Today has been very productive. 

 

Got the new Edhildil legs pretty much finalized. Will probably still have to do some touch-ups on the legs caps; even after increasing their diameter a bit there's still some skin breakthrough on some of the thicker thigh settings, but I didn't want to take the time just now to check and adjust every slider. I also adjusted the texture settings, disabling the cubemapped reflections so the new parts will match the look of the existing Edhildil set. 

 

 

Even with that slight increase these leg caps are still probably the most outfit-friendly cyborg parts I've got. Unlike pretty much every other leg, there's not much at all that they'll clip through.

 

 

(And checking these outfits for fit let me know that a few of the modified Vanilla outfits that I'd adapted did not, in fact, use the Vanilla texture paths as I'd assumed, as my not having re-installed all my source mods on this new computer left them all purple'd. I'll get a fix out for that when I get the next update put together.)

 

I mentioned earlier that I wanted to find other things to do with these new leg caps. Another thing that I've had on my to-do list is finding some way to use elements from some of the models in the Dwemer Mechanicals set, particularly the Dwarven Dog parts. My big hang-up there was that I just couldn't see a clean way to hook those parts up to the existing cyborg leg sets. But then I had to separate off these new caps to get the legs to work nicely, and they just happen to be nothing but a clean way to connect leg parts. I tossed the Dwemmy mesh into one of the Edhildil work files to see how things would look, and I liked what I saw. Banged out the initial version in the post below in about a half hour.

 

Getting things  properly positioned proved a bit tricky, however. I ended up having to split some of the parts off into separate meshes just so I could change their angles and sizes independently. I have kind of mixed feelings about that, and the split I did on the new Edhildil legs; it's the most effective way to achieve my ends, but I have no idea how to re-merge meshes, and am painfully aware that several of the things I've built for this project have entirely too many sub-meshes. But on the other hand, having the meshes separated makes it very easy to do things like have the thighs be morphable while leaving the lower legs undistorted, and doing the weightpainting is a snap.

 

 

And in the course of some further tweaks I split the feet off as well, which let me paint them to the foot bones and give them a bit of motion, although it's really hard to get that across in a still photo even without the floating feet getting in the way.

 

 

Next project: Getting some 'blank' boot meshes in-game so I can take decent pics of these things.

 

Of course, having the foot mesh separated means that those toes are removable, which raises the obvious question: Is there any reason that this has to be a dog's leg? 

 

I say thee neigh.

 

(I've been waiting all morning to drop that one)

 

Horse legs have been on my 'wouldn't it be nice if' pile for a long, long time, but I hadn't really found a good way to do them. Rediscovering the Dwarven horse model when I went trawling around for parts raised some hopes, but the design of its legs was... not really what I was going for. The hooves had some potential, though, and I recently got around to digging them out of the mesh. Wasn't at all sure how I'd build legs to go with them, but once I got the Dwemmy legs converted I realized I didn't have to. They pop into the place of the claws quite nicely. 

 

Only downside is that they don't have the NiOverride height increase that I had originally envisioned. Had thought about doing one for the dog legs as well, but decided that the lower legs couldn't really be sized up as much as they'd need to be and still look decent. Had to stretch them out a tiny bit more than I wanted to just to reach the base height, actually. But the end result is just fine.

 

 

The hooves are again weighted to the foot bones, so they'll move around a bit in motion, as I managed to capture at the end of this jump sequence:

 

 

And I'll be honest, seeing those hooves fly up as you're running just makes me smile.

 

 

As for how I'm going to integrate these into the collection, don't worry. I've got plans.