So remember how I said that I'd put off doing characters like Hestla until a later date so I could focus on the main characters? Turns out that was a total lie. Last night I got an idea in my head and after some quality time in Outfit Studio I found myself with an almost-finished custom outfit for Hestla. From there, it was just a matter of time to take it to completion...

 

 

I was generally happy with how Hestla came out, but I did have some issues with her hand not behaving right. There were a couple of related causes at work here, one of which being a mod that adds claws to vampires. I removed the bare hand and nails from Hestla's left hand and reassigned the body slots to resolve the issue. I also experimentally removed the glove of her right hand without removing the armored parts to see how it would look; this way, her claws would be exposed on that side too. If you look very carefully you can see that nothing is holding the armor piece on her thumb in place, but that's a pretty small detail to pick up on, and I think we can give it a pass.

 

 

As a nice added bonus, while I was fine tuning her I figured out why Vilkas' face texture was messed up and I believe I addressed the root cause of the problem for all remaining NPCs that use data from the Pandorables series of mods. I also tried something new here, using Outfit Studio to substitute in diffuse textures from Armoury of Tamriel 2 as a way to get different material colors from what you'd normally see. In the vanilla game, Hestla wears red Vampire armor and carries a weapon that can be up to Elven in quality. For her custom armor, I used a mashup of Shinshi, Elven, and Wolf armor pieces, and I applied the AOT2 alternate daedric (red) textures to the armor parts to echo her normal outfit color. I'm pretty happy with the results. Finally, by leaning on Shinshi for the torso pieces, Hestla somewhat subverts the normal bikini armor schema by having panties but using such a low-cut bra that there's some significant peek-a-boo going on up there. All in all I think it succeeds well in creating something that looks very similar to Wolf Armor but is at the same time a significant departure from it. 

 

With her hands working, the other thing I wanted to consider was whether or not to give her a helmet or a mask. As with Athis I designed a custom headpiece that uses the circlet slot so her hair is still visible. 

 

 

Not bad, it adds some character to her face without hiding any of her main features or messing up her hair. 

 

OK, so what other ex-Companions (or at least retired/semi-retired members) do we have to look at? Lets do the two easy ones first: the Gray-Mane brothers. Earlier I decided to leave Eorlund as-is for now and equip Vignar with the vanilla Wolf armor. We'll accomplish this for Vignar by just editing his outfit. I did make a custom skin for Eorlund with battle scars on it since his outfit leaves a lot of skin on display. I tentatively kept the DND face normals, which hopefully will be a good match with the Virtuvia skin.

 

 

 

Why give Vignar armor, you ask? A couple reasons: first, it links him much more closely with the faction if you encounter him around town or when he shows up at the funeral scene during the Companions quest. Second, the companions are all getting custom armor, which means that if I don't put it on someone else, that vanilla armor will only appear in the world if the player wears it (and that's a whole other topic of discussion - after I make the character versions, I also need to make a couple custom sets to put in Eorlund's store!)

 

 

LOL whoops! I think I have a typo in my texture set path somewhere!

 

 

His face looks good, though. Vignar looks fine too. And as you can see below, fixing the typo on the texture paths resolved the purple skin problem:

 

 

So that just leaves the assassin, Arnbjorn. He's an archer, so let's start with the KSO sleeveless shrouded armor and then add on a few Wolf armor parts. 

 

 

 

Here's the initial design. We'll see how the KSO cock sock works out - if it has too many issues with clipping I might need to find a different solution. Arnbjorn already kind of has custom armor, so rather than going in and making a whole new record we'll just update his model path. Down the road, if some other mod uses his costume, then we can always split the two records.

 

 

 

Looks like the outfit is pretty much working right out of the box, including the custom skin normals and the cock ring/cock sock pieces.

 

So I think we can officially declare success on our custom characters for the day! That's about half of the remaining characters with ties to the Companions, so we'll have just a few more work complete - at least without drilling down into NPCs that appear during the faction's quests.