Work Disproduct
Entry posted by AVS
1325 views
Christ, don't even ask me about the last month and a half. Work has been infuriating- I'm on my third trainee in as many weeks, and while this one at least seems capable of managing the weird hours, it's an open question if they'll be able to handle the toxic old bag of a coworker that they'll be dealing with part of their time. Since she's directly responsible for at least three of the people we've previously had in that position leaving, I'm not getting my hopes up.
Modding Skyrim is also frequently infuriating. I'm afraid I've been too furiated-out to put much effort into it lately.
Which isn't to say that I haven't done anything. My pace has been severely reduced, but I have gotten just about all the things I needed to finish before I was ready to release the -BAF- set done. Particularly the ground models, which are kind of a chore to do. I did cheat and reuse the ones from the hand/feet parts that are redundant with the existing body sets, but that still left dozens for the new mixed-and-matched parts, and the ones for the handful of accessories.
I've also got the Bodyslide files for forty pre-built bodies made up at this point. Or re-made, in many cases; adding those hip spheres for the fuller beast legs to the existing files turned out to be trickier than I'd anticipated, thanks to Outfit Studio just up and deleting a bunch of the mesh associations from some of the sliders when I saved the altered files. Hopefully I won't repeat that mistake should I add anything else to the base mesh, but in that case it would help if I knew what the heck went wrong in the first place...
At any rate, it all seems to be working, but I'm inclined to stop at the forty pre-built variants for now. I'm sure I missed one that someone might want, but hey, that's what all the build-your-own files are for. ?
I've also been applying various small fixes for things that I've found during casual play-through or while roughing out the distribution pack. Such as realizing that I was completely ignorant of texture compression when I noticed that the file sizes for my recolors of the sweater-knit suit were four or five times larger than the original. Fortunately that was fairly easy to fix, with no noticeable quality loss.
Textures are definitely one of the areas that I'm weakest at, though. I've run into quite a few things where I'd like to alter the textures on them so I could use them here, but pretty much everything I've attempted outside of simple recoloring has had... Mixed results. I recently found one thing in particular that I'd like to use in the Bikini Ascension set, having finally gotten around to poking at that months after installing it: The close-fitted Thalmor hood. If I could alter that to use Dwarven-style textures instead of the Vanilla Thalmor ones, it would be an ideal base layer for the helmets I've been building. Much more versatile and lore-ish (if slightly less kinky) than shaving everybody's heads, anyway. But I'm not even sure where to start, there.
I also poked around a bit with the most recent Devious Devices update, and found a nice bit of convergence with the Pony Play animations and my new pony-type beast legs. I'm not inclined to add a DD requirement directly to my stuff, but using the Pony Collar with this body style produces very acceptable results.
I do feel the hand pose is a little odd in this context, but it's not a deal-breaker. It does feel particularly strange when used with the pony arms, though.
But it does have a couple of slightly irritating issues, mainly related to my preference for using this kind of thing on followers. First is that the animation set doesn't seem to include the full sprinting animations, causing your followers to break character if they have to dash to catch up with you. Which feels particularly wrong for a horse theme, y'know? Second, and more annoying, is that they tend to lose the animations entirely after going through load doors and the like. You have to keep re-equipping the collar to get the animations to kick back in. DD has historically been pretty good about keeping NPCs bound to their alternate animations, so I'm not sure what's happening here. But it does keep this from being perfect.
I'm also a bit intrigued by the Pet Play animations in this update. It's not something I could do without adding that DD dependency, since they don't have a collar equip for it, but I do keep wondering how hard it would be to build a set of very short limbs...
2 Comments
Recommended Comments