One of the more disorienting parts of having to put your life on pause for a couple of weeks is how it backs up all of your other plans and considerations. I'm finding myself without nearly enough time to catch up on all of the things I had been intending to do before everything happened, so I'm kinda cramming a lot of it in all at once. The problem with that is that it keeps leading me off on further tangents...

 

Of course, the upside of having an enforced pause is that it gives you time to think about things. I had a major 'a-DURRRRRR' moment when I realized I had been grabbing the Vanilla textures I'd been using in my Bikini experiments from the original texture .bsa instead of the hi-res pack .bsa files. That makes a world of difference where these outfits are concerned, as their textures are native 2k. It's no wonder I was having trouble with some of my ideas for retextures, since I was trying to use small samples taken from Skyrim's original sub-1k textures and blowing them up way too much to fit. The higher-res source you can get for this sort of thing the better, especially since the textures already get stretched a bit over areas like the butt just as a factor of how they were designed. The hi-res packs give me a deeper pool of decent Vanilla textures to draw from, and I also redid my template masking to more accurately cover the areas actually used on the mesh and figured out how to copy the mask selection over to other existing textures, which will let me reuse the textures for the straps and edging from the existing colorways instead of having to manually alter the template's color each time like I did on the first attempt. So I'm pretty well set to try out whatever with this, as soon as I get around to putting in the effort. It's just a matter of grabbing a texture and plugging it into the template.

 

 

Just this initial messing around with the setup has given me perfectly workable bikinis based on the stitched leather from the Bedroll model there:

 

 

A fur bikini using a standard clutter pelt's texture:

 

 

And my personal favorite...

 

The ELDERKINI

 

Really, the only functional limit here is how much I feel like doing. I figure I at least ought to get a few more leathers and furs, and maybe some of the hold banners as well. And of course I still have to re-do the Dwarven stuff I made with the low-res textures on the first attempt. And also find a source for un-tattered versions of those Dwarven banners; some digging on Nexus turned up 'clean' versions of pretty much everything except those, although it did also find some other custom textures here and there that might be handy for this. This whole thing could easily balloon out to be a much larger mod than I expected it to be.

 

But I haven't put much further work into it yet, because I got sidetracked from this sidetrack. Y'see, I went and decided I needed yet another new character. I've had some quest mods sitting around that none of my current builds were suited for, not being stealth types, and decided to throw two stones at one bird and also use her as a bikini inspector. And then another stone by making her specifically a futa bikini inspector. I haven't played as a futa character since before I started work on the DCC, in no small part because they don't have much in the way of dedicated clothes to wear. Which I'm attempting to redress with the bulgy versions of these bikini bottoms, so getting some dedicated playtesting on them is appealing. And it also finally lets me properly try out Holzfrau's SoS Grower Extended mod, to great effect:

 

 

Having the bits deflate normally like that instead of flopping around like a long wet noodle vastly improves the whole SoS look, IMO. Shoulda worked like this right from the start.

 

Of course I can't make a character these days and not have her be a cyborg, but I wanted a relatively toned-down one here. So I just lopped her arms off. 

 

 

I should probably stop for a moment and digress on the rest of this outfit. Since this character was going to be wandering around in a bikini regardless, I figured I should go full 'smutty rouge' with her look, and an important part of that was properly framing the nether bits. Some kind of garter and stocking seemed like the best choice, but I didn't really have any handy. The 'Wet Look' outfit from this set showcased on SkyTM a few weeks ago had caught my eye,  but I had to pass it up since I can't download from Baidu anymore. (It keeps saying it has to install a client, which, yeah, no.) Searching around turned up a couple of kinda-sorta-maybes for an alternate take on the concept (the 'Merry Widow' from here is on that shortlist), but nothing else I liked quite as much. So I dug around more in Google and found an alternate source for the Wet Look set. 

 

But there were two problems with it. The first was that despite seeing mentions of a UUNP version, the only one I could find an actual download of was the UNPB. Which is basically what I use for a preset, but I still needed an overlay piece like this to be UUNP-HDT based to keep the weighting consistent and non-clippy and to allow for SLIF morphing. So I had to do a conversion myself, which kinda felt like old-home week in a way. The first stuff I used Outfit Studio for was chopping up and refitting outfits to customize them for my use like this. Compared to doing a full UUNP conversion where you have to check for fit against dozens of sliders and presets, a quick re-weighting and conversion cleaned up for the same basic body type you started with is a walk in the park. It took me basically no time to get this done, and that includes a couple rounds of fixes for animation clipping and smoothing down the shins of the stockings so they'd work right with my favorite boots. Compatibility with which was part of the second problem with the original:

 

 

I know why these outfits get built like that, but man does it make them a pain for people like me who like to mix and match stuff. But since I was in there changing shit anyway...

 

 

The end result looks great, but it does sadly conflict a bit with yet another one of my stones, which was trying out amply's Render Tattoos. The main thing I wanted to use from that was the big ol' Imperial symbol on the back, and that looks great even if the outfit covers some parts of it:

 

 

...but the leg tats sadly just don't quite work with stockings, thanks to Skyrim's stupid transparency limits causing them to flicker in and out where the netting covers them.

 

 

Getting something on the front was a bit difficult as well, since there doesn't seem to be any chest tats that fit cleanly into the regions not covered by the bikini or collar, and only a few pelvic tats that don't get largely covered by the top of the schlong mesh.

 

 

Despite that, with everything put together (and switching over to a dark red recolor of the leather bikini texture) the end result is nicely balanced and delightfully smutty. 

 

 

But you can't help but feel that running around in a blizzard dressed like that would be a bit chilly. She could really use a jacket. Unfortunately most of the handful of regular jackets floating around out there don't really work with the cyborg arms, with random bits clipping through here and there. I went digging around for bulkier alternatives, and found a number that were... interesting... but not quite what I was going for:

 

 

...until I stumbled back over something that's been in my 'hey I should try this out' pile so long that I'd kinda forgotten about it, the FurArmorSet (specifically, Jerok's UUNP conversion of it). 

 

 

The coats in this are overlays using slot 46, which I don't think I've used anywhere in either the main DCC sets or the extras, so they're compatible with pretty much all of my stuff right out of the box. They're also bulky enough to wear over at least the Gynoid arms without noticable clipping. That said, the full coat wasn't quite the look I wanted, here.

 

Nor was the small shawl, although it was closer.

 

 

The fur poncho, on the other hand...

 

 

Oh. Oh my.

 

 

This thing is perfect. It lets the character at least look like they're trying to stay warm, but still leaves you with an interesting third-person view. And it exposes just enough of the chest to keep Immersive First Person View interesting as well:

 

 

The only particular downside is that it clips through quivers a bit, but I think I'm willing to put up with that. Or I could just move them down to the butt, I guess. Personally I like the default position better, though. And I wouldn't want to occlude that kissmark...

 

 

So, yeah. I fully intend on doing more work on the bikinis, and to get back to work on the robot bodies, along with all the other non-Skyrim stuff I've been backed up on. But you'll excuse me if I take a few days to smut up the place a bit...