Here's another catch-up post for you. Progress on all of this has been pretty haphazard thanks to all the ongoing real-life hassles (key people taking vacations while our work volume continues to be way more than we can actually handle really throws a few wrenches into things, you know), but I'm still plugging away at it. Although at this point the list of things that I need to finish but haven't had the energy to put the work into is getting uncomfortably long... Anyway, this is what I have managed to get done.

 

We'll start with an update on those Vanilla clothing-based bodies I brought up last time. I showed in that post that there was a bit of a problem with the neck plate fitting onto the neck seam in the skin on the robes I was using, which confused me some. Well, I belatedly realized what was causing that. You see, I've known about this odd bug in the Creation Kit where if you have the CK open and then generate an outfit in BodySlide so you can create the armor entries for it and get it into the game, the in-game outfit's weight scaling won't work. Turns out the same thing happens if you move a purely Vanilla mesh into a different folder while the CK's open. It just can not, for whatever damn reason, parse the weight scaling on any mesh that wasn't in-place in the file structure before the program starts. So that was an annoying but easy fix... That I didn't actually realize was the issue until I had worked up a different fix, which was to replace the skin sections of those meshes completely.

 

 

This was a pretty quick and straight-forward modification, just made by duplicating and enlarging the neck ring a couple of times, but I rather liked how it turned out. It also bypassed the whole issue I was having with reconciling the skin sections on those outfits with the alternate material bodies, which helps keep these suitable for the 'clothed statue' idea that was one of the main reasons I wanted to do these in the first place.

 

 

This also led to me restructuring how these were implemented. Originally they were just direct, unaltered copies of the Vanilla meshes with the existing Doll Collar neckplate mesh seconded into the outfit, which led to me scrapping the Apprentice Robes there because they had some issues with the fit with the Doll hands and feet at the wrists and ankles. Since I ended up having to modify the necks of the College set as well- they have a tiny scrap of skin mesh at their collars that leaves a tiny space to be filled in after it's removed- there wasn't any good reason not to just go ahead and do the fixes there as well. So these are now wholly discrete models with their own proper weight scaling and integrated neck plates. Pretty much all I need to do with them is a few touch-up fixes and to build their ground models. Along with the ground models for everything else I've done recently. Those are a biiiiiiig part of the 'too much of a hassle to do right now' pile. 

 

A lot of what I've been doing instead could be charitably classified as 'play-testing'. The save with the Dunmer character that I've been using for a while had been getting increasingly clunky lately, so I took some time to pare out a few of the more script-heavy mods that I didn't really use all that much and start up a new character. I figured that since I needed to do that anyway I'd take the opportunity to fill in a thin spot in my NPC's racial representation and build a donor face for a new Automated Breton, as B17-1 up there was the only one I had. I did have a couple of Bretons that I had worked up while building faces for the Vanilla mask project, but I honestly didn't much like how they had turned out. Having to build to the restraints of the head frame for the swappable masks limited things a lot, and they came out a bit too generic-looking. Not having that particular restriction in this case, since I don't plan on building a swappable mask from the face, let me be much more creative in how I laid the face out. Especially as far as the eyes go, which I took as an opportunity to go Full Pixie.

 

 

For the purposes of this run I'm not decking her out in the DMA parts and just gave her some simple Dwarven Augumentation modifications, as I'm also using her to test out some salvaging I've been doing from other mod outfits for personal use. But eventually she'll be added to the Automated roster as B6-13.

 

(The Fair Skin makeup's nose shadowing always looks weirder in NifSkope than it does in-game, just ignore that.)

 

Alongside of her I made some quick non-DMA Automated NPCs inside one of my personal-use mods to use for practicing in-world placement and follower recruitment, as I found that altering those on the DMA NPCs after I had encountered them in-game could be a bit iffy. I mostly took that as an opportunity to make Automated out of some faces that I liked but couldn't really use in DMA, such as some sourced from bandit expansion mods:

 

 

But I also happened to include one sourced from a quick NPC I made to play around with Being A Cow, based directly on one of the wilderness encounter Dawnguard NPCs. 

 

 

She also happened to be the donor for one of the generic Redguard masks I made for the Vanilla set, as I rather like her face, but I hadn't included her with the batch of Automated I made from existing NPCs inside of DMA because I'm pretty sure that would require me to set Dawnguard as a master file, which I've been reluctant to do so far. Nothing says I couldn't just import her face like I have to do for the custom NPCs, though, and I might just do that because she is fun to have around. I carried on her previous version's cow-girl theme for the heck of it, with the horns and ears set salvaged from BaC, the Pony legs, and...

 

 

...the robotic tail, which I actually finalized a while ago but could never find a good space to wedge into these updates. It gets the improved base I showed before for the beast race tails and keeps the large cable element for the tail itself, but the simple sphere at the tip's been replaced by a more streamlined structure made from part of the Centurion bust decoration. The new tip ties the design together a lot better, and the base managed to work pretty well with the bikini bottoms here, as well as the bare Type XXX pelvises and even the robotic ones. 

 

 

I also added an extra little touch to that tail-base, mostly for the ground models but also for the little bit of exposure it gets when used with those robotic pelvises, by giving it something of a 'plug' at the end.

 

 

So that whole sub-project is pretty much finished off, aside from, again, some small fixes and building those ground models. I really procrastinate on those, mainly because they're a total pain in the ass. 

 

Anyway, back to... well, another digression, actually. I'll bring it up now to explain why they're in some later shots, but remember how I've mentioned that the process for making an Automated's face can be applied to any female NPC with an exported FaceGen, including existing followers? I wanted to showcase that idea a bit, so I did just that. I figured that a good place to start was with someone who was already pretty on-theme, like Talyn here. Just make the alterations to her head mesh, go visit her in-game and...

 

 

Okay, it isn't actually super noticeable on her at first due to her equipment and hair, but there's not much you can do about that initially. One thing you absolutely do not want to do is remove the hair meshes while making the alterations, however, as this will cause the game to stop recognizing the FaceGen mesh entirely in-game with various unwelcome results. So you'll have to modify that at the dressing stage after you recruit them along with adding in the head frame elements, which you can't do outside of the game without modifying the follower's .esp file. So for now they'll just have the creepy floating face, like this:

 

 

Now for Talyn, she's already got a perfectly good cyborg body with a lot of fun things built for it, and I didn't see any reason to replace it with DMA parts. So she just gets a Doll Collar neck plate and a Live head frame. 

 

 

As you can see that still leaves her existing hair behind, which can be a bit of a problem as some hair sets aren't entirely suited for use in this context, which was a whole source of issues when I was working up the wigs. In this case the shaved sides don't quite work out, so for now they can be displaced with the Null hair set.

 

 

The soul gem didn't quite feel on-theme for her character, though, so I swapped it out for the brain capsule, and gave her back her original neck support as it's a rather neat piece in itself.

 

 

After that was deciding on a head covering:

 

 

I settled on the crest, mainly because it offers a good view of the brain lights which pairs rather well with all the existing lights on her armor.

 

 

So that works well, but in a way Talyn is a low-hanging fruit. She's already a Dwarven cyborg, this just adds to that a bit. So next let's look at modifying a completely random follower mod, like, say... This one.

 

 

Here we'll do something slightly different and modify the head after encountering her in-game. The game doesn't freak out over texture changes on the FaceGen models the same way it does mesh changes, so it can change mid-save without any ill effects.

 

 

The only downside to all this is that it requires editing the file outside of the game, so there's no real 'immersion' to it. That said, there was a mod posted recently that lets you change wig colors through an in-game interface that then somehow edits the mesh's texture settings outside of the game. I have no idea how it works or if the same process would be feasible for the changes needed to make an Automated's face, and certainly don't have the expertise needed to even try to implement it at this stage, but it's an intriguing feature. And if nothing else, that mod might be handy to have when I finally manage to get the DMA wigs out. But for now we'll have to do things manually, so let's finish off Rosie with her robotic parts...

 

 

And then we'll set her up with something a little new.

 

 

When I first showed off this Gigadeux-based set, I said that I was going to skip the pelvis as the model wasn't really set up for it. And, well, that's still true- there's no actual hips to it- but while poking around at it I felt that it would work out pretty well as a variant of the Gynoid pelvis design. It took a lot of futzing around and eventually turned into an almost entirely different piece, but it came out well enough. The mid-torso connection is new as the old one didn't quite fit, the number of inner cables had to be multiplied to fill in the visual gap between the belt and belly armor, and the Gynoid hip plates ended up getting replaced with a new design based on the Type XXX joint plates. Pretty much just the core structures and the butt and crotch plates are unaltered.

 

 

And it also happens to work out pretty well with the tail:

 

 

Once again, this still needs some final tweaks and to have its ground models made, etc. I sure am saying that a lot, huh?

 

Now, to get this back on thread, let's return to Annabelle here. As I said, she has a 'cow-girl' theme going, so as part of that I kitted her out with the Variable version of the Milker chest and used SGO to get some expansion going. 

 

 

This is all well and good and exactly what the Variable chests are in there for, as it amuses me, but there's a bit of a problem with those modesty plates. The mesh they're made from isn't particularly high-poly, but they're tasked with covering a part of the body mesh that both is high-poly and is subject to a lot of potential changes with the BodyMorph system, so at high levels of expansion it's annoyingly persistent in doing this shit:

 

 

I had thought I had ironed that out in this version of these, but I guess not. This is only a problem on the Variable versions, of course; for all of the Fixed Weight models I went through and fixed any noticeable clipping during the course of building them and they're not subject to any further morphing. But on the Variable versions there's just so damn many potential, um, variables that it's a giant pain in the ass to account for all of them. So Instead of trying, I decided I'd make a new modesty solution.

 

The first thing I turned to was the cowling piece I used on the Meteor helmet, as it had a decent cup shape to it. A little bit of work later, and...

 

 

...Wait.

 

 

This isn't modest at all!

 

But I like it.

 

 

The problem is that the morphs have certain points where they're particularly touchy. The nipples are some of the more complicated ones, especially the length and size sliders which can very easily produce clipping and distortion on models that weren't set up to accommodate them. The best way to start on that is by having an intersection of a decently high number of vertices centered directly over the nipple, but the only place with one of those on this mesh is at the point of the cowling. So it's barely providing coverage.

 

But that does have its own appeal.

 

 

It does have its own limits, though. Stupid-huge morphs can distort the ring element placed at the back to fill in a hollow on the cowling mesh, and very small morphs are not kind to it, as should probably be expected. It does pretty well on the middle sizes, though.

 

 

It's also only really suited for use with the MC variable torso there. You can use it with the regular Doll chests, but it's just kinda hanging on. 

 

 

So I'm inclined to toss it in, but it's kind of a limited use-case and doesn't actually accomplish what I was looking for out of it. For that I had to turn elsewhere, which led to me brainstorming on places I could source a suitable mesh from. And that led me to someplace a bit unusual: The Dwarven Greatsword.

 

 

This was a return to the pastie-style covering instead of trying to make a cup element, which I figured would work better with the non-MC torso applications, using the Greatsword's hilt decoration and pommel caps. They worked out pretty well; the hilt deco has a surprisingly high poly count, especially compared to the similar parts on the other Dwarven blades, while the pommel has an amusing design for the context and provides plenty of clearance over the troublesome nipples.

 

 

Both of them took fairly well to the various breast morphs, with almost all of the points where it needed cleanup being at the very edges of the mesh where it contacts the skin. The actual results of the morphs can be a bit varied, but things mostly turn out okay. 

 

 

So all that was coming along quite nicely, right up until the point where I tested them in-game. You see, making armor parts out of non-armor meshes can be a bit... Fussy. Sometimes it turns out fine, sometimes the game will choke on them entirely, sometimes something weird and in-between those points will happen. This time we got the in-between.

 

 

In this case, the parts just sorta flick in and out of visibility as the camera moves around. Get the camera at the right angle and they're perfectly visible, move it a tiny fraction and they vanish. It's super-annoying, but more annoying is that the only way I know of to fix it is by using the .obj-conversion method to remediate the meshes. Which is all fine and good, except that I didn't find this until after I had made all the fixes to the morphs in Bodyslide, and those don't carry over so now I have to do them again. Which I will do, eventually, because these worked out pretty well, but they're right there on the procrastination list.

 

So that moves us on to my third choice, which ended up being something between the first two: the chassis piece from the Dwarven Sphere. 

 

 

This... Actually worked out a lot better than I was expecting it to. I was anticipating problems similar to the current Spider-based plate's, but it turns out that this piece has an acceptable poly count with an intersection of vertices in a reasonably useful place.

 

 

Centering that over the nipple gives me reasonable coverage with just a tiny bit of areola peeking out at the edges for some risque flair. The mesh itself manages to cup the breast while only barely contacting the skin, which helps give it an amazing amount of leeway in conforming to the various morphs. Big, small, even some of the really oddball ones in the UUNP catalog, all but a few super-extremes work fine.

 

 

Best of all, it didn't give me any crap in-game.

 

 

I'm inclined to get all of these into the mod, but this is certainly the most successful. It manages to be both a cup and a pastie at the same time, so it looks good regardless of the chest it's used on, and its flexibility as far as the morphs go is a fricking blessing compared to the usual fussiness I have to deal with. These will still be somewhat limited in their use, though, as I only intend to include them as Variable versions. The Fixed Weight chests will have to make do with the Spider plates and the Edhildil bras, as adding four more coverings for each of them would add another big chunk to the mod's parts count. I'm already at three pages in AddItemMenu and I haven't even gotten around to putting in all the rubber Doll variants yet, guys. I've got to find some place to exercise restraint. 

 

Speaking of AIM, I actually have been considering some way besides it to get these parts into the game. Not crafting, setting that up is still too much of a giant pain in the ass, but probably something along the lines of chests placed inside the space I'm planning for the Automated NPCs. Working on that has been it's own headache, though. I've mentioned before that my first experiment involved duplicating a piece of Avanchnzel, but that had had some particularly obnoxious problems involving random things not rendering in properly, so that wasn't going to work.

 

 

My next thought was that the NPCs would need something to do in the space anyway, so it would make some sense to use a location that was already set up with idle markers and the like. The obvious place to start there was with a Markarth interior, and that actually worked out fine. So I went ahead and tossed in a bunch of the NPCs I've done so far to test out their deployment.

 

 

I found out a few interesting things while doing this. First, I can now confirm that the SoS keywords do apply properly on the torsos when the save doesn't have records of those items from before the keywords were added to them, as all of the panties and torsos equipped on these characters loaded without any complaints. This does mean that you're likely to run into the same problems I was having with them not doing that if you upgrade the mod mid-save, though. Second, is that when making these NPCs I really need to remember to strip out any location-specific AI packages left over from the original NPCs if I want them to stay put. I neglected to do that on the Automated Courtesan I made out of Windhelm's Susanna, and she promptly wandered out and managed to get herself killed by a nearby Forsworn. Although that does give me the opportunity to showcase what looting a dead Automated looks like.

 

 

You can further loot the head frame as well, but that'll leave her face floating in space alongside the bare torso frame. The face and the torso frame are the only parts that are her actual 'nude' body, everything else is a piece of armor as far as the game is concerned.

 

And a note about the hair; that clipping at the cheek seems to be caused by some neck weighting on the forelock reacting to the odd angle the head is resting at. In a normal position it doesn't so that. I don't know if the weighting there is really needed, but I'm also not sure if it's worth the hassle to adjust at this point...

 

 

Anyway, the other thing of note is that the Markarth spaces turned out to be way too small for the number of NPCs I need to cram in there. I had only tossed in a handful for testing and it already felt cramped, and I've got a frickin' pile of them made up that need homes. One in-theme way to alleviate that would be to have them in the space but 'deactivated' in some way, to keep them from wandering around and getting in each other's way as they compete for idle markers. The ideal way to handle that would be something that could set the NPCs to act like mannequins until removed, like in the Cursed Mannequin Collars mod that I mentioned before, but that uses a complicated and somewhat limited quest-based method that I have absolutely no clue how to get working. Second-best would be something like the Draugr wall niche markers or the ones that ghosts idle in before they walk through walls, but I don't think there's any way to get those to work with non-Draugr or non-ghosts. I gave the latter a try, but nobody was interested in using them.

 

 

Going through the Vanilla markers, the only one that seemed to provide anything close to the effect I wanted was the one for the door sentries at the Imperial HQ in Solitude. It isn't quite what I had in mind, as the NPCs still rotate through an idle pose and head-track so they don't really come off as 'deactivated', but it does seem to keep them in place from what I've seen so far. It may work as a good-enough solution.

 

 

But even with that the space is still too small. None of the Markath interiors quite felt right, so started looking at other Dwarven spaces that already had some NPC use. Out of them, the most promising candidate for a donor is Raldbthar. It's a decent sized space with some variety to its rooms and nothing particularly obstructive. The only big change I had to make was that I'd pictured the Automated hangout to be in very good shape for a Dwarven ruin, which required me to clean up all the various rubble piles scattered around the place. But this also freed up more floorspace, so it's worth taking the time to do. 

 

 

The part that's really selling me on this is the large room just past the bandit-occupied area, though. part of what I had in mind for the Automated's space was that it would include the machine that created them in some fashion, but I wasn't really looking forward to having to build something that represented that. This room, however, is already set up to look like some kind of large mechanism.

 

 

I did some more clean-up here and pulled some fences out to expose the structures at the side of the room; I'm thinking that those could be modified as 'outputs' for the DMA parts, with some ground models littered around and containers here and there containing the entire DMA stock. Similarly, the door at the back of the room is perfect for the exit of the machine that a freshly minted Automated would come through. Everything past that point is set up more as a standard Dwarven dungeon and isn't really as usable as the rest of the space, so I don't mind scrapping it in favor of a reconstruction chamber. It won't be functional, of course, as that would require a whole lot of things that I don't know how to do, but I am pretty set on it as an aesthetic element. 

 

This is as far as I've gotten with this so far, though. I still have to decide a lot of the details regarding how I'm going to kit out and populate the space, as well as where exactly the entrance to it is going to be. I've currently got the doors to all these test zones peppered around Deep Folk Crossing's upper area, but it's actually a bit of a pain to work with due to its navmeshing being rather spotty. What I'd rather like to do is to associate it with an existing isolated Dwarven surface ruin that doesn't have an established dungeon or Falmer activity all that nearby, but there's not a whole lot of those. I'd particularly prefer it for story purposes if it was in an unpopulated area, but that knocks out otherwise decent candidates like the Dibella shrine on the road to Markarth or the henge near Shor's Stone. Ones that get a lot of attention from other mods like Reachwind or the shrine in the mountains north of Whiterun are a bit iffy, too. Any suggestions as far as that goes would be welcome.

 

One last thing to mention regards the voices for the NPCs I'm making. The Vanilla voice system has some obnoxious limitations where followers are concerned in regards to which voice types will actually work for follower dialog, which I ran into face-first here when I tried to use the High Elf voice for A5-16. This is an old problem, of course, and has long had a solution in the form of the Relationship Dialog Overhaul mod, but I had never bothered to use that both because I had seldom bothered with followers in my own games and because it has a history of conflicts with PAHE. Given this situation where I suddenly find myself building a whole mass of followers, however, it seemed only rational to give it a try instead of limiting my followers to a whole three voice types. The results have been fairly entertaining. 

 

 

They'll even play off of each other sometimes, which is pretty wild.

 

 

So yeah, you can probably add that to the list of recommended companion mods when this stuff actually comes out. It certainly makes the whole thing work a lot smoother.