I feel that with the new pelvises built I've gotten the broad strokes for this project basically set, so lately I've mostly been polishing up the details. One of which concerned the Gynoid arms. I mentioned way back when I first built them that they lacked something really visually connecting them to the core body; having the shoulder cap assembly moving around with the clavicle bone looked good, but it felt a bit off to have something like that floating around without anything to hook it to the body. So I decided to make use of the 'solid weighting' I used for the neck and spine rings to build it a hook. First I took some additional rings and formed them into a sort of 'socket' for the shoulder spheres...

 

 

...and then I balanced the clavicle and spine2 weights over them so that they accordion out with the shoulder's motion.

 

 

This gives me that visual hook I wanted, and adds more depth to the joint's motion in general.

 

 

These do lean even harder into the whole 'floating parts' thing, but honestly doing it like this is a lot easier than trying to get any kind of solid mesh to work properly, especially in an area that needs as much flexibility as the shoulders. I also ended up modifying how the Gynoid arm itself was built a bit as a result of that same flexibility issue. This was something I was going to have to do regardless- it's original weighting, which I've mostly kept intact, was designed with the assumption that it would always have the shoulder spheres half-buried in the shoulder cap, which itself would be flexing along with the normal body weighting. Changing the caps to solid parts caused the shoulder spheres to frequently come loose from them as the bones pulled them in various directions, and having them exposed showed that the way those bones were painted to the mesh could do some weird things in certain poses. One of the worst offenders being the right-handed constant casting pose.

 

 

Fixing that was a pain. In the end I had to separate the spheres from the rest of the arm so I could paint them solid to get them pegged more firmly to the clavicle bone and more or less stay in place on the caps while still moving along with the rest of the arm, and then had to modify the weights at the ends of the arms to keep them pegged to the spheres while minimizing distortion at the point of connection. Took a couple days and a couple dozen test meshes to get the whole thing working right, but I think I've got something that I'm reasonably happy with now. 

 

I had also considered doing a similar accordion ring setup for the Dwarven Devious arms, but among other issues ran into some particular oddness with this same casting pose. There seems to just be something a bit off about how the arm bones in that pose work- I had both sides painted to the spine and the upper arm bones the DD shoulder spheres are set to, and while the left arm moved just fine, the right arm did... this.

 

 

It already wasn't really appealing to me, but that was a dealbreaker. But I did have to do something to modify it from my earlier version, as the Centurion globe meshes I'd set up as 'emitters' there were doing very strange and backwards things in certain lighting. So I just replaced them with smushed-down copies of the sphere model I used for the spine connector. ::shrug::

 

 

It works, whatever.

 

I also wanted to fill out the selection of chests a bit more. The initial set of chest armors were all built on the UUNP base shape, but with how this stuff works I could basically build the chest parts out of anything, so long as they don't infringe on the motion of the joints too much. Variants for the Spice armor taken from the 0 and 1 meshes for the original UNP version have already popped up unheralded in past entries, and I did a version with the original version of the Sexy breastplate as well, although that one required changing the energy storage to a sort of monoboob model.

 

 

I can also make more variants by generating versions of the breastplates using various Bodyslide presets, like these Spice alternates using the UNP Petite and Venus Body settings.

 

 

The limiter on these is that the results of a lot of the presets on the armor meshes don't really look that great. The Spice armor is the most flexible one, but I feel that I've already got enough types for it. The Sexy and Remodeled armors distort a lot more, especially at the lower end of the scale. I've got a couple more maybes that I haven't tried out in-game yet, and I haven't done much with the manual adjustment of the sliders to see if I can get some decent shapes like that, so I may end up wedging a few more variants in. 

 

I have had some variants that I've had to scrap, at least for the moment. There's an earlier, skimpier version of the Remodeled breastplate that I tried to do something with, for one, but had to give up on. The neck opening's too small for the base of the replacement heads, and the mesh is too low-poly to gracefully accept modification. And I had a set of variants for the internal parts that I built before I started work on the new pelvic units, which turned out to not actually fit on the new pelvic units without extensive modification, so those are on the back burner. The constraints of those new spines as well as issues with the shoulder joints also banjaxed my early idea of doing something with the full torso armor pieces from the Gilded assets. The waists are too narrow and the shoulders far, far too wide to really work with how everything else is built. Which is a shame, as that's one of the only places I've ever seen the alternate Vanilla female Dwarven armor design used, but I couldn't figure out a way to use it here. 

 

I did kinda half-ass something with the male armor mesh, though.

 

 

It's a bit on the awkward side, but I kinda like it anyway. 

 

The legs are pretty much all set up as well. I finally found a design for the Gynoid pelvis to Bikini legs adaptor that I liked, and threw one together for the Edhildil pelvis as well.

 

 

The NiOverride settings for the tall Bikini legs are pinned to their meshes, so they effectively work like regular high heel boots here. I also tossed in copies of the sunken-height tokens from the -BAF- set, set to the foot slot and buried in the thigh caps, along with the null-mesh hand parts to allow for the 'disassembled' look. 

 

 

One thing I noticed while doing my earlier testing, though, was that the lines of the legs when I equipped the full Edhildil leg units while still wearing my character's usual high heeled boots were actually pretty good. The heels paired better with the shape of the thighs than the big ol' clunky foot parts it's been using. So I figured I'd see if I could build some high heels for those legs.

 

And then I figured that while I was at it, I should try to build them to be compatible with the Gynoid legs as well.

 

It worked out pretty well. I sourced the heel meshes from the Nova Catsuit boots, which gave me regular and platform variants, tossed in a cylinder mesh for the ankle, and bulked the the calves out with some of my ring meshes.

 

 

Problem was that while the meshes are designed to also fit on the Edhildil legs, the Gynoid-friendly color settings... Don't. 

 

 

So there's also going to be some darkened variants thrown in to work with the full Edhildil set. Which kinda defeats the purpose of making the mesh work on both leg sets, but fuckit.

 

 

I've also (also also) finished up my re-evaluation of the faces. I ended up ditching about half of my initial set of thirty-something... and then added enough new faces from my second go-through of the SeXtreme models to push the number up to fifty. And that's just the base faces, not inclusive of the Dwarven and stone variants, which I finally finished building yesterday. I mainly trimmed out low-poly meshes and cut some of the 'characters' that didn't have a lot of variant expressions that I wanted to use, although I did end up with a couple single-uses because they had an expression that I particularly liked. Could probably trim a few more out, but screw it, at least it's a round number. 

 

 

Don't have a lot of screenshots yet, though, as I haven't got anything past the initial skin versions for them in-game. In part because I ran into a reoccurrence of an issue. 

 

 

I'd found earlier that the emissive settings these meshes are initially set to tends to get kinda glowy in low lighting, and toned it down on the earlier versions to where it was less of an issue, but turns out it was just less of an issue for the relatively bright nights on the island I've been testing these in. Went for a bit of a run after getting the first batch of the new faces into the game and randomly decided to go through some of Skyrim Underground's dungeons, and found that in the dark-dark areas it likes to throw at you the faces were once again phosphorescent. So I went back through all of them and axed the emissive entirely.

 

 

Still have to see how they look in sunlight, but this change does improve things in low light a lot. The shadowy masks with bright, glowing eyes are quite striking, and the glow effect on the eyes comes off much more strongly.

 

 

So, as far as progress goes on this, I'd say I'm somewhere around 70%. I've got pretty much all the limbs done, the pelvises done outside of maybe some mild tweaking. The chests might get a few more variants, but nothing complicated. Still got to do some cleanup on the headgear so it works better with these 'open' heads, and get the rest of the faces and a few other things in-game for testing. And then do that testing and hope that I don't run into any more 'dammit' moments. But the bulk of it is going to be building the ground models. Which will be time-consuming, but hopefully I can build off what I learned in making ground models for the Dwarven Devious armor and end up with something particularly nice, as having a pile of these parts just laying around in a dungeon somewhere particularly appeals to me.