Progress has been a bit slow these last few weeks, in part due to various Real Life concerns but also because getting the wigs put together has turned out to be A Project in and of itself. The core of the problem is that while the hair packs I'm sourcing from give me hundreds of options, there are a number of restrictions posed by how they interact with the other doll parts. This has the benefit of giving me a number of ways to cull down the amount of hair sets that'll end up in the final pack. Some of the criteria were easy enough to check- I'm avoiding hairs that go over the chest or butt to avoid clipping due to the variance in sizes from the fixed-weight parts, and any hair mesh that wasn't properly double-sided was passed over as you can see up inside of the head at the base of the skull area- but there's some issues that can only really be checked by actually putting them into the game for testing. The main one being that the foreheads of the faces I've been using are a different shape from the Vanilla head mesh's, which results in several hair meshes clipping into them in unsightly ways: 

 

 

Which is a bit unfortunate, as it included some that I otherwise quite liked, but again does give me another way to winnow down the candidates. I'm down to just over fifty, which is still too much but a lot closer to manageable. The next problem is is that I have to see how well the ones that remain work with alternate textures, which requires building all those alternate models and getting those into the game. I have mentioned how working with the CK is one of the worst fucking parts of modding, yeah? Well, having to do it twice over again for each of those fifty hair sets just to find out if they'll actually work is kind of soul-destroying. 

 

And yes, twice over again. Figured that I might as well throw in some brass variants while I was at it. 

 

 

These aren't nearly as detailed as the existing brass hair sets from the Gynoid resources, as I don't have the slightest clue how to re-map a texture onto a mesh in the way those were built. But I've already been prioritizing hair meshes with more distinct 'ribbons' of mesh for the equally un-remapped stone versions, so simply tossing on the solid brass texture actually translates pretty well.

 

 

Of course on some of these turning the mesh 'solid' like this introduces new disqualifiers, but there are a couple that I'm tempted to keep in as human-type only because they work so well with the regular Doll set. Still haven't decided on that one. And there's a couple with very minor flaws that I might actually go to the trouble of fixing, like this set of braids where the detail mesh at the back of the head frame just slightly clips through.

 

 

There's also the issue of the hair colors, which I don't really understand the mechanics of. The regular wigs come out as dark brown/black when you first put them on, but will change to your character's hair color at some point after a cell load. But it seems like when you put them on an NPC they still change to your character's hair color for some reason? I believe the color-matching pubic hair mods also have this issue, so I don't know if there's a fix for it outside of finding a way to set a permanent color for them. 

 

So yeah, this all has been a pain. But the Dolls and Statues feel vastly more complete with the wigs, so I'm gonna continue to plug through it.

 

 

 

 

...And that would have been about all I'd have to mention here if Charmers of the Reach hadn't happened to get released this month.

 

While building these I've been pretty taken by the idea of the stone versions, in particular, being a sort of robotic Statue of Dibella that the pervy bunch of Dwarves I've got built up in my head-canon created for her as a way for her to interact with the surface of Nirn. I've expressed that idea already with the Fragment of Dibella insert, but I've been wanting to do a few more things to make a distinct 'Dibella Set'.

 

When it comes to modding in Skyrim, there's the things I want to do, the things I can do, and the things the game will actually let me do. 

 

One of the things I kinda want to do but don't really have the skillset to create is a full-blown Statue of Dibella follower.  I feel it could be pretty entertaining if done the right way. I mean, what is a Goddess of Beauty, anyway? 'Beauty' is a transitive, immaterial, and above all subjective thing. Damn near anything can be beautiful to one person's eyes yet ugly to another's. So what exactly is her remit? She's one of only a small handful of gods, but what exactly is she there to do? Beauty isn't something that can be lorded over, it's something that can only be experienced. So why shouldn't she let a piece of herself run around and truly experience it, in all its forms? The beauty of a body, the beauty of nature, even the beauty of combat.

 

...Of course in practice she'd just seem like some loony Dwarven-built statue running around yelling "Beautiful!!~~~" at all kinds of random moments, but she can't help it if these poor mortals don't truly understand the wonders around them.

 

But again, that idea is outside of the range of what I can do. I did, however, want to at least find a new face to use to represent her in that 'Dibella Set' idea. That was at least possible, but my options for making one were very limited. I wanted one unique from the faces already in the DMA set, but those already covered almost all of the 'characters' from the SeXtreme models and the few I hadn't used I didn't feel were particularly suited to the Goddess. I could also have used the in-game FaceGen to build a new head in her image and chopped it up to build a new mask, but lower polygon count of the Skyrim head meshes makes getting a decent looking edge to the mask difficult and the look of the Skyrim faces just doesn't mesh all that well with the existing masks, so it wasn't an option I really favored. Those were the only options I had that didn't involve casting even further afield, though... Until Charmers popped up.

 

In a way this is actually a combination of my previous options. The Chamers head mesh is based on the same types of DAZ-sourced models as used in the SeXtreme mod, so they share a certain familial resemblance, while being implemented in Skyrim the way they are lets me use RaceMenu to build and export however many new faces I want. I can even use the RaceMenu sliders to create models with various expressions, although the limitations of Skyrim's system keep me from getting ones that are quite as vivid as some of the expressions in the SeXtreme faces.

 

 

The COR heads also work pretty well with the Doll bodies, although there are certain conflicts and limitations. Their necks are a bit thinner than the Vanilla model's which means that they can work together nicely with the Doll neckplate even without an additional collar:

 

 

Which is a good thing, as due to both that thinner neck and some significant differences in the shape of the cranium, the neck frame does not work out at all with these heads.

 

 

This is actually very close to the head shape the existing masks have, for obvious reasons.

 

 

Outside of the neck frame's issues this shouldn't really cause too many problems, honestly. Most stuff isn't built quite that closely to the Vanilla headshape, so just about everything else I've tried has fit just fine.

 

 

However, it does have some of the same problems with certain hair meshes as the DMA faces, as they share the same rounder forehead shape. But that doesn't really limit use with the wigs I've been building, since they've already had the meshes with that problem culled out.

 

 

I am running into one particularly odd problem with using the DMA equipment with a COR race, though. Specifically, if I use one of the replacement head items, the COR head stays vanished after removing it. It only seems to come back after triggering RaceMenu with the console or reloading the save, but then after that equipping a head replacement results in the COR head and the replacer occupying the same space. Trying another replacer in succession, in this case the Null head, got rid of the COR headshape mesh... But nothing else. Putting the frame head back on didn't change that, but having the eyes and teeth hanging off of it like that is at least amusing.

 

 

So yeah, no idea what's going on there. Only use DMA stuff on a COR race if you don't plan on changing out the head, I guess? But the COR head is kind of the entire point of using that mod, so why would you want to replace it to begin with? 

 

Which brings me back to what really caught my eye about these: the idea of using these faces elsewhere. This head is a much, much cleaner mesh than the Vanilla headshape, and has has a nice, clean cutline to go with it.

 

 

As a result, you can make a very satisfying mask part out of it:

 

 

The forehead cut is a lot further forward than it is on the SeXtreme-sourced masks and the earplates had to be made a bit bigger due to some differences in the meshes, but this is a very satisfying result. The shorter forehead is actually kind of preferable, as it shows off more of the head's internal structure. 

 

It also takes quite well to the stone textures, which is good since the whole point of this was to make a statue's face.

 

 

The eyes are of particular note. Unlike the Vanilla eyes the eyeball and eyelashes are completely separate meshes, so it's possible to directly retexture the eye itself without affecting the lashes. That was also true on the SeXtreme faces, but on those the little bit of skin in the inside corner of the eye was part of the eyeball mesh, which caused some issues. On the COR model it's part of the main head mesh, but that also means it's still there when using the robotic eye parts from the existing DMA partsbin, which is also a bit less than ideal. Simply leaving the eye meshes in and retexturing them works fine, though, so that's what I'm going with here. It probably works out better for this particular application anyway, since I am trying to build the face of Dibella.

 

 

Yeah, that's a good start. Still not entirely certain what to do with the brows and lashes, though. They don't exactly fit in to the statue theme, but they do add some definition to the face. The stone eyelash textures from the SeXtreme assets might work, but the brows were part of the skin textures on those. Here they use the Skyrim system of placing them on an overlay mesh, which means there's absolutely no point in swapping any textures out. Could just remove them, but... 

 

Either way, it gives me a Dibella face. The smirky one I've been using is cute, but this has the passing resemblance to the in-game Dibella statues that I was going for. 

 

 

Using these for non-statue faces, however, has hit a bit of a snag. The brass face effect I haven't even tried yet. The COR heads use the same texture systems as the regular Skyrim heads, which means I have every expectation of running into the same issues with mixing environment maps and model space normals that nixed the brass Doll bodies. The flesh one I figured would work out fine, but when I tried it out in-game...

 

 

...For some damn reason it's completely losing its tintmask. At first I thought it was because I had made it into a slot 44 part and that it was another instance of Skyrim only applying texture effects to things in particular slots, but moving the face to a whole-head slot 30 model as I did here produced the same results. Which is confusing, as I built a whole-head model using Vanilla head meshes a couple years and had no such problems with the tintmask vanishing from the on-body model. I could even use it on other races, giving me a Nord head on a Dunmer body, for example, without the game complaining about it. I'm going to have to dig out that old head model and see what exactly the difference is between it and this to see if I can fix this problem. 

 

Of course, even if I do get the tints fixed these will still be static, motionless masks. One thing I discovered in the course of that prior head experiment was that changing a head model into an outfit piece completely disables the expression animations. I'm not sure if there's a way to re-enable them on the outfit mesh, but it should be theoretically possible on a mask-cut version of the COR headshape mesh. You'd be limited to using it for purpose-built NPCs instead of being able to swap it onto any random character, but it would be entertaining to get an Automaton with a fully expressive face. But that idea runs into both the limitations of what I can do and what Skyrim will let me do. Trying to import that whole-head model as a headshape in the CK did not go well; the CK apparently does not accept multi-mesh models for that part and will only pull one sub-mesh from it, with terrifying results:

 

 

Conforming to that limitation and simply subbing in the mask-cut head mesh itself for the COR headshape seems like it would work out better, and would also have the happy side effect of giving me a way to build new masks without having to trim each one out of the RaceMenu export mesh. But I think there's a conflict with using an altered mesh with the existing .tri files, as that just gives me this weirdly jaggy mess:

 

 

I'm guessing that if one were to generate new .tri files specifically for the altered head mesh it could work, but now we're well into the realm of things I don't know how to do. So it will have to remain an interesting possibility, but something that I won't be able to get done for the foreseeable future, I'm afraid. 

 

Also in that realm is an annoyance I've encountered regarding the bloodspray decals. I alluded above to the issues the game has to applying texture effects to parts that aren't on specific slots. I've also recently mentioned elsewhere how, as for as the game is concerned, the upper torsos are the body mesh for things built with the DMA system. Well, the combination of those things seems to mean that the game tries to cram all of the bloodspray decals onto the upper torso's skin mesh.

 

 

I'm not sure if there's any way to actually disable that, annoyingly. At least not on a per-outfit basis. Something similar happens to the hands, as well, where they'll end up just covered in blood. It's irritating, but I might have to live with it. There's already a few other things in that category that I've decided to stop wasting time trying to fix. 

 

These COR-based faces will probably be the last new-new things I try to put together for this, although I'm not gonna swear to that. Probably won't do a whole lot of them, either. Dibella is the main point of interest, and she only really needs the one face. Maybe a couple of variant expressions. This does give me the resources to build more should I want them, but I can't think of any others I really need off-hand. 

 

Aside from that I've still got the wigs to finish slogging through, and then I need to re-generate the meshes for building the fixed-weight variants. I made some changes to the mid-torso connection on the pelvis after finding that it clipped through on very narrow-waisted morphs, so all of those need redone. And then following that I can finally start working on the ground models...