So I've been slowly getting back into FO4 modding now that everything is up to date for the "Next Generation" release. There's even a new mod that finally addresses the FaceGen related memory leak that caused so many problems for me in the past! If you've been following the conversation in the 3D Pubic Hair thread, you already saw that I shared a cleaned up and improved version of the private pubic hair mod I used in Charley's Story, and hopefully in the days ahead I'll figure out how to get color matching to work on that (along with getting at least some rudimentary conditional hiding and inventory control going - but that's not a priority just yet).

My current project stemmed from the small customization job I did on Magnolia using an outfit by DX. I decided that rather than doing a simple outfit swap patch, I would use some of the skills I developed in my most recent round of Skyrim customization to do unique art in The Third Rail without messing with any other game stuff - so players' general replacers (or lack thereof) wouldn't be impacted outside that one location. This was a good learning experience for me and I developed much better familiarity with material swaps, BGSM files, and the way some textures in FO4 are shared between multiple art objects through the use of offsets.

I'm pretty happy with how the art swaps came out, and as you can see from how I have to use the flashlight on most of them to really see them in detail, under natural lighting they're subtle enough to blend in with the surroundings pretty well. I also learned about how to use the "cloud" filter in Gimp to apply random looking dirt to the posters, which makes them fit in better than just having them be totally clean. 

While I was working on this, I learned the basics of rigging up fully functional skill magazines, so if you get sticky fingers (no double-entendre intended) with the magazines on the table, the Sole Survivor will get some very small stat bonuses from them.

The last part of this mod, and what I'm working on now, is setting up a small fetch quest to track down and repair a ruined poster in the VIP room. I spent a bunch of time yesterday rigging up the dialogue, and it more or less worked when I tested it. I'm still learning some of the intricacies of the the Creation Kit's quest dialogue manager - not the most intuitive and user friendly system ever designed! However, the UI wasn't the real problem last night. The real problem is that The Creation Kit helpfully deleted all my material swap edits when it loaded my plugin. This was an issue in the Skyrim CK as well, and its a reason you have to do certain Texture Set edits (like for the 1st person models) in xEdit exclusively, but I was really annoyed to see just how pervasive it was with FO4. The CK wiped out essentially 100% of my art edits. 

So it looks like I'll be starting from scratch, doing the quest in a completely separate file and then merging it with the art edits file. That's going to increase the time to complete the mod, though fortunately all the aliases are going to be on vanilla characters and objects so I won't have to touch my art edits any further in the CK.

Still, it's super frustrating and it just underscores that the CK should ask before it "helpfully" fucks around with your work on loading a plugin. Surely this must be just as frustrating for the Bethesda folks using the CK internally, right?! 

I considered uploading a beta version with this blog, but it contains enough art assets in it that I don't really feel comfortable sharing it without a proper credits page connected to it. I will however keep sharing progress as it moves forward. I still need to ponder on whether or not I'm going to make a "less NSFW" version for the Nexus, but I'm leaning towards this particular mod being Loverslab-only, if for no other reason than I have my doubts about whether or not the Nexus would tolerate linking directly to the source artists' Patreons or other monetized platforms, and I think its important that I create an opportunity to drive traffic back to their sites since I sampled their artwork.

But I digress. Just wanted to give folks an update on what I'd been up to since I know I've been quiet for a while.