Sometimes things just happen, one after another. 

 

First, a quick follow-up on the milker torso. I'd mentioned that I wasn't entirely sold on my initial build for the bottling apparatus in the previous post, and that I'd like something a bit more in-scale. I also thought it might be nice to have something a bit more Dwarven-themed, so my initial thought for the revision was to build up a new milk jar using one of the ornamental dwarven pots. So I threw one together, and it didn't turn out all that bad, considering. 

 

 

It was kind of a pain to build; had to chop the ornament out of the mesh, paste it over a copy of the mesh with the textures altered to give it that glass effect, chop up another copy of the mesh to get that milk filling... And then, at the end of all that, it wouldn't work. Some meshes just do not like getting converted to a format that will work properly in an outfit without jumping through all kinds of ridiculous hoops, and this was one of them. I was having some issues with the fitment and some other concerns on top of that, so I abandoned this branch. 

 

My next plan was to go back to the SGO milk jug but adjust the angle of the machinery so that there would be room for a larger version of it, and that part went well enough. But it ran into one of those other concerns, which was that having the milk visible in the jug being permanently level was getting on my nerves. 

 

 

So I decided that I might as well just go for the most obvious solution and swap it out with the original Hearthfires milk jug. It's both opaque and on-theme, after all. 

 

 

Honestly, I kinda dig this. It fits into the arc of the back well, gives me that nice big receptacle I was wanting, and fits into the theme quite nicely. So I'm thinking this is the final look for this part.

 

I do still intend to work on some further chest sizes for this setup, but I got a bit distracted by another aspect of this whole 'flesh components' concept. It occurred to me that if I was going to salvage bodies for their chests and pelvises, I might as well do something with the arms and legs as well. And as it happens, the Gynoid limbs and the parts I built out of the Nova Catsuit boots gave me exactly the sort of thing I needed to build something along those lines. All I had to do was find some stuff to fill the gaps with. 

 

 

The legs presented a bit more complexity, as they opened up further considerations about the pelvis. That prototype pelvis I previously posted about used the Gynoid hip parts for fairly obvious reasons. The Gynoid legs also don't really work with any of the other hip parts. As such it made sense to consider it as a whole part, since it would have to be built as one in the same way as the regular Gynoid legs in DMA. I also wasn't entirely happy with how that prototype had turned out. The Dragonborn boiler part I used felt too bulky and overcomplicated for the application, the cut was made pretty much arbitrarily, and it all just immediately looked terrible if you got it out of the UUNP base shape. That last part in particular was presenting a bit of a problem as I wanted to have flesh legs that were in the same UNP shape as the regular DMA Gynoid legs so they would be compatible with the thigh armor parts, but mixing UNP legs with a UUNP pelvis just looked weird. My initial thought was to find some way to make the cut at a lower point, but I also was still a bit miffed at not having something suitable for Bodymorph/SLIF support after lucking into it on the flesh-bearing chests. So I was looking at the base I was using to build this stuff in Outfit Studio and thought to myself, what would happen if I put a comparatively simple ring mesh right about... Here?

 

 

What happens, as it turns out, is that I end up with a pelvis that's perfectly happy to work in Bodyslide and still doesn't really get in the way of any of the existing chest modules.

 

 

The DD chest is the only one I've seen so far that it even remotely has issues with, but it looks like that still manages to clear a standard UNPB-sized belly. 

 

 

An aside about the messed-up textures on the hands: I initially built these fleshy modular arms the same way I built the other DMA arms, with the hand and arm meshes all in the same .nif file set to slot 33. The problem, which might be related to the issues I was having with getting the custom texture paths working on the chests, is that the hand and arm textures are in different files, and the game evidently hates trying to point at two different skin texture files in the same model, or at least ones that are set to particular slots. I ran into some further issues related to that which I'll get into later. Here, regardless of the fact that the texture paths on the meshes themselves are set to their proper respective skin texture files, the game insists on forcing the model to use one or the other. I tried various things, but nothing would get it to budge on that. Either the hands would be fucked up, or the arms would, as long as they were on the same slot.

 

 

So to my annoyance I had to split them into two .nif files, combined together in the armor entry so they still work like the other arms. The hands stayed on slot 33, but the rest of the arms had to change to slot 34 as otherwise they wouldn't show up in first-person view. Unfortunately this also means that these conflict with the existing Gynoid arm armor parts, as they have to use slot 34 for the same reason. I suppose I can just do variant arms with those added into the model, but it's a bit annoying to be forced to do that.

 

Anyway, back to the pelvis. As I said, I chose the cut point for this iteration after taking a closer look at the meshes I was basing it off of. Part of that was a question of where exactly the edges of the cut could be given the skin mesh's polygon layout, but I also paid a lot more attention to where exactly the effects of various sliders would play out this time. One of the main reasons for that was so I could end up with a model that would let me do this:

 

 

It chops a bit off the top of the belly, but personally I just think that adds to the charm. And it still seems to do a reasonable job of working with the existing chests, aside from the point of the DD unit getting buried in it.

 

 

So now I've got a variable top, a variable pelvis, flesh arms and feet... I basically just went and made myself some jointed dolls here, right? Well, I figured I might as well run with that. Seems like it'd be somebody's fetish. And given the method I used to build all these parts to begin with I basically already had a full-body version ready. This stuff was all made by taking one of the old DCC Gynoid Bodyslide files, swapping in the UUNP Special ref, ditching the metal 'skin' parts and cutting the Special's skin to fit. All I needed to do for a one-piece doll was save the result as its own project and generate a body with it, right? Then just slap it onto a character and it should...

 

 

...Not register with SLIF for some reason. 

 

Now, I've had some weirdness with this whole thing in OS related to the reference shapes. Specifically, I keep the UUNP Special ref mesh in the project so I can use it if I need to adjust the weights or sliders on something, but I've found that on re-opening the project file it would have up and decided that the labia mesh was now the reference shape, which led me to have to reload the UUNP ref a couple of times. And usually reloading the ref is enough to fix slider issues, but for whatever damn reason they kept persisting here. Tried exporting all the parts to a new project, adding in new elements, ditching the labia mesh, all sorts of things to no avail. 

 

While I was trying to figure that out I decided that the fully-human torso looked too plain and too much like a regular cyborg body anyway, so one of the changes I tried out was adding in a mid-joint using the ring part I had previously made for the pelvis. Import that straight in, then flip it over and massage it to fit around the bottom of the ribs, and boom:

 

 

But the SLIF failures continued. Still, I liked where this was headed. The part where the angles of the two rings met had some skin persisting in clipping through, so I decided I might as well just cut out that strip of skin entirely. But then there was a slight gap at the back where the two rings didn't quite want to sit flush, so I might as well duplicate the filler part from the pelvis model in the upper ring. And y'know, at that point I really might as well make the upper and lower skin sections separate meshes, 'cause that would let me do this...

 

 

Well, ain't that somethin'? 

 

In the interest of pure shits and giggles, I went ahead and split the top and bottom into their own separate body files and added them both into the game. It was mainly just to see how they would look when used by themselves, as I still hadn't found any way to fix the SLIF issues, so imagine my surprise when I found that while the bottom part still refused to do any kind of expanding, the top, by itself, worked just fine.

 

 

So, yeah. No clue what exactly was going on, but something somewhere got introduced to the bottom half of that mesh that blocked SLIF, but sometime after I'd spun the previous variable pelvis model off of the same base project as it worked and continues to work just fine. Bizarre. But hey, now I've got a working Doll top and a working Doll bottom, so all I really need to do is put them together, right?

 

Well, actually, I needed to make one more change. Now, I could've tried importing the pelvis module back into the project for the Doll top to make a one-piece body again and hope that it wouldn't re-introduce whatever the hell the previous problem was, but frankly that'd be kinda boring. I mean, I'd accidentally ended up with what was effectively a modular chest part, so why not run with that? But to do that I'd have to adjust the positioning of the ring. Its initial positioning had it basically mated with the pelvis's ring, which put it in a position where, when using a UNP-based body preset, the structure for the top of the modular parts' spinal assemblies would clip through the upper torso's back. And it just happened to do it the worst with the one on the Gynoid model that was borrowed for the Doll pelvis, but it did it to some extent with all of the rest as well.

 

 

Fortunately it turned out to be pretty easy to scoot the ring up and angle it a bit to the point that it'll provide a reasonable degree of clearance, and it happened to give the design a bit more of a dynamic look as a bonus.

 

 

But the even bigger bonus is that it expands the gap between the two halves of the torso, providing space for some lovely robot-y detailing, giving you a fully-jointed Doll body.

 

 

This isn't something that I had intended to make, but I like that I made it. Raising the upper ring does put it a bit into the breasts' morph zone, though, so it can display some effects from size changes that I still need to explore the ramifications of. I've already found that it was necessary to completely remove the belly and lower spine weights from the module to keep the skin from clipping through in weird places, but that honestly just enhances the doll effect so it's no loss. But there was one odd development where the morph influence from the pregnancy slider up and vanished. I'm not sure if it decided there wasn't enough affected mesh left or what, but it's not actually a loss. Works better this way, frankly, and I probably would've taken it out myself. It's just a bit concerning that OS keeps doing this stuff on its own. 

 

 

Another slight annoyance is discovering a limitation of Slavetats. Evidently it won't apply its overlays to skin layers in non-skin slots. That is to say, they'll only show up on parts set to slots 32, 33, and 37. Skin in any other slots just doesn't get covered. So the slot 32 upper torso gets the overlay while the slot 49 pelvis doesn't, but the slot 32 version of the pelvis from the earlier experiments does. 

 

 

Similarly, the arms built into that upper torso part on slot 32 get the overlay, but the ones using slot 34 for the modular version do not. The breasts on the milker torso, despite being all that's left of the skin mesh on slot 32, have no such problems.

 

 

This is a bit irritating, but I doubt there's much I could do about it without losing the whole modularity concept. The game simply seems to treat those slots differently as far as the skin textures and their related overlays go. 

 

But yeah. This was an amusing thing to stumble into. And a bit of further amusement comes from what I originally built the basic OS project for. I hadn't really intended to build it up into its own thing like this, but rather to use it as a source file for pre-built shapes like I did with the milker torso. The main reason for that was to get the UNP shape I needed for the armor-compatible legs, but there's nothing keeping me from generating just about anything shape-wise and spinning it off into it's own part. A fun quirk in OS is that if you adjust a shape with the sliders and then export the model from the file menu, you get that exact shape in the resulting .nif file. So say I was messing around and ended up with something pretty hippy...

 

 

All I have to do is export that shape and build an armor entry for it in the CK, and bam:

 

 

And of course this lets you give your followers a quick babonkadonk upgrade.

 

 

This is actually something I had considered doing with the metal Gynoid legs in the regular DMA release, but the need to basically rebuild the new robotic parts of the pelvis each time rather put me off the idea. With the human pelvis left intact, however, it's pretty trivial. About the only thing holding me back is how ridiculous I want to be.

 

 

And all this also only applies to the pelvises using the Gynoid-type legs. The stuff I mentioned previously about Bodymorphs not really working with the fully robotic DMA legs still applies, so those will get paired with a single size of pre-built pelvis, most likely based on either the UNPB or UUNP base shape. And in all this there's still the question of the modesty covers. The variable version of the pelvis seems to work with the Bodyslid undergarments I've tried so far, outside of the labia mesh clipping a bit sometimes, but the pre-builts could get questionable. The panel from the DCC Extras pack that I've got built to a UNPB preset works fine with that part built using thickened UNPB sliders, but how would it hold up with the UUNP or ZGGB-based versions? And those breast covers look fine while she's standing still, but I don't know if the UUNP Special's breast weighting is slightly off from UUNP HDT's or what, but they clip a lot in motion. Stuff like that makes me wonder if it might just be easier to make alternate versions of the chest and pelvis modules with the covers built in, but then you'd have to swap them out for any action scenes... Logistics are a motherfucker, man.