In my apparently never-ending quest to vastly inflate my mods' parts counts, I came to conclude after getting the statue prototypes working that they and the Doll bodies could really use some theme-matched hair pieces to pair with them instead of relying on the brassy Gynoid hair set for everything. This opens up a pretty deep rabbit hole. I briefly considered extracting some of the hair meshes from the SeXtreme models I sourced the faces from but there were various issues with doing that, not the least of which being that many of them were pre-posed in rather awkward ways- the same issue that kiboshed the initial idea I had to use them as a source for humanoid body parts, before figuring out how to cut up the UUNP torso. The much easier second option was to simply grab stuff from some existing hair mods, Apachii and KS being the most obvious and permissive choices, and use them to build new 'wigs'. 

 

 

Actually selecting which hairs to use, however, is a large and ongoing project. Everything I'll be showing here are ones that I grabbed for testing and prototyping purposes. I haven't even looked at more than half of KS's massive pile of hairdo's yet, and what I've seen so far indicates that getting the regular wigs working, in particular, will be quite a bear. The game seems to treat hair weirdly in several different ways, which makes converting them into simple armor pieces something less straightforward than I'd like. There's a lot that use two .nif files that seem to get combined by the game somehow despite them both being on the same armor slot, which you can't do with an armor piece. And trying to use one .nif without the other on a lot of them results in all sorts of weird 'holes' in the textures.

 

 

But the regular wigs have been of secondary interest so far, as my main focus was on getting proper stone hair made up for my robot statues. Which has been easier in the fact that it mostly allows me to just use a single one of those .nif files, as converting a hair mesh to stone basically involves turning off every single texture setting that makes it a hair mesh. Many of which were obvious enough, but then there's the 'Assume Shadowmask' flag, which is less obvious but very important, as apparently when it's on a hair mesh being used as an armor piece it makes the hair transmit the shadows from the things behind it, which is just frickin' weird. 

 

 

Choosing a hair to use can get complicated by several factors. Models that put a lot of the detailing into the mesh itself instead of into the textures are key. The KS hair models are generally better at that, but they come with their own complications. There's a lot of significant differences in the way they and the Apachii hair models are built, one of which apparently causes them to consistently show up darker in NifSkope than the Apachii models, even with all the settings converted. They both show up the same way in the game, so I really don't know what's going on there. 

 

 

The KS models also have an alpha property node that needs to get taken off to get them to work right, and they use their normal maps in a different way that's simply incompatible with the stone textures. The Apachii models can leave theirs on and the only downside is some odd flat areas at the hair tips, but the KS maps do this kind of thing:

 

 

So getting these working at all takes a bit of work, but once you know what to change it's reasonably easy to do. All just a matter of changing stuff around with NifSkope. The question then comes down to the mesh itself. With the flat white stone coloring and all the texture gimmicks ripped away, all you have left to look at is the modeling. So hairstyles that used a lot of those gimmicks for things like 'windswept' looks just... don't really work. 

 

 

Or you could have one with a lot of really good modeling up front, but that uses a big flat plane for the undercut at the back.

 

 

But a more consequential factor has been the limitations imposed by the other bodyparts. In this initial testing I've mostly favored short cuts and up-do's, for the simple reason that longer hairstyles tended to clip the fuck through everything. The style that cover the breasts obviously being a major offender, as many of those don't seem to be sized for anything larger than the base UNP body.

 

 

So that kinda rules those styles out, but then any of the longer swept-back styles were running into the issue of the DMA replacement head's neck plate. Even if they looked fine while standing, once the character went into sneak the plate did this:

 

 

Part of the problem here is that the DMA heads both were and were not really intended to be used with a regular humanoid body. The base plate element was included in the design so that it would cover the neck opening if used on a human body, but it was sized so that it would snap 'over' the neck plates used on the old robot bodies, then carried over to the DMA torso designs, that were already sized to work with the human neck model. The end result being that the base plate is really quite large, especially at the back. The overhang there when used with the Doll bodies was already unsatisfying, even before it started to get in the way of the hair models. 

 

At the same time as all this, I also wasn't quite finished with the Doll/Statue chest piece. Capping off the lower torso and the shoulders was the important part, but it really needed some sort of permanent neck cap element for it to really be a completed piece. Of course I already had a neck cap, so that was easy.

 

 

Except... It didn't really look that great. Didn't match well with the other capping elements, even after adding the environmental mapping to it. And when trying it out in-game I found out that it's actually positioned in such a way that it clips through the base plates on the DMA head a bit, something that I hadn't tested for previously because they weren't parts that could be used together.

 

 

These cumulative dissatisfactions prompted several things.  The first being that I just went and built a new neck cap for the Doll bodies using the same elements I used to build the other caps. Like those it took several tries to get right, but the end result is much more refined than my previous options.

 

 

The second being that I just gave the fuck up on cross-compatibility and built a new version of the DMA head specifically for this neck.

 

 

The result... Is totally worth it. 

 

 

Totally, totally worth it. 

 

 

This gives me a vastly cleaner neckline, lets me use amulets and collars with minimal issues, and all that clipping on longer hairstyles? Completely gone.

 

 

Ignoring cross-compatibility does have some knock-on effects, though. The neck plate does it as well by being permanently affixed to the body, which is something I had previously avoided doing but figured I might as well do here both for thematic purposes and because even the 'skin' bodies are built to use alternate skin textures, so there's little chance of avoiding a neck seam on these. An unintended effect of that is that it ends up clipping through the other neck plate, which messes up using the Doll bodies with the old DCC heads a bit, but I'm not inclined to concern myself too much about that. Slightly more annoying is that it clips through the sides of the Dwarven Bikini Collar III that I liked to use to pair these bodies with the character's original head. That I might actually fix by tossing a modified version of the collar in with the rest of this. It could use a version with the metal chromed back up, anyway. 

 

 

But the most dire combination is undoubtedly the new head with any kind of un-capped neck.

 

 

Totally. Doesn't. Work. I don't really want to include yet another version of the head that has the neck plate integrated into it, but might be able to pull off doing a 'collar' version of the neck plate on slot 45. It's already shaped so that the upper rim properly clears the neck mesh, as it turned out that starting by building it on an imported head ref and then adding it to the body for further adjustments got a better shape and crashed Outfit Studio less than starting it on the body and importing in a head mesh to adjust the fit to. I will have to go back and add some head weighting to it, though, as I left it off the body-incorporated version to avoid even that slight distortion.

 

 

I did luck out on one point: the new heads work great with the robot body neck plates. Just slots right into the middle of the detailing without any fuss.

 

 

I made a few other subtler refinements while I was at it. A simple but remarkably effective one was adding in additional plates to the shoulder caps. They're simply downsized copies of the ones that were already there, but with the important change that they do not have bodymorph setting attached to them. This gives the shoulders of the arm parts a stable place to connect to, and the plates are both small enough for the body to morph freely around them and large enough to hide all the bizarre things that does to the original plate elements. Well, most of the time. They do a pretty good job of hiding the sins on the regular UNP and 7Base ranges, but some of the oddballs are as difficult to deal with as ever. I don't even know what Dream Girl is doing with its shoulders, there.

 

 

I also addressed some issues with the pelvis. When I built it I copied in the Type G pelvis to get the tube elements, and figured that I might as well reuse the torso connector parts while I was at it. That included the uppermost ring around the edge of the part taken from the Ballista, as I thought it looked kinda crummy without something masking it. But that ring proved to be a problem, as it was a very close fit within the bounds of the lower cap of the Doll chest even on the UUNP base shape and would happily clip right the hell through any shape that tucked the back in a bit. Not a lot, mind you. But enough to be annoying. 

 

 

Also annoying is that this means the Type G pelvises are going to do the same thing. But while I'm not really inclined to go back and change those in response to this, I do feel that the Doll parts should work reasonably well together. So the Doll pelvis got a new connector part.

 

 

I also fixed the cut line at the bottom of the butt to resolve some clipping, and added in the original metal Gynoid leg skins to allow for those variants. I've got variable versions for both the skin and stone parts, and modesty plates incorporated into the model to allow for the stone version's lack of bounce and the variety of pre-sized versions I can use these to build. Barring any other discoveries or decisions and outside of making the versions for use with the other leg types, I think I'm pretty much done with the prep for these. 

 

Which means I can start building up a bunch of Aspects of Dibella.

 

'Join the Dibellan cult,' they said. 'Be beautiful forever,' they said...

 

Pre-sized parts let you have a variety of body types on display, but the UNP Petite one will probably get you on a watchlist somewhere.

 

The long hairs don't really work with larger breasts, but I do kinda want to use one for a 'Statue of Dibella' outfit, maybe by permanently pairing it up with a UNP chest in the armor entry. Probably won't be this one, though; I want to see if I can find a good one with straighter hair to match the in-game statue and that doesn't obscure the amulet.

 

 

The headcanon I've got brewing for these has them pegged as another product of the Dwarven Dibellan cultists who produced the rest of the Cyborgs, but with a significantly different aim. You see, it's a mistake to think of the Dwarves as being atheistic or even agnostic. They knew the Gods existed. They just didn't think of them as inviolable beings whom mortals shouldn't meddle with. They knew they could be meddled with. And if a group of them with an interest in a particular Goddess managed to convince her to imbue a fragment of herself into a vessel that they had built for her...

 

 

...I felt I needed a way to represent that. So a new head insert, the Fragment of Dibella. 

 

I wasn't really sure what to use to represent this at first. The existing Dibellan imagery in the game pretty much boils down to that one statue, which isn't really suited for use, and the shrine, which I miiiiiight have been able to make something of but didn't look promising considering the bounds of the existing frame. My next thought was to go completely abstract and use one of the starburst-glow effects used in various places, but those are built in a particularly odd way and I wasn't sure where to even begin turning one into an armor piece. I discounted using a regular gemstone for a similar reason, as those use a very non-standard texturing method that I didn't want to deal with. Using a Stone of Barenziah was pretty far down the chain of reasoning, but the fact that it was a pink gem, which feels pretty Dibella-y, spoke in its favor. The fact that it was animated didn't, as I've had various difficulties getting animated models converted in the past. Right from the get-go this one was... not a problem. Usually the first sign of trouble with an animated model is that OS's move tool won't work on it properly, or it won't skin, or it won't hold its weight painting... but this one just popped into place and went through the whole process without a hint of fuss. 

 

And then a miracle happened.

 

I have never had any luck getting a model with an animated texture effect to retain it after converting it to an armor piece. It either gets lost along the way and my fumbling attempts to add it back on just cause the model to crash the game, or it doesn't get lost and the model just crashes the game right away. I had every reason to expect that this would do the same thing, and that the best I could do with it was trying to clear the animation off the mesh and making do with a stable emissive glow effect like I use with the robot eyes.

 

But this... This just works. 

 

 

It just plopped right into the game with the animation fully intact, no fuss, no problems. Even let me brighten it up a bit to reflect the divinity contained within it without any issue. 

 

Truly, it's been blessed by Lady Dibella herself.

 

So fuckin' smug about it.