Bit of grab-bag, this post. First, the Dwarven Cyborg Collection is over 10,000 downloads! I thank you for your interest in my crazy time-waster.

 

Second, the Edhildil Variable set is fully built and in-game:

 

 

Didn't think of the missing hand thing when I was building this, but I'm willing to run with it.

 

 

Alternate Feet

 

 

The set made it into the CK with remarkably few errors. That part is so damn tedious that I usually fuck up a few things through sheer inattention, but all I really noticed in my check was a mis-pointed ground mesh. Just have to check over that again and then build the actual distribution pack, and this thing'll be good to go. 

 

Thirdly, with these variables all in the game, I've finally cracked a major milestone: I now have two pages in AddItemMenu. I haven't gotten around to actually counting how many things are in this, now. I don't know if I want to.

 

Fourth, I had a bit of free time last night and ended up messing around with the bodysuit idea some more. Upon further consideration, while the idea of using the CK's texture swap options is appealing, there's factors that make it a somewhat clunky solution outside of maybe some character-specific sets; the main one being, if we're going to be honest, the fact that that method requires even more CK entries to work. And going back to the mesh-based solution does offer the distinct advantage of being able to use cubemaps to get full reflective qualities and the like going, which is about the only way to get the scale mail from the old Bodysuits mod into any kind of working order. But when you do... It's a pretty good working order.

 

 

 

Could actually stand to tone the chroming down a bit, if anything. It doesn't distort nearly as badly in regular use as I was afraid it would, either, although some of the texture seams are a bit unfortunate. But it's definitely something workable.

 

Changing up the cubemap while reverting to the original body texture and subbing in the leather bodysuit normal map gives an interesting sort of 'encased' look.

 

 

One uses the soul gem cubemap, and could be passed off as a 'crystalized' body (although it would maybe need a more faceted normal map for that); the other is some generic shiny cubemap and could serve pretty well as-is for an ice-encased body. Maybe find a good Snow Elf skin texture, for some long-preserved early cyborgification 'volunteers'. 

 

Also gave a quick try on a latex suit, but...

 

 

It needs some work. The first dark cubemap I found came out waaaaaaaay too shiny for my tastes. It's also completely missing a normal map; trying to use the default body's 'model space' normals on a body that's been reset to work with cubemaps like this produces Weird Results, and I haven't dug up a flat normal map file yet. It would probably help if I could convert a body normal to an environment map normal, or if I had any idea how to make normal maps in the first place, but those are still pretty well in the 'wizardry' category as far as my modding level goes. Regardless, I kind of prefer the previous attempt using the regular body normal and Holzfrau's specular layer. The deep, semi-matte rubber look is much more the kind of thing I had in mind when I was first thinking about this. I'm pretty sure I can still achieve that with the mesh replacer method, though. Just have to not change a bunch of settings on that copy of the skin mesh. 

 

The main problem with this is that they are copies of the skin mesh. Not they'd get in the way of each other; it'd be pretty easy to drop these into the refs for the bodies, and making a zap to get rid of an entire mesh is the easiest thing to do in Outfit Studio. Just select the mesh, hit 'make new zap slider', boom. So it'd actually be very easy to have multiple, swappable 'skins' available.

 

No, the problem is that when you copy a mesh in OS, you don't copy it's god damn zaps. In fact, there's no evident way to copy a zap. You can edit the zaps by opening the .osp file in Notepad++, but that's because it looks like this...

 

 

...and the deepest you can go there is whether it's affecting a particular mesh or not (which can be pretty handy when you get a bit of leakage to clean up, actually). But the information for the actual masking the zap's based on, the 'Data' section of the zap's entry, is stored in the based shape's .osd file, and that looks like this:

 

 

Now what the fuck am I supposed to do with that?

 

So this method has the deeply irritating necessity of having to redo all the god damn limb zaps. Again. On the upside I can do them all at once for however many suits I end up putting in, by having them all selected when I make the zap, but on the downside that's all you'd be getting 'cause I really don't want to have to keep doing that part. So if you've got any requests or suggestions, here, get them in now.