Overtime pay is nice, but it's not like I've got enough hours in a week to do all the things I want to do as it is...

 

I think I've got the final design for the hip adaptors down. Ended up having to do a second version for the Gynoid hips like I was afraid I would. Poking around at things I found that my original plan for these, with the large spheres sunk down into the Edhildil leg caps, left them in a position that could move without clipping through the butt. But the whole reason I had moved away from that and added in the spacers was that sunken spheres look terrible when used with the Centurion pelvis. Doing both was the only real solution, and annoyed as I am at the parts creep I think the end result is worth it. 

 

 

Everything is Bodymorph-enabled, so the spheres will balloon in and out properly with the hip and butt sliders. This can get them a fair bit off from true spheres, but not so much that they really look bad. The Gynoid versions don't fill into the hip caps quite as well at the front as they did when the sphere was higher, but I figure that's an acceptable trade-off for fixing the clipping. With that fixed, they look quite nice in motion.

 

 

The Edhildil version still has that overhang issue, but I think I can put up with it. Not really much I can do about it without adding in a second pelvis piece, anyway.

 

 

There is one issue with the leg caps that I wasted a lot of time on finding no real solution for, though. It's not a super-noticeable one, but if you happen to look closely at the inside of the legs when a body using those is in a crouching-type pose, you'll find that there's areas where the caps get kinda bent upwards a bit. 

 

 

This is just kind of an oddity with the original flesh connection, but when used with the hip pieces it results in them clipping through some. 

 

 

When I went digging around to find out what was happening, I found something odd. I don't usually do much to edit the weight painting on the original body parts I've been using for this project. I figure the creators are bound to know a hell of a lot more about weight painting than I do, so outside of stuff like copying in HDT bones I've pretty much left the original weights alone, especially on the limbs. That said, the weighting on most of those limbs is actually pretty simple; since these are metal parts that aren't supposed to have a lot of flex, you can often get away with having them just painted solid to one bone. My new hip pieces are entirely on the thigh bones, for instance, and the new forearms I've done are painted solid to all the forearm bones, same as the blade arms in the Bikini set. The new Edhildil upper legs are mostly on the thigh bones, but there's also an odd scattering of lightly-painted areas connected to the pelvis bone. I figured, hey, the Bikini leg caps get away with just being on the thigh bones, do these caps really need this pelvis weighting?

 

Yes. Yes, they do. 

 

 

The thing is, the Bikini caps are much lower on the legs than these. These are high enough that they're on areas of the skin that are affected by the pelvis weighting, particularly in crouching poses. So if you get rid of that weighting on the thigh caps they'll stay nice and straight and suddenly not be able to hang on to the cut lines on the skin as that gets distorted by movement anymore.  Particularly at the inner thigh, where the cut on the skin zap for the caps suddenly resulted in a huge hole, and trying to fix it by re-doing the zap to leave a flap of extra skin just barely inside the limited space of the cap just resulted in that flap clipping through as it got pulled around by the pelvis bone, thusly. 

 

Like I said, the original creators clearly know a lot more about weight painting than I do.

 

So that whole exercise got abandoned, and I'm just going to have to live with the new parts clipping through each other a bit. I will probably pull that pelvis weighting when I get around to making full-robot bodies using these, though. They won't have any stupid skin weighting to worry about, after all.

 

Putting that aside, the new hip pieces are now fully integrated into the base model and existing work on the Bodyslide files for the BAF set. I've got a new prebuild set up featuring just them, the Satyroi, and have started integrating them as variants on some of the existing beast leg sets.

 

 

Also made a fix to the Centurion arms while I was in there. When I was originally positioning them I was only allowing for how they'd look in first-person with the unarmed pose, since I didn't have the invisible weapons all built at that time. When I got those built, I found that I'd gotten the arms too far inwards and that the massive axe and hammer freely clipped into each other in the first-person dual wielding pose. Pulled them out to be more in-line with the blade arms, as well as a bit offset vertically, and that got the clipping down to just the occasional bit on the spearheads as they move around. 

 

 

This will hopefully leave me with everything done for the core body, unless I get any more bright ideas. Pretty much done with the outfit stuff for the Extras pack, too, aside from still not having the slightest idea why my conversion of the new Edhildil set's bikini top keeps crashing the game. So It's pretty much just that and deciding what I want to put in for the prebuilds. And the problem with those is that there's just so many damn things I could do...