Making Faces
Entry posted by AVS
2625 views
So, I figured out what was fouling up the skin tints on the mask I built from the Charmers of the Reach headmesh. I had some vague memories about problems with using Racemenu's CharGen export meshes to create outfit parts from the abandoned experiment with detachable heads a couple years ago (cripes, it's been two years since I started doing all this Dwarven stuff), but I couldn't recall exactly what the issue was. Just that there was some processing involved to get them usable. I blew through pretty much an entire day trying various things that I could remember doing in relation to that project with no particular luck... until I finally, right as I was about to give up for the day, remembered that the Racemenu heads put the tint masks on a file path that can't actually work.
A-durrrrrrrr
Anyway, fix that, and everything works fine. Huzzah!
With that issue resolved, I could move on to the second thing that appealed to me about using the COR head to make new masks: racial variation.
While I like the SeXtreme faces and found them well-suited for their use in the all-robotic body phase of DMA, as I started working on Doll bodies the fact that those faces are largely Caucasian with with skin tones that don't quite match the game's was a bit dissatisfying. I mean, I like the whole mix and match idea for the parts, but it'd also be nice to sometimes have ones that match more than mix. Especially for the Redguards and the Elves. Being able to use COR to generate new faces quite handily solves that problem.
This... Gives me range.
There are some caveats involved, though. First is that many of the faces did admittedly come out a bit same-y. This wasn't really intentional, and I did in fact make an effort to distinguish their shapes a bit more as I was building them:
But, well, I was also trying to give them looks that I found attractive, as I figured I could tie these in to that initial Dibella face and present them as her race-specific Aspects, and that seems to have kept me from getting too adventurous with them.
I was also a bit constrained in that by the current limitations of COR. It's not a full multi-race mod yet; it has multi-race support, but those all use the same sets of meshes and skin tones as the main Breton-based race. Well, no, the elves do use a slightly different head shape, but it tends to clip through hairs even worse than COR's basic DAZ-based head so I didn't use it for creating these. All of the elves here are actually heavily-modified COR Bretons, and are particularly similar in shape because once I got that elfish jaw sculpted out I didn't want to fuck with it too much. This also means that they use the same human-type normal map specific to the COR head model- Vanilla-based normals absolutely don't work on it, I tried and it was terrifying- and thus don't have the brow ridges present in the Vanilla elves. It doesn't look that bad, but it'd be nice to fix, and there is technically an option for that via this mod. But while it does restore the brow ridges, they unfortunately managed to re-introduce the early Vanilla-style blocky compression artifacts, so I can't say it's exactly usable.
Things are further complicated by the skin tones. The COR races have a fairly limited range of them, and when I built the first face for this batch, the Redguard, I just sorta manually close-enough'd the color selection. And it came out fine, but a bit too dark-chocolate for the existing Vanilla skin tones.
For the subsequent faces I first loaded in the Vanilla race and used Racemenu's 'save color' function to copy the original tints over, which is a functional but fairly clunky process. I just randomly selected whichever tone per race that I liked, figuring that it'd be fine as long as it was in the range, but then it turned out that I had picked exactly the right skin tone for Jenassa. And that when the parts match, it works really well.
This also had the effect of locking me into using Fair Skin as the pack-in texture on the Doll parts. I had already been inclined to it and its well-defined areolae after seeing it used on the COR races, and had tossed it onto the Dolls for testing before making these faces. Seeing just how drastically differing skin textures can affect how the skin tone is presented like this convinced me that matching to the faces was a must, and the COR faces are currently only matched to the Fair Skin texture. But it's really good at giving that smooth, possibly artificial look I was shooting for with the Doll skin, so that's fine.
The core problem, though, is when you don't luck into a skin tone match.
I wanted to build a Diversity Squad set of followers to test these, but there's not much in the way of Bosmer in the game to recruit in the first place, much less ones that're decent at combat. So I took a shortcut by using the console to generate a copy of the Wilderness Encounter Wood Elf... And did not luck into a match with the tone I had picked for the mask. Sometimes it looks fine, but sometimes it's really fucking glaring.
Fixing this is tedious, but not really difficult. It's simply a matter of loading in the Vanilla race in Racemenu, saving the color, loading the COR preset made for each of these masks back in and applying the color, and then exporting the mesh to save off the tintmask. The tintmasks are interchangeable, so different ones can be applied to the same mask. I did this to fix the earlier issue with the Redguard mask, and the WE Redguard I grabbed to test with it worked out a lot better, although I still feel it's about a shade off.
The obvious complication is that this only works once per skin tone. The tones of the mask and body are completely independent of each other, so to match the various possible bodies a new copy of the mask has to be made for each skin tone. And while I had hoped that I could do this by means of texture sets like how I'm subbing in the Rubber Body skin, tintmasks don't seem to be swappable using those. My experiments with the Nord mask all just ended up using the tintmask pathed in the mesh. So unless I can figure out a way to get that working, each skin tone variation will have to be a completely separate mesh.
There's usually about ten skin tones per race. So this could turn into yet another source of parts bloat real damn quick.
But man, they look so damn good all put together like this.
You'll note that I've been using the fixed-weight body parts for the Squad, here, and there's a few things to mention about that. First is that it does work out quite nicely for providing that extra bit of diversity between each Doll, despite the fact that I've only got a fraction of the models added into the game so far. Another is that this is why there's only a fraction of those in so far:
That's 280 meshes produced by my spree of generating fixed-weights from the UUNP presets available in OS, with some customized 'pre-expanded' versions as displayed on the Redguard and Altmer models. Add in another 140 for the Rubber versions, if I were to do those for each body type. But not all of these are going to actually end up in the mod. I've already pulled some of the UNP weight variants due to them being too similar to other versions, and pulled CHSBHC entirely due to various issues with gaps in the skin. And all of the UNPF chests are gone because, as I mentioned before, the breasts do this sort of thing:
I do like the wasp-waist style of the preset, however, so I tried to fake up a version of it using various regular UNP chests to replace these, many of which you can see in the list and an example of which, the UNPetite High-based model, you can see on Jenassa above. But I'm going to have to go back and re-do those as I got the waist a bit too tight and the pipes at the sides of the pelvis connector clip through sometimes. This after I already had to re-do all of the pelvises with a further remodeled connector when I found that the sides of the initial take were clipping though the base ring of all the UNPF-style chests.
This is a large part of why it's still going to be a while before this stuff actually gets released. I keep having to rate my completion percentage downwards.
You'll also note that several of the Squad are using robotic limbs. The arms are pretty much freely interchangeable with the existing DMA parts, but there is a sort of a limit with the pelvises imposed by the fact that the existing robotic thigh parts don't really work well with some body presets' hip shapes. Since I don't really feel like rebuilding the thighs for each type of pelvis and because it gives me an easy way out of expanding the parts count even more exponentially, the robot legs/human pelvis combo will be limited to the two presets that the thighs fit best on, the base UUNP shape and the UNPFx Low. B-Type and E-Type connectors were provided for both of them. The Doll chests can also be mixed with the robotic DMA pelvises, as demonstrated by the Nord model, with the caveat that the G-Type pelvis' larger torso connector is likely to clip to some degree or another. It'll work fine with the Milker type chests, however.
I also feel that I should specifically mention something about the Breton mask. I based it on the second COR preset, as I felt that it suited a sort of youthful and fresh-faced Aspect of Dibella, but when paired with the short in-game height of the Breton races and the preset's low, 20-something weight, it comes out looking, um, really young.
And if you pair it with the UNPetite body on a Breton NPC, well...
All I'm gonna say is please be aware of the laws applicable to your local jurisdiction.
Finally, I mentioned above how my realization about the face tints came after a long day of failures. Well, a lot of those failures related to the idea of subbing in a mask-cut version of the COR head model to get a mask with working facial animations. This wouldn't have helped me get the interchangeable race-based masks I've showcased here, as it would be limited to purpose-built NPCs, but it would have bypassed the tint issue and the idea of getting facial animations is appealing on its own. I showed how in my previous attempt I found that trying to combine the altered head mesh with the existing .tri files produced a bit of a disaster, but right after posting that I happened to get around to checking for a new version of Outfit Studio and found that a recent update had quite handily added in the ability to edit headmesh .tri files. Couldn't seem like better timing, that. So I updated OS, made the edits to the relevant files, subbed those in for the COR originals and boom, I had a perfectly decent floating mask on my COR character.
Even had what appeared to be intact facial animations. Success!
Except something seemed a bit off. This floating face was supposed to look the same as the one I used to build the first Dibella mask, with the slight smile that I built into it (and all the subsequent masks). But here, no smile.
Going into Racemenu I found that pretty much all of the expression sliders simply didn't work. Moving them around produced no changes to the model. On top of that a lot of the other sliders had noticeably reduced effects, producing only minimal alterations in the affected facial parts. So I couldn't even use this for my hoped-for secondary purpose of quickly producing new static masks for statue versions. All of those racial masks had to be individually cut from the full head meshes.
This is a disappointment, but I have no idea what exactly went wrong, much less how to fix it. So I'm probably going to have to continue to bin the idea for now. I did have a thought about trying to sub it in on an NPC, but trying to do that directly on an existing Charmer NPC mod didn't work at all. Producing my own would require me to have something like MAFKit, I'd expect, but actual download sources for MAFKit appear to have gotten vanished so that's no help.
I'm having a similar 'I have no idea what I'm doing'-based problem with getting the HDT vagina effect to work. Specifically, it doesn't. The models lost the bit with the .xml file at some point during the build process, and trying to simply paste it back in produced no effects. (Oddly the prototypes for the new faces picked up that .xml file somehow, but that also seems to have no effect on anything.) I don't even begin to know enough about how that stuff works to fix it at this point, and it's a bit of an annoyance that it vanished. But considering that my main reason for including it was to get anatomically correct statue models, I'm not really inclined to go out of my way for it.
Function's nice, but it's alright as long as it looks good.
(Also, never tell someone to start dancing while they're sitting down. It's silly.)
12 Comments
Recommended Comments