Like I mentioned last time, I don't play High Elves very often. I think I've made one, maybe two other Altmer characters out of the two dozen or so I've played over the years. But I made this one both to do something different and with the idea of making someone suited to wearing the Aster... And realized that I completely failed to take the Altmer's wildly divergent ear position into account when I was putting the Aster together.

 

 

Obviously that wasn't acceptable. At first I just tried to change the character's ears around with the Racemenu sliders to see if I could mitigate it, but there doesn't seem to be any way to use those to shrink down elf ears that looks at all good. And with the way they shrink I couldn't get the tips to stop clipping through until I lowered them two full points, which... looked like this:

 

 

That got things functional, I guess, especially when paired with a hairstyle that completely covered them. But...

 

 

I hate these guys, but she ain't wrong. So clearly I had to find a more in-depth solution.

 

Bethesda, in all their wisdom, gave the Mer races different ear positions from each other. It's not something that's too horribly noticeable while you're playing, but it makes fitment A Pain. Dunmer and Bosmer ears are fairly close to each other, but the Altmer ears are significantly more, well... erect than the others, while the tips of the Orc ears are a good two or three inches lower than those. The best way to really display that is to pull copies of some head models and pile them all together, creating this abomination...

 

 

Providing coverage for that entire range without any bits clipping out is damn near impossible. I managed to find a 'good enough' position when I first built the Elvish version of the Ripper Circlet that inspired me to build the Aster, but that only really worked because it also had the Ripper's 'hair' bits to hide stuff in. And even that only really fit the three main Mer, as I completely forgot to include an Orc head in the set I was building it on. And since I carried the earpieces from there right over to the Aster, and then ended up making some adjustments with only a Dunmer head to go by... I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised by this. 

 

Fortunately, fixing it was actually pretty straight-forward. I just had to expand on the race-specific submesh feature I was already using to get the Elvish Ripper and stubble hair meshes working, and reposition the Aster's earpiece parts build race-specific variants for each damn ear type and hopefully eliminate the clipping once and for all. Easy! ...ish. Took quite a bit of fussing around with the above abomination as a reference, but I think I've got a pile of variants that'll work fine on any standard head. Although I had to compromise a bit on the look with some of them.

 

 

I left the original version in as the human-use model, since they don't have these problems to worry about. The Bosmer and Dunmer versions were moved around a bit to clear up some minor existing clipping, but are pretty much on the same profile. The Altmer and Orc versions took much more serious tweaks, though, taking them well out of the original alignment. Don't have an Orcish character handy to check how that version looks in-game, yet, but the repositioning of the back lights definitely gives the Altmer version a bit of a different look from what I've been used to.

 

 

It's not too bad, though, and more importantly it fits without having to fuck around with the ears.

 

 

And it really, really suits her. This whole method does make it one of the most complicated armor entries I've worked on, though...

 

 

Having done all this, I decided I might as well go back and do the same thing for the Ripper circlet.

 

 

Well, sort of. I didn't really feel like doing a patch for the whole Gynoid pack just for this, so it's not going to be in there, at least for now. I've also been wanting to do a human-use version of the Elvish variant, since I honestly think it works a bit better. So I tossed copies of it and the ear variants into the Extras pack alongside the Aster, with the stubble meshes included in the same way. 

 

 

This will, of course, let you use both types on different characters at the same time. 

 

(New ear type/Old ear type)

 

The Gilded helmet is still a bit of a lost cause as far as the ears go, unfortunately, but I did note again that the Altmer ear position only produces some very slight clipping at the tip that pretty much gets lost in the detailing, which could be useful in the future.

 

 

I'm also picking back up on getting the -BAF- prebuilds put together. It's mainly a problem of narrowing down all the options I went and gave myself.

 

 

I did stumble upon one other thing that needed fixed while I was messing around with these two, relating to the invisible weapons. To get the things to show up in AIM you need to have them pointed at a ground mesh of some kind. It didn't seem to particularly matter what, so I just tossed in a copy of the Dwarven gear clutter. As far as I could tell while I was testing those with the player character that worked fine, but upon giving the invisible sword to the one in the beast limbs, there, she got a copy of the gear mesh sliding along the ground at her feet. 

 

 

I swear to christ, Bethesda.

 

Fortunately using the same zeroed-alpha method I used to make the weapons got rid of it, but that does mean that you won't have anything to see if you drop one of these out of your inventory. Which is a bit annoying, but the preferable option. 

 

 

And I did enough running around with the new character to get some decent kill-cam shots.

 

 

I quite like how this layout works, with the Nightshade bodysuit and the short Bikini-style legs. So It's already one of the prebuilds, as the Scout set, along with the chain mail and horse legs setup from my previous character as the Cavalier. I'm probably not going to hew too closely to the military unit theme- that Dwemmy limbs and scale mail combo above is the Brass Beast, for instance- but it does give me a place to start from.