Hi folks, hope you all had a good weekend! I had a few false starts on blogs over the last few days but I never really reached "take-off velocity" on any of them. Let me summarize what I've been up to before I start on today's work.

 

1. I discovered a problem with the R18PN Lingerie set that was causing skin discoloration on actors. I converted several outfits from this set to use the BHUNP V4 body - specifically the frilly smallclothes that Ida Black-Briar wears and Sadia's teddy-style one-piece. Because of lighting conditions in the zones where these NPCs are located I didn't immediately notice the problem until just recently - both of them had noticeable discoloration between their torso and their hands, feet, and head. Further investigation revealed the problem: the NAM1 and NAM3 fields in the Armor Add-on records were populated with the vanilla female skin texture.
   
   
   
   On a vanilla build, this would probably go totally unnoticed, but since I have tons of custom skins in my game it stood out. These fields let you define an override for the normal skin texture and they can be very useful in some circumstances. However, this wasn't one of those use cases and so I removed those entries from the ARMA record. As you can see below, Ida's skin now looks consistent and doesn't have texture seams.
   
   
   
   By contrast, here's Ingun using the Northbourne NPCs of the Rift head:
   
   
    
2. On the topic of Ida, I did a face transplant on her. Because of my initial use of easyNPC I have tons of unused facegen files lying around in my Mod Organizer tree from various replacers who "didn't make the cut" in easyNPC. So I took the Courageous Women version of Ingun Black-Briar and re-used it for her sister. This basically just involved renaming the files and then going into the nif to also make sure any internal mappings were also updated; then I copied the face-related data from Ingun's CW NPC_ record to Ida's and... well, you can see the results above. I'll likely use this technique in the future for other NPCs that have more vanilla-like face geometry which might look out of place in a game with lost of mod-enhanced NPCs.
3. I identified more problematic morphs from the UNP Minidress Collection. These aren't defects per se but instead they're a consequence of the slider changes between BHUNP V3 and BHUNP V4. I haven't fixed all of these yet, but the main takeaway is that you can't count on UUNP bodyslides to morph properly with BHUNP V4 anymore. These outfits will require conversion to the new reference body. Fortunately, the shapes are essentially the same, so for most outfit it just requires conforming sliders and re-copying bone weights, which doesn't take too long to square away. 
4. I started creating a registry of janky Sexlab animations that I need to eliminate from this build. For example, "aggressive doggy", one of the built-in default animations, has a longstanding alignment issue in its first stage. Having said that, as I've progressed with this effort I'm leaning more and more towards just entirely removing the vanilla Sexlab animations, either through a hard remover or through using a "default-disabled" tool to soft remove them. I've seen all these animations a million times and many of them are less well put together than the newer alternatives that exist.
5. I experimented with tweaking the outfits in Prison Alternative to be a little closer to my current worldbuilding. I had mixed results and rolled back that first attempt at a patch. I'll revisit this work after some further analysis; there aren't too many edits I need to make in this vein and most of the issues actually have to do with unplanned interactions with "3rd mods" - for example, adding prison rags to the NPC prison outfit causes Immersive Equipment Display to render the imprisoned follower's weapons. I suspect that the real solution to that problem will actually be to add exceptions to IED so it doesn't render weapons on the prisoner rags rather than making outfit adjustments. But yeah, further analysis required but the door is definitely not closed on this customization work.
6. I installed the new dialogue expansion mod for Uthgerd the Unbroken. This was a completely uneventful installation so nothing to really talk about here. I did find it interesting to see the mod author's take on Uthgerd, which was actually kind of similar to the one that I came up with (albeit a little less exposed). Notably, he went with the same chest piece.
   
   
    

 

For today, we're going to start out by doing some more face changes. First things first, you may recall from before that the NPCs from Prison Alternative were displaying the Black Face Overlay. This means that those actors aren't loading facegen and indeed, a quick check of the data folder reveals that facegen files are not present.

 

 

Now some people might say "oh, just get Face Discoloration Fix," but I have three issues with that:

 

1. I don't really like highlighting FDF too much, because it's a crutch tool that prevents users from learning how to mod properly. And correctly integrating NPC changes is an important skill to learn. If nothing else, the black face overlay may be a warning sign of deeper problems with an NPC_ record. For example, if an NPC overhaul includes skill, faction, or AI changes in addition to a face change and the face is getting conflicted out, then the end user might be losing those other changes, too. The black face overlay is a valuable warning sign, and disabling that function isn't actually a good thing.
2. FDF does increase game load and can have a very noticeable impact on performance, especially when loading multiple actors at the same time.
3. Using FDF deprives me of the opportunity to further customize my game!

 

So the first question we have is: do we want to use templates or do we want to use defined faces? This is actually a little more in-depth than just asking if it's more immersive to have randomized faces, because the other thing that might get inherited from a template is the sex and the voice type of the actor. PA comes with spoken dialogue and if we want to open up the door for templates then we should make sure that the relevant voice types are supported.

 

 

The core PA mod seems to support all the basic male voice types, so we can use a template for the jailer as long as it's all-male. We'll plug in this leveled NPC list below and set the "use traits" flag on the jailer.

 

 

 

We may be back to do some further work on this guy's outfit, but one thing at a time: let's look at the other PA mods that I have installed.

 

The Riften pack already uses templated actors so there's no problem there.

 

 

The Solitude add-on uses templated NPCs but it doesn't have the "use traits" flag checked. This mod also has more narrowly defined voice data rather than recording many different voice types. Since all the actors portrayed in this one are 'unique' in the sense that they appear in one location only and play a role in a narrative scene, these characters are candidates for receiving custom faces.

 

 

We have seven actors total: one guard and six vampires. There's a leveled list suitable for the guard, but as expected the vampires don't have a similar option.

 

 

 

So what's a good source for vampire heads? There's two female heads in this mod that might be a good starting point. Let's start with them. I might as well grab their take on Harkon too while we're at it.

 

 

I'm going to take a slightly different approach to this one compared to how I did Ida; rather than copy the data over, I'm going to tailor the mod's OEM plugin and just change the Form ID numbers of the NPC records so they override the PA versions. That way I won't have to screw around with all the head parts, jewelry, and other stuff and I can just forward the relevant parts of the PA records. I will still need to rename the external files to match the facegen naming conventions that the game will expect.

 

 

That's a nice feature. OK, we'll just take the ladies after all.

 

 

Both ladies already have custom skins so I don't believe I'm going to have to do any further tweaking of either their face textures or their WNAM records, but let's load them up quickly to make sure they look OK. One minor disappointment is that this mod doesn't ship with the custom outfits shown in the Nexus page, but that's fine. Their faces should still look good.

 

 

Just kidding, I screwed something up. This is going to require some further research, but now I have a headache and so I'm just going to deactivate this mod for now and then give it some more attention later. So I guess this is going to be a short entry for now - I'll try and get another one up soon continuing with this work.