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And now for something completely different


AVS

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Well, still in the Dwarven Cyborg theme. But kind of an inversion of the last release's ethos.

 

With the -BAF- set, my underlying theory was 'user choice'. Letting you use all the work I had done to that point to build whatever you wanted, and maximizing the variety of combinations of metal limbs to the humanoid body. It's also pretty much the last thing I had in mind to do with the body conversions, as-is. I've done pretty much all I can do, as far as those go.

 

But one thing I've often run into while working on this is that my ideas often run two or three steps ahead of the actual scut-work involved in building these things as distributable mods. I had the start of the -BAF- idea all the way back when I made the first variable limb set for the Bikini body, after all. And you got a surprise product of that impulse when I whipped up the preserved heads while poking around at an old idea related to the next thing I plan to do...

 

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A significant expansion of the full-robot body lineup. 

 

A version featuring the Gynoid limbs has been long overdue. The conversion of the original full Gynoid body kinda filled the slot, but I've always had the feeling that a skeletal robot torso built around the hip and shoulder caps would turn out pretty well, and just the barest attempt at tossing them onto the core from the Bikini set version is quite encouraging. 

 

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And of course there's all the new limb options, which prompted some revisiting of the Edhildil version.

 

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There's the new Edhildil legs, the beast limbs, and of course the centurion arms to use. And I'd like to do more chest options- the Sexy and Spice breastplates, of course, as well as a few entirely new things if I can get them working. (A very experimental version of one you might actually notice in the above images.) I am, as always, keen on variation.

 

I'm running into one annoying difficulty there, though; the Edhildil arms, despite working perfectly throughout the variable and -BAF- projects when built by themselves with Bodyslide, crash the fuck out of Skyrim and the CK if you build them out without the pelvis and then try to re-import them into a larger mesh to put in-game. Which kinda limits their usability, and brings me back to that point about user choice...

 

I'm not inclined to give a whole lot on this one. 

 

These robot bodies are fiddly as all hell. Lots and LOTS of little pieces go into those torsos, and a lot of them are very carefully fitted together. The energy tanks, for example, only just barely fit into the Remodeled breastplate. A sneeze either way and they clip right through. Using them with the other breastplates will require versions of the core with them re-positioned to fit in those breastplates. The connections to the existing limbs are even more problematic. I intend to edit them as little as possible, as they already work fine, but they're also weighted with the intention of being able to hide a lot of stuff inside a fleshy body. Having their ends laid bare like this means I have to find new ways to cover them. That wasn't as much of a problem for the Bikini version, whose upper torso I intend to use as the basis for the new versions, but only because I could get away with slapping in a big sphere with simplistic weighting. Matching up to the Gynoid arms is going to take a bit more nuance.

 

There's also the element of distortion to consider. Since these are fully robotic and don't have the excuse of having to keep up with varying user presets, I'd like to keep them as close to their original shapes as possible. One thing that dissatisfied me about the original Edhildil iteration of this concept was that building it to the UUNP base shape caused the gears on the legs to distort, since the source model I used was a UNPB version. But I did that because the spine I had finally managed to figure out how to get weighting on, allowing me to even do the concept in the first place, clipped right out the back of the pelvis when it was in any shape but the UUNP base, and trying to adjust it just caused the upper section of the spine to clip like crazy through the lower. Having the new upper torso meant I could ditch that second section, though, so now I can make those adjustments, and it looks great... Except that the malfunction mentioned with the arms above kept me from building the parts off the -BAF- base shape fork that I intended to use without adding in dupes of the new leg caps and their adaptors that didn't have the conformation settings so they don't end up distorted. I probably could've skipped that and built the pelvis for the bodies that'll use this setup to the UUNP shape with the original spine position, since I'll have to keep that around for the stuff using the Bikini pelvis which was built for that position, except that using the UNPB shape noticeably improves the design's ass overhang. So there's a lot going on just for this one butt.

 

All of which is a long way to explain why I'm inclined to do these as entirely pre-built, non- (or at most minimally-) customizeable bodies, in direct contrast to what I just did with the -BAF- set. 

 

It wouldn't be impossible to do a similar concept with these. I could do an extensive series of modular parts for the torso that could be swapped in and out using zaps in BodySlide, for instance. Something like that is basically how I intend to build these in the first place, after all, except as discrete .nif files for the modules merged together in Outfit Studio. The problem is that the parts count would get absurd, given how many are in just one version of the torso. The -BAF- files already make BS hang a bit when they open, I'm kinda scared to get much more ambitious than that. The distortion element means that the parts have to be built to their original presets, something that can't be done with the sourcing as-is unless I want to re-do basically the entire process that led to the -BAF- fork I'm using. Which would defeat a lot of purposes, there. And since these things are intended to be single-weight and slider-less regardless, as trying to do anything along those lines would wreck the fuck out of those carefully crafted torsos, so it seems like it'd be easier to just avoid any end-user use of BodySlide entirely for this batch. 

 

I'm also inclined to do this as yet another stand-alone .esp file. I am starting to worry myself about .esp bloat, but doing things this way make it easier to keep organized, and perhaps more importantly, would make this pack the closest thing to a CBBE-'compatible' body set I've got, given that they're all slider-less bodies with no skin textures to worry about. In fact, I intend to do this even more stand-alone than usual, with a number of redundant items tossed into it. Obviously it'll have to have de-weighted versions of the hands and feet for the sets that need them (although probably fewer of those, given that I intend to be pretty sparse on the mis-matched limbs here), but I also intend to throw in copies of things like the Preserved Heads, which were meant to go with this stuff anyway, and probably some of the Gynoid heads and accessories as well. Nothing from the Head Pack proper, though, since it's already CBBE-'compatible' in the same way that this'll be, and thus will work in perfect coordination with it.

 

As for when this will come out... I ain't making a single damn promise. Seriously, I just started on the actual mesh work this morning. I'll at least be able to skip all the tedium of making the BodySlide files (yet another reason not to do this as a -BAF-!) but getting all these little parts put together will take time and entirely too much trial and error. 

 

And with Skyrim you can always expect a lot of errors.

 

 

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