All right, so I'm just about ready to finally, actually release this bloody update. There's a few more things that I would've liked to tuck into it, but between work stress and a lack of free time/days off and fucking thunderstorms and power failures, I'm just gonna have to tuck a lot of it back onto the 'finish later' pile (and it is getting to be quite a pile) and go with what I've got done. 

 

But there was one thing that I scraped out of that pile that turned out better than I expected, so I tossed it in as a bit of a bonus: the Preserved Head:

 

 

And not just any old head. Your head. 

 

 

The entire apparatus functions as a helmet, replacing the hair mesh in slot 31 and completely encasing your character's head. The effect isn't perfect; the character's neck still exists under there as there's no functional way to vanish it and I couldn't find a workable way to obscure it, so the head's not quite as 'free-floating' as I might've liked. and as a result of that, when used with a regular humanoid body it kiiiiiiiiinda looks like a space helmet. Not that that's entirely a bad thing.

 

But what this is really intended for is use with the robot bodies.

 

 

Making this was... Interesting. First started on the idea way back at the end of last year, as the intended counterpart of the Preserved Brain, but the results were... Iffy.

 

 

 

First off, the barrel piece I've been using elsewhere just wasn't transparent enough for the gimmick to really work, while the shape was unflattering and the hoops just got in the way. So it needed to be replaced with something else, and the bug jar was the obvious candidate. But simply converting it to a skinned mesh didn't work. Very... crashy. Had to do that .nif > .obj > .nif thing again, reapply all the textures... and then figure out how to make it transparent again, since trying to get the original method working wasn't bearing fruit. Ended up with some decent results from playing around with the alpha settings, not unlike how I made the invisible weapons. It might actually be a little too transparent, as it can be a bit insubstantial under some lighting, and it's got a distinct tint thanks to it still being pointed at the flat black texture the original jar for whatever reason uses, but it's good enough to be getting on with.

 

 

Second, while my solution for covering the neck, an elaborate arrangement of cables closely sleeved to it, did function well enough at that single job it was kinda terrible otherwise. Didn't really mesh with the jar bottom as cleanly as I would've liked, and thanks to combination of the poly limitations of the cable meshes and being laid out to specifically cover the neck seams on the human bodies, ended up clipping like frickin' crazy through the neck plate for the robot models, which I had completely neglected to check it against. So it got a complete and vastly simplified rebuild.

 

 

The neck covering is cut down to just a single, hugely enlarged chunk of cable weighted to and amply enclosing the neck mesh, The neck seam is covered by a simple copy of the base plate from the robot models, set up so that it connects onto their necks without looking silly and weighted to the spine so that it remains static. Much more effective and much, much cleaner than the prior attempt. The sleeve does clip through the base of the jar a fair bit with head motion, unfortunately, but I don't think there's really much way to avoid that. Certainly not without a much more high-poly cable mesh, anyway. I'm honestly amazed it works as well as it does, considering that chunk I'm using is only one triangle long. 

 

 

The jar is sized to provide ample space for all but the most absurdly-chinned heads. Some of the leftover cables from the first neck were used to make little 'supply feeds' for the head, while the main spine and eye plate implants from the original design were carried over and improved upon a bit. The eye plate is unfortunately a bit of a requirement, thanks to Skyrim's 'one transparency at a time' limitation rendering the eye meshes invisible under the glass, but it's moved out some from the original Gynoid version so it should hopefully have an easier time clearing brows and noses. And carrying those over let me maintain something I was keen on incorporating during my first crack at this: Gag support!

 

 

The lock does tend to clip through the bottom a bit, but eh, close enough.

 

This is absolutely the last new thing I'm gonna do before the update, promise. Well, this and a rework of the Shock Trooper's limb layout, but that took hardly any time at all. And this probably wouldn't have been in here, except I started poking at the idea again while thinking about future plans for robot bodies using the new limbs and ended up rebuilding pretty much the whole thing when I should've been sleeping.

 

Only to lose it all when Outfit Studio up and crashed the moment I got something I liked put together and realized I hadn't bothered to save it off at any point prior to that.

 

But I knew what I wanted then, so it didn't take all that long to re-redo. Figured I might as well throw it in, then, since it seemed kind of obnoxious to start teasing even further future updates when I haven't even gotten this one out yet.

 

...Wait, I guess I'm kinda doing that anyway by mentioning those further robot bodies, aren't I?

 

Also, working on this got me thinking again about my even older inverse of the concept which also never went anywhere, the equippable detached head models. Still have no idea how to fix the missing tintmasks and weird eyelash rendering on the ground models, but it might be worth finding some workarounds. Or maybe combining the two ideas, preserving a specific head in a jar. Could probably do something to trim off the neck and leave it properly free-floating like that, too. Hm...