Hey, I'm still alive. Had a bit of Skyrim burnout lately and had been occupying myself with other things, but then a quick check for new stuff on Nexus netted me Baddog's Dragonborn Armor set. Which is a very nice piece of work in and of itself, but my eye was particularly drawn to one of the Nordic Carved Armor variants. Riveted to it, actually. 

 

You see, I've had an idea in the back of my mind ever since I first started working on the fully-robotic bodies with that initial version based on the Edhildil set, months and months ago. It occurred to me that if things were put together properly, it'd be entirely possible to use the same general concept to make more aggressively cyborg'd body parts, in the form of 90% robotic parts with some fleshy bits integrated into them. And the obvious place to start there would be to weld some breasts onto a robot chest. It'd fit nicely with the SGO and SLIF-fueled breast expansion stuff I'd been playing around with before getting onto this whole Dwarven kick, and it'd mesh with my general headcanon of the Dwarves 'salvaging' various useful parts from their victims. 

 

The problem was that I didn't have any decent chest parts to use as a base. I needed something that would let me isolate the breasts while masking the inevitably jagged edges where the skin is cut, and that would provide a solid structure for the rest of the upper torso, but I simply couldn't find anything that quite worked. So I put the whole idea on the back burner and continued to keep an eye out for something that fit those requirements, and when I saw that Nordic armor piece I realized it was exactly what I needed. I got Baddog's permission to use the mesh, and banged myself out a prototype.

 

 

This actually didn't take as much work as I was afraid it would. Took a while to remove the pauldrons and some other bits, and the original collar turned out to be nigh-impossible to cut cleanly so it's just kinda hammered down under the neck mount, but the basic structure was ideally suited to my purposes. All I really had to add were the plates to fill in the back of the breast openings. 

 

 

In fact, it turned out to be even more ideal than I expected it to be. I was figuring that I'd have to build this like I did the rest of the robot parts, with a single-sized mesh and no weighting/morph support, but it turns out that the arm openings fit around my standard torso core's shoulder plates pretty much perfectly regardless of the morphing. Only thing I had to change was to swap out the back plate for one that wasn't domed. So as it is right now, this thing is entirely Bodyslide-compatible.

 

 

This is pretty handy, but it also raises some questions for me in terms of how exactly I want to put this together. Having it be a Bodyslide part means that it'll be shaped to the user's preferred presets, but it also means that it'll be pegged to the character's original weight, which knocks a bit of a hole in the 'swapped out parts' aspect. I'm somewhat inclined to include the Bodyslide-capable mesh as a 'variable' version alongside pre-built versions using some of the more entertaining chest shapes (I'm particularly amused by the MCBM preset up there), but that introduces more logistical issues as far as the breast covers go. One very handy part about this working well with Bodyslide is that it means I can just reuse my existing nipple cap pieces, but a pre-shaped version would need its own versions of those. Conversely, the pre-shaped versions would actually make it easier to implement something else that I've had back-burnered and that would work nicely with this concept, which is some kind of milking machine. The big hang-up with that is the fact that Bodyslide and small fiddly bits like tubes do not work together well, so having these be a set size and shape simplifies that problem. But contra-conversely, the fixed versions would lose SLIF support, which would be a bit of a bummer.

 

 

There's also the questions of textures. My initial thought was to ditch the Nordic normal mask on the armor itself, as the areas that were under the pauldrons are a bit messy and it has the carved bits at the back of the neck still, but all that doesn't really look that bad in-game compared to the loss of the rest of the detailing so I'm inclined to hold onto it. The breast textures, however, provide more to consider. They're currently set to the default skin paths, which is fine, but does kinda limit this to UUNP users until/unless I whip up a CBBE version- which actually wouldn't be that hard to do, anyway, and might be a good idea considering that the weighting's a bit different. But it'd also be entirely possible to re-path them to an independent skin texture, which I'm kinda tempted to do just because I want to see if I can find one that matches with the faces better. I'm also curious to see how such a setup would be affected by things like tintmasks and beast races, and how far I can push that whole 'swapped-out parts' idea within Skyrim's texture structure, but that's going to take more experimentation. 

 

 

But again, the basic structure of this is sound. In-game and in motion, it works pretty much the way I've wanted this concept to work since I first had the idea for it.

 

 

The obvious companion part to this, however, is a bit more of a problem. I've whipped one up, but it's even more of a prototype than the chest is.

 

 

The theory behind this is actually simpler. Isolate the pelvis, slap it between some robot bits, done. The Gynoid hip caps provided half of the work, so all it really needed was something cutting it off at the waist. Actually doing that was a bit of a pain, as there's no real clean cut line on the mesh and it ended up having to be raised fairly high to clear the buttocks, but it's a functional look. 

 

It's also going to be a real fucking pain to weight. Clearing the buttocks put it right in the middle of the most flexible part of the body, so it's pretty much stuck ending up with some degree of distortion in the waist plate unless I can find a way to have it weighted solid without the flesh it's connected to tearing out during motion.

 

 

It does, however, bypass some of the chest's problems, which is itself a problem. You see, it basically can't be Bodyslide-compliant, for a couple of major reasons. The first is that pretty much all of the UNP Family presets shove the stomach and hips forward of the UUNP base shape's position, which completely wrecks that already touchy waist cap. The second is that all the leg parts I've put together for the DMA set are solid and single-weight, which means that trying to use them with a Bodyslid pelvis does not go well at all.

 

 

So I'm pretty much stuck leaving this as single weight as well, which will simplify building it in a lot of ways, but also means that it won't be compatible with any kind of modesty garments/plating not built to the UUNP base shape, so I'll have to provide those for it. A bit more cumbersome is that it'll also screw up SOS compatibility, and I'm not at all sure how to handle that yet. 

 

And it quite definitely can't be SLIF-compliant- you don't even want to see what that waist plate looks like with the pregnancy slider on- which means I have to figure out why the hip caps I copied over from one of the Gynoid cyborg meshes still are and fix that.

 

 

Still have a lot more work to do on this one, including seeing if I can get a HDT vagina set up in it. There's only one real reason for a robot to be built like this, after all, but the whole 'working vagina' thing is something I haven't really bothered with before so I'm gonna have to research that before I can even try getting anything done with it. But this does give me something interesting to work on.