they are still being driven by their original spirit, but may find that their memories grow spotty over time. The Centurion core is the least of the lot, suitable only for the weak-minded, but it still may be preferable than the Grand Soul Gems. One of these gems is insufficient to hold a human soul, but the machine has a way to split the Automated between two of them, working in tandem to drive their new body. It's unclear why this option is chosen, but the results for those who were converted in this way can apparently be quite distressing. 

 

 

Which is all a long way of saying that the Grands will go to the sad sacks, the Lexicons to the mages, the Centurion cores to the low-level bandits, and so forth. I'm not quite sure how to present the Falmer and Meridian crystals yet, but they'll probably be the mid-range. The follower NPCs will tend towards Lexicon crystals and actual brains, while the enemies will get the lower-end stuff. 

 

And poor CL-22 will get a Gilded helmet for her final headwear. You can still see the crystals through the side-vents, but she wants to hide her shame at least a little bit.