Point the First,

Point the Second, yeah, the FO4 expressions system sucks, Skyrim's was better (at least for our purposes).

I guess if we could figure out which specific morphs are applied on each mood/expressions, we could try to add ear movement to those in particular so they load where appropriate, though there's always the risk of them looking weird if they are used elsewhere. Dunno if there's such a list out there (or if it's possible to edit a race's expressions somehow).

In any case, please do keep us updated on how this all goes.

Yeah, the expressions are kinda silly. In theory they are better since each side is manipulated individually but in practice, they are kinda... not there IMHO.

If I had to guess, the vanilla expressions are the AnimFaceArchetype animflavors but I'd have no clue where to even start looking for what they actually contain/do.

Woah, and I need 3D Max to create a nif in FO4 format? Is that really the only option? 

40 minutes ago, Bad Dog said:

Woah, and I need 3D Max to create a nif in FO4 format? Is that really the only option? 

I don't think any of the existing Blender Nif plugins supports the FO4 nif format (yet?) so if you want to go directly from the 3d editing program to nif then Max is your only option indeed.

However, you can use Outfit Studio instead just fine. Do all the sculpting and placement and stuff in Blender, export as OBJ, import into OS, and do the rigging and the saving-as-nif there. That's how I did the sharks (and Amelia, and the Deathclaws) and it worked pretty well. Blender can still be used to handle TRI files directly as well, as the format hasn't changed from Skyrim (only the required morphs themselves have).

(Plan B is actually getting ahold of the Max version supported by the nif plugins, which IIRC is 2013. It's not for sale anymore and even if you contact Autodesk directly and ask them to sell you a copy, they'll tell you any old/not-for-sale-anymore versions are unsupported and basically suggest (with plausible deniability, of course) you pirate it instead. So I'll let you figure that one out).

I may know a guy if you want to opt for the latter indeed. ?

(For legal reasons that's a joke).

I'd forgotten the OS option. Weight painting is way easier in blender, but maybe that's the way to go.

Of course, if there were a convenient link somewhere to get that old, no-one-cares-about-it, not-commercially-viable version of Max, that's something I might like to look into as well.

This is me discovering that FO4 textures aren't really anything at all like Skyrim textures.

Okay, we're cooking with gas now.

I started fooling around with the hyenas but I think I'll switch over to Lykaios. They're popular and I'm thinking the entire suburb in the startup sequence will be wolfies. Then when the PC gets back to town, it will be a mix of random races. Same with the other settlements and groups--all random races, just whoever washed up there. Except maybe those gangster people, I have an idea they'd look good as all hyenas.

sadly even my 3dsmax can't do FO4 so i can't help much here (also i don't own FO4 so that's not helpful either).

but i still have the file that i used to reshape blaze's skyrim Modern Clothes meshes to match FO4's t-pose.....that's probably not helpful here but it's something i can do.

Max file? If so, please. Anything to help me get started. Right now the OS route is working. I'm just worrying about things like neck seams where the weights have to be exact.

1 hour ago, Bad Dog said:

I'm just worrying about things like neck seams where the weights have to be exact.

For neck seams in particular, I think this process may work (assuming you want to rig a head using the body as reference):

1. Mask all the vertices on the neck seam on the body (aka the ones that must be a 1:1 match for the head, but only those ones), and invert mask. You should now have all the vertices masked except for the ones on the neck seam.
2. Do the same for the head, so the end result is "only neck seam vertices are unmasked" too.
3. Do "Copy Bone Weights", set Distance to something very low like 1.0 or even 0.x, and set "Max Targets" to 1.

This should force OS to match every neck seam vertex on the head with the corresponding one on the body and then copy the bone weights 1:1 (Key word "should").

Otherwise, if that doesn't work right for some reason (or it mostly works but a handful rogue vertices end up with bad weights) OS does let you see what each vertex' bone weight value is in its UI if you hover the brush over said vertex with the bone selected. Worst case scenario you could go vertex-by-vertex and bone-by-bone matching them exactly with the "Fixed Weight Brush" toggle.

That's how I do the weighting on "rigid" pieces like holsters and mag pouches, I find a vertex to use as reference (usually one where the actual piece physically attaches to the body/vest/holster pad/ whatever) and manually paint the weights 1:1 so it never deforms but rather moves as a solid piece.

(I have a few tricks for this process so do let me know if you ever need to use it and I'll give you a rundown of it).

Okay, @Blaze69, how have you handled the tris? I have a set ready to go for the Lykaios but they're scrambled. I exported the obj preserving vert order, imported through OS; tris exported directly from blender using PG's script. How did you get them in?

Hoping I don't have to do 50 morphs one at a time, but if I do I do.

3 minutes ago, Bad Dog said:

Okay, @Blaze69, how have you handled the tris? I have a set ready to go for the Lykaios but they're scrambled.

Plan B if the OBJ import scrambles the order even if it's not supposed to is to grab the head mesh from the TRI itself, (because it's always OS' OBJ import that does the fuckup whenever it happens).

OS can load (and save) TRIs now, so what you can do is import the TRI file to get the mesh with the right vertex order, and then rig it and save it as nif, which should ensure a perfect match of the TRI order (because you literally got it from the TRI itself).

You should be able to load the current ingame head nif as a reference and simply copy bone weights to get it nif-ready. Do note that you may have to invert/flip the UVs alongside one of the axis (I think it's X, but I'm not sure) on the TRI-extracted mesh for it work as intended. No idea why TRIs flip the UVs like that bit then again AFAIK they were never even meant to store UV info so we shouldn't complain, lol.

Okay, I'll see what I can do with that. 

Bone weights are going to be a super-very-bad-icky problem. The Skyrim heads all have seams along the back of the skull and the crappy bone weight copy in OS isn't copying the same weights to vertices that are in the exact same position, but attached to different parts of the mesh - so the seams open up in the game. Ick, pthooey.

...and we are in fact getting somewhere. 

Turned out the tri issue was all the usual--split the edges where the UV splits, use PG's flag to get the vert order right.

Need to fix the bug eyes. They don't look like that in blender. Since most of the morphs are left side/right side there's a tendency for there to be an awkward seam in the middle, have to fix that. Dunno why the body isn't picking up the fur color--possibly it has to be in the nif for a body in the clothes nif to pick it up. Or something.

I have a quick and dirty body texture--no seams blended. I'm basing things on Enhanced Vanilla Bodies, which I hope is popular enough to be reasonable. 

Gonna get the lykaios in for player male & female, then get the furrifier working for the lykaios only. Maybe I'll get that clean enough to release. Then I'll start doing other races and extend the furrifier to cover them too. 

7 hours ago, Bad Dog said:

Bone weights are going to be a super-very-bad-icky problem. The Skyrim heads all have seams along the back of the skull and the crappy bone weight copy in OS isn't copying the same weights to vertices that are in the exact same position, but attached to different parts of the mesh - so the seams open up in the game. Ick, pthooey.

Dunno what to say, both the Vulpine and Selachii heads are split at the back and OS copied the weights just fine, there's no seam or mismatch between halves.

Guess you could try copying bone weights from either of those? Maybe the vanilla human heads being split in two is confusing OS by having to copy from one half first and then from the other?

6 hours ago, Bad Dog said:

Turned out the tri issue was all the usual--split the edges where the UV splits, use PG's flag to get the vert order right.

Yeah, nifs not being able to handle UV splits without vertex splits to match is kind of a pain. But glad to hear you tracked down the issue, lol.

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Need to fix the bug eyes. They don't look like that in blender.

What eye meshes are those? I'm assuming edited original Vulpine ones? Did you make sure to also edit the matching "_facebones" nif? Maybe those are still using default Vulpine shape/position and that's why the eyes become misplaced when the game loads them.

Plan B is to make it so the FaceBones nif is a duplicate of the "main" one (including the use of normal bones instead of the facebones ones). That should temporarily stop you from editing the eyes properly using the FaceBones system (assuming you're planning to use FaceBones in the first place instead of TRI morphs), but should at least remove any and all FB-induced interference with eye shape/position for testing purposes.

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Dunno why the body isn't picking up the fur color--possibly it has to be in the nif for a body in the clothes nif to pick it up. Or something.

Huh. Usually the "skin tint not working" issues happen on the head, not the body.

There's more pressing issues, though, so I guess we can get there when we get there.

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I have a quick and dirty body texture--no seams blended. I'm basing things on Enhanced Vanilla Bodies, which I hope is popular enough to be reasonable. 

The go-to male body replacer now is BodyTalk3, but AFAIK they use the exact same UVs as EVB, so that should make them BT3-compatible as well. So you should be good to go.

EDIT: please do make sure to grab CBBE for the ladies and build all the race assets for it if you aren't using it already, though. CBBE is the go-to for female body replacers, and pretty much everything else is either CBBE-texture-compatible or it's outdated/nobody uses it anymore.

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Gonna get the lykaios in for player male & female, then get the furrifier working for the lykaios only. Maybe I'll get that clean enough to release. Then I'll start doing other races and extend the furrifier to cover them too.

Sounds like a plan.

! FURRY FALLOUT DOODLE POLL !

So, fuzzybutts: I've created or significantly enhanced 14/15 separate races (depending on how you count) and I'm not signing up to port them all. I'm thinking 6-8 max. So this is your chance to say which races you'd most like to see ported. I'll take your feedback, mix in my own preferences, and go from there.

Poll is here: https://doodle.com/poll/ydkmie6tuea3htts?utm_source=poll&utm_medium=link

Everybody gets 4 votes! Only 4! You have to decide what's most important to you.

I separated out dogs and wolves because I plan on setting up the furrifier to do one or the other, and I'll make enough tints to cover both in one race (if the system can handle it.) Every race I do will be assigned to some NPCs and available for the PC.

It may be hard to impossible to make headgear that covers the range from horse to panther. I'll consider that when making the final choice. (I understand FO4 does better at assigning armor variants to races, but there's a limit to how many variants I can make.)

Go vote!

5 hours ago, Blaze69 said:

Dunno what to say, both the Vulpine and Selachii heads are split at the back and OS copied the weights just fine, there's no seam or mismatch between halves.

Guess you could try copying bone weights from either of those? Maybe the vanilla human heads being split in two is confusing OS by having to copy from one half first and then from the other?

I have the Vulpine and use them as the bone weight source. I'll try the Selachii. Dunno what the difference is.

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What eye meshes are those? I'm assuming edited original Vulpine ones? Did you make sure to also edit the matching "_facebones" nif? Maybe those are still using default Vulpine shape/position and that's why the eyes become misplaced when the game loads them.

 

Plan B is to make it so the FaceBones nif is a duplicate of the "main" one (including the use of normal bones instead of the facebones ones). That should temporarily stop you from editing the eyes properly using the FaceBones system (assuming you're planning to use FaceBones in the first place instead of TRI morphs), but should at least remove any and all FB-induced interference with eye shape/position for testing purposes.

What do I know from a "facebones" nif. I haven't looked at facebones at all. Okay, going to look.

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Huh. Usually the "skin tint not working" issues happen on the head, not the body.

Well... could be I just didn't set up skin colors right. Gotta get nude and see what I've got. 

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The go-to male body replacer now is BodyTalk3, but AFAIK they use the exact same UVs as EVB, so that should make them BT3-compatible as well. So you should be good to go.

 

EDIT: please do make sure to grab CBBE for the ladies and build all the race assets for it if you aren't using it already, though. CBBE is the go-to for female body replacers, and pretty much everything else is either CBBE-texture-compatible or it's outdated/nobody uses it anymore.

All right, off I go to download another body replacer... JFC LOOK AT THAT LIST OF PREREQs... okay, I guess I woulda gotten them eventually anyway.

Using CBBE for females.

-

Hey, I'm thinking in the startup sequence, the little town might not only be all lykaios, but all with dog face patterns. Then not introduce wolves until after the apocalypse. 

1 hour ago, Bad Dog said:

JFC LOOK AT THAT LIST OF PREREQs...

I assume you mean BT3 here since FO4 CBBE doesn't have any requirements.

AAF is optional and is the kinda SL equivelant except nowhere near as robust or extendable or anything really but it's pretty much best FO4 has currently.

BodySlide and Outfit Studio is for body customization.

LooksMenu is the RaceMenu equivelant except nowhere near as robust or extendable or anything really but it's pretty much best FO4 has currently.

MTM physics preset is optional but it's just (O)CBP(C) physics config.

OCBP Physics is optional physics framework.
OCBPC Physics is optional physics framework. This one can do collisions.

ZeX skeleton is the XPMSE of FO4 except only BT3 and Fusion Girl use it as far as I know.

So TL;DR, only hard requirement is ZeX skeleton because otherwise you have unweighted dicks and ass(?) that stretch to infinity. Everything else is optional if you don't care about customization or "press button to sex" framework.

1 hour ago, Bad Dog said:

Everybody gets 4 votes! Only 4! You have to decide what's most important to you.

Why must you hurt me so. ? /s

For real though, I had to pick the races I wanted to see in FO4 the most, not the ones I think would be a good replacement for wasteland NPCs. Oh, well.

I do have to say, since some of the races do share assets in YA (like for example AWDs using Lykaios meshes or Striped Hyenas being just retextured Spotted Hyenas), some of those may end up still making the cut even if they don't win the poll. And by that I mean if hyenas do end up in Furry Fallout, I'll do my best to port whichever of the two species doesn't win (since only textures would need to be ported, and that I can do). Same goes for the others that have compatible textures, e.g. even if (Sabre)Lions win and Cheetahs do not, the Cheetah texture works on the Lion heads so I'll add it as an extra skin option or whatever.

(Totally not hoping Sabrelions win so I can slap the Cheetah texture on them and recreate Shalia in FO4).

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It may be hard to impossible to make headgear that covers the range from horse to panther. I'll consider that when making the final choice. (I understand FO4 does better at assigning armor variants to races, but there's a limit to how many variants I can make.)

I mean, as far as I can tell, FO4 has no limit on the amount of ArmorAddons you can add to an item, and every race seems to pick up on their unique AAs just fine even if they use HumanRace as reference, so in theory there's no limit.

Obviously that means the actual limit is how much work you're willing to put into it and on how creative you can get with each specific item to get it to fit head shapes it was never meant to. (Good luck getting glasses to look good on horses, for example ).

1 hour ago, Bad Dog said:

I have the Vulpine and use them as the bone weight source. I'll try the Selachii. Dunno what the difference is.

The Selachii heads should have more vertices so maybe OS won't go as crazy trying to find suitable targets and thus the weighting will be more consistent across the seams, would be my guess.

Other than that, I'm not sure if the current Vulpine heads use a skin transform or not (the new update should, but that's not the file you're working on), so if OS asks about skin transforms when trying to copy weights, make sure the two new checkboxes at the bottom of the window (which would be missing otherwise) are ticked, that should keep the head in the place it should be.

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What do I know from a "facebones" nif. I haven't looked at facebones at all. Okay, going to look.

The game expects every headpart nif to have a matching "(nif name here)_FaceBones.nif" next to it that is the same as the main one but actually rigged to the chargen face bones. So if you didn't change the paths and still have the old (Vulpine-fit) eye _FaceBones nif, it could be loading the old shape and thus causing the weirdness. Either nuking the _FaceBones nif so it doesn't exist or just replacing it with a copy of the standard eyes nif should get rid of the issue for now.

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All right, off I go to download another body replacer... JFC LOOK AT THAT LIST OF PREREQs... okay, I guess I woulda gotten them eventually anyway.

To be fair most of them aren't actually required, only the ZeX Skeleton is "hard"-required to avoid floating dicks due to missing schlong bones. EDIT: ninja'd by Sly with a better explanation.

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Using CBBE for females.

Good. Figured I'd bring it up before you start putting work into females, just in case.

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Hey, I'm thinking in the startup sequence, the little town might not only be all lykaios, but all with dog face patterns. Then not introduce wolves until after the apocalypse.

I guess I can see that, though TBH I'm still a bit iffy on stuff like that because I don't even know what the "lore" is in the first place. But I guess "domestic dogs" before the apocalypse and "savage wolves" after does have a bit of a thing going on for it no matter what.

@Bad Dog

3 hours ago, Bad Dog said:

! FURRY FALLOUT DOODLE POLL !

 

So, fuzzybutts: I've created or significantly enhanced 14/15 separate races (depending on how you count) and I'm not signing up to port them all. I'm thinking 6-8 max. So this is your chance to say which races you'd most like to see ported. I'll take your feedback, mix in my own preferences, and go from there.

 

Poll is here: https://doodle.com/poll/ydkmie6tuea3htts?utm_source=poll&utm_medium=link

 

Everybody gets 4 votes! Only 4! You have to decide what's most important to you.

 

I separated out dogs and wolves because I plan on setting up the furrifier to do one or the other, and I'll make enough tints to cover both in one race (if the system can handle it.) Every race I do will be assigned to some NPCs and available for the PC.

 

It may be hard to impossible to make headgear that covers the range from horse to panther. I'll consider that when making the final choice. (I understand FO4 does better at assigning armor variants to races, but there's a limit to how many variants I can make.)

 

Go vote!

Would there be an option with bats?

This would also be my first vote ?

Damn, forgot the bats. Left off all the birds intentionally, cuz no flying. Also beaks don't fit freakin anything.

To the extent that there is lore, my take is:

• Nice suburban white-bread retro-50's town with nice white-bread retro-50's suburban people all pretty much the same and nicey-nice. (Domestic dogs one and all.)
• Shit hits the fan and nefarious individuals suck them into the storage facility. (Maybe wolves at the gate and other races as scientists.)
• Somebody steals the baby. (Also some not-dog race.) 
• Escape out into a changed world where everything is scrambled and your nice town is occupied by a bunch of random squatters. (So a mix of races.)
• And it's the same everywhere--all the pre-war communities have been scrambled and rearranged. Where the lore suggests a group that managed to maintain coherence from before the war I'll look at keeping the races more the same but unless it's a family group probably not all the same. 
  • (Fuck. Families. The furrifier is going to have to figure out relationships so it doesn't make the families totally random. I can see different species marrying, but the kids should take after one of the parents.)
• Anyway the mafia-types can be all one race because I expect they're assholes, but the scientists are only supposed to care about science, so I'd expect them to be a mix.

A bit of a silly question, but what is the difference between Lykaios wolf and Lykaios dog? 

I thought Lykaios was a wolf.

PS: Choosing only 4 races will be a difficult choice.

1 hour ago, Bad Dog said:

To the extent that there is lore, my take is:

Oh, I mostly meant "what is the explanation for everyone being furry now". My options were:

1. Everybody has always been furry (like with YA in Skyrim), and "human" in this alternate universe just means "sapient anthro mammal", with the different species being the equivalents of RL races/ethnicities.
2. Government created Furry Juice™ Animal-FEV that turns humans into anthros, it got leaked and aerosolized when the bombs hit the labs and stuff, all the survivors got transformed and they're furry now.
3. Government created anthros through bioengineering (separate from humans or whatever). Human-killing bioweapons/plagues got leaked from the labs when bombs hit, all humans died from plague or became Ghouls from radiation, anthros took over the world (or what's left of it anyway).

So I'm guessing it's #1, going by what you lay out here.

I do have to admit the only one where the intro makes sense is #1, or else the player and all their neighbors being furry would make no sense at all... unless we pretend Sanctuary Hills was some kind of large-scale experiment to see how transformed humans (#2) or newly created anthros (#3) would behave in a "standard" human society or something like that. Then again I always use Start Me Up to skip the vanilla start and also change all dialogue, quests, etc. so Shaun is not the PC's kid, so it's not like it would affect me in any way.

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• Nice suburban white-bread retro-50's town with nice white-bread retro-50's suburban people all pretty much the same and nicey-nice. (Domestic dogs one and all.)

Figured as much, yeah.

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• Shit hits the fan and nefarious individuals suck them into the storage facility. (Maybe wolves at the gate and other races as scientists.)

Eh, not sure I'd call them "nefarious". Vault Tec Rep and the Vault 111 staff (other than maybe the higher-ups) are mostly Punch Clock Villains that work for the actual nefarious individuals (aka Vault Tec Execs/the Enclave) and whose main crime is just following orders, and the US Army grunts aren't even involved in the Vault Tec crap, they're just maintaining peace and doing their duty.

Tirade aside, Army personnel/Vault Tec Security goons being wolves while scientists and Vault staff are a different "weaker/nerdier" species would be fitting, I guess.

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• Somebody steals the baby. (Also some not-dog race.)

Wouldn't really know what to turn Kellogg into, at least not without knowing what species are available.

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• And it's the same everywhere--all the pre-war communities have been scrambled and rearranged. Where the lore suggests a group that managed to maintain coherence from before the war I'll look at keeping the races more the same but unless it's a family group probably not all the same. 
  • (Fuck. Families. The furrifier is going to have to figure out relationships so it doesn't make the families totally random. I can see different species marrying, but the kids should take after one of the parents.)

I don't think the amount of families is big enough to be too much of a drag to clean up manually afterwards, but if you can automate that stuff, all the better.

1 hour ago, poblivion said:

A bit of a silly question, but what is the difference between Lykaios wolf and Lykaios dog? 

I thought Lykaios was a wolf.

He explained it in the post. If I got it right, the plan is to have Lykaios be able to do both wolves and dogs for the player (depending on custom morphs and tints and such, like for example the Bernese Mountain Dog face markings from YA), but NPCs will only be of one kind (e.g. all dog-like or all wolf-like), and that's what he's asking.

4 minutes ago, Blaze69 said:

He explained it in the post. If I got it right, the plan is to have Lykaios be able to do both wolves and dogs for the player (depending on custom morphs and tints and such, like for example the Bernese Mountain Dog face markings from YA), but NPCs will only be of one kind (e.g. all dog-like or all wolf-like), and that's what he's asking.

It confused me a little, because in the poll there is a Lykaios race twice once as a wolf and a second time as a dog.  I definitely want to vote for the Lykaios race, but I didn't know the difference.

It's (wolf vs dog) really about how many tint masks to I have to create and if there are limited slots how much of a problem will that be.

Yeah, scenario has to be that everyone was always furry unless somehow you could have everyone human, skip character setup in front of the mirror, then when you break out you're like OMG I'm furry how did that happen and you do character setup then.

If there are only a few families they can be hard-coded in the script, which is way easier than trying to parse relationships.