Making progress on this, although not as quickly as I might have wanted. Part of the problem is that I'm trying to do something particularly weird here, as far as the game is concerned, so at points I just sorta... Hit walls.

 

I mentioned in the comments of the last post that there were various issues with trying to use clothing with the Doll bodies. The fixed-weight versions are something of a lost cause, given that as the game treats them as clothing/armor pieces themselves, there's no way to get an overlaid clothing piece to automatically conform to them. The statue versions have the additional problem of having the breast and butt bounce removed, so they'd need alternate versions of the clothing that also have those removed to avoid motion clipping. About the only place where clothing use is feasible is on the Variable version, as that's intended to be built to your Bodyslide preset same as any other type of outfit, but that feasibility comes with several restrictions. First, as the upper torso Core has to occupy slot 32 for the body replacement function to work, any clothing has to either be built onto the Core mesh itself, as I did for the modesty-plated versions of all the Doll bodies, or an overlay outfit using an alternate slot. The number of those are fairly limited, being mainly the original Dwarven Bikini cyborg-use set, the batch of overlay outfits I made for the DCC Extras pack, and the slot 48 versions of the bikini tops from my Bikini Revival set. But then you run into the next set of problems, which is coverage and weighting. 

 

The coverage problem involves how the Doll bodies chop up the regular human bodies and replace sections of them with robotic parts. Finding outfits that will actually fit into the areas of human body left has been the first difficulty. The bikini top mesh from BR, annoyingly, ends up with the back of the straps buried in the neck and mid-torso rings. The deep cuts at the shoulders are particularly restrictive, as many, many outfits end up with bits floating over the gap, thusly:

 

 

The mid-torso gap is also a major problem, although I found that depending on the particular design of the outfit it can have less impact than I might have expected. The dress piece from the Ancient Nordic set, for instance, almost works fine.

 

 

The main problem it runs into is the biggest one: the weighting. I had to remove the lower spine and clavicle bones from the Cores to keep them from causing all sorts of clipping and distortion in the mechanical parts, but the direct result of that is that the outfits, which assume that they're on a body that does still have that weighting, can display all sorts of clipping around the back and shoulders. In cases such as this where the outfit covers the full torso that most frequently expresses itself as clipping around the upper mid-torso ring, as visible above. But you can also have cases where an outfit was fairly closely fitted to the upper back, and in those cases you get, well, this:

 

 

So, y'know, that's clearly un-ideal. The combinations of all those restrictions severely limits the number of tops that are really usable. The bottoms are less of an issue; the hips retain the original weighting so the only real restriction on them are the physical constraints imposed by the Gynoid parts. As such pretty much any bottom that would work with the DCC's Gynoid set will work here. but for the tops... The only one I've got in the Extras pack that really works without any major issues in the Hakama top. It's low and thin enough to clear the cut lines without any real issues, and seems to have managed to avoid the majority of the weight-clip areas as well. 

 

 

But for pre-existing stuff... That and the stringier of the Dwarven Bikinis are about it. I spent some time looking for an alternative, but have yet to come across anything I'm entirely satisfied with. One problem is permissions. There's this 'strap bikini' that works fairly well, although the bottoms have a little less coverage than I'd like for a 'modesty' outfit. The top fits into the space restrictions well enough, and displays relatively minimal clipping. But given that the provenance of it is a bit less than clear, I'm leery of using it.

 

 

It also runs into my other concern, which is morphability. This looks nice at moderate weights, but those clasp elements do not like getting pulled around by Bodymorph mods, and can look particularly bad at higher or lower weights. And that's also a problem with most of the other outfits I checked out, particularly as far as the lower weights went. A lot of them just look terrible when asked to fit on something like a UNPetite chest, and that's kinda been the final wall for one idea. I had a thought that I could, if I found a suitable outfit, add in a version of it with the top de-boned in the same way as the cores, and include pre-sized versions matched to all of the fixed-weight torso parts. They'd only work with the fleshy Doll bodies, and add parts bloat and complexity, but it'd be the only really feasible way to give them a clothing option aside from the modesty plates. But I've yet to find something that actually works the way I want it to, so that idea had to go back on the shelf for the time being.

 

As far as the bodies themselves go, I've finally gotten the stone and flesh versions of all the fixed-weight variations loaded into the mod. This, unsurprisingly, kicked me over to two pages in AddItemMenu. Considering that I'm still not done adding parts, this is kind of scary. The rubber versions are done entirely in the CK and don't require additional meshes, but I've been wavering a bit on doing them for all of the fixed weight versions both out of concern for the ballooning parts count, and also because working in the CK is so fucking tedious. I'm kiiiiiiinda inclined to reserve the rubber skin as a Variable body variant alongside the Gynoid legs. There's just a point where I've got to stop, after all. I've already gotten a boatload of variations out of the body shapes as it is.

 

 

The chests and pelvises of these are mostly but not quite exactly paired. There were some parts that I ended up pulling because they were functionally identical to other parts. In the case of the UNP and UNPB pelvises they were exactly the same, and there were a couple of chest presets where one of the ends of the weight spectrum was pretty much the same as the UNP Low chest. I also didn't bother including the Low version of every preset, and as mentioned before the original UNPF-series tops were ditched in favor of approximations made using some of the other chest presets as bases. This lets you combine the UNPF's wasp waist with some otherwise plumped-up parts, to an amusing effect.

 

 

This part of it at least, the idea of being able to display Dolls with multiple body types at the same time, has worked out pretty much perfectly. It just costs a lot in parts bloat. But it gets results.

 

 

Also effective was the project to add skin tone variants to the Charmer faces, although it also contributed to the parts bloat and was suuuuuuper tedious to do. The elves had five skin tones each and the humans ten, and I had to export a head out of Racemenu for each one of them. But it worked!

 

 

Being able to match up the face and body tones really improves the whole look of the thing. That Wood Elf from the previous post no longer looks dippy:

 

 

Although the Wood Elf in particular has a bit of an annoyance as far as the tones go. The last two of its tone presets are, as near as I can tell, damn near identical. My color vision's not the best so at first I thought it might just be me, but after poking around at the outputted textures it honestly looks like they have only the most marginal of differences.

 

 

So that's something of a 'What the hell, Bethesda?' moment. Left them both in there because I just couldn't be bothered, but if you find yourself thinking they're identical know that it's not just you. 

 

I also revised the Wood Elf face for the third damn time, as my previous attempts kept coming out looking older and more shrewish than the 'pixie' look I was going for. The third try still ain't really there, but it's good enough to be getting on with. 

 

 

And one more fix for the faces in the 'tiny thing that bugged me every time I noticed it' category: I made the eyelashes double-sided. I honestly think it really improves things. I may be a bit too detail-oriented.

 

 

The increase in number for the faces from the variant skin tones helped kill my interest in doing alternate expressions, though. The tones and the statue versions increase the count of the racial faces more than enough, thanks. (And no brass versions for now, I tried and as expected I'm having the same issues getting the environment mapping to work as I was having with the bodies.) But when I was digging around through the Charmers assets I found that it had a whole slew of alternate face textures for some reason, including a few with some entertaining features. I figured I could combine those and one of the more unusual morph options on the Charmer heads to at least generate an alternate version of the Dibella mask...

 

 

...The Corrupted Aspect of Dibella. With obligatory Statue version. For pure shits and giggles. And speaking of shits and giggles, while I was finally getting around to adding the 'pedestal' pieces from way back at the start of this project into the main mod it occurred to me that there was one more variant on that idea that I could add. You see, while the pedestals are amusing they are also somewhat limited by the user's access to a method to force an actor into a good static pose, given that I have no clue how to attach a forced pose onto an outfit part. What I needed was a take on the idea that wouldn't look as out of place in motion. There was one obvious way to do that.

 

 

Mind you, this is still victim to my limitations. Like the other pedestals, it's completely static from the base of the spine down. I have no idea how to add the Sphere rolling animations onto it, or if that's even possible, and it certainly doesn't compact into a ball or anything. I couldn't even find the rolling sound in the footsteps options, annoyingly. And the bottom will clip through the ground in some situations, particularly crouching. But even given all that, this is quite amusing.

 

 

One other recent addition was a more fully realized 'insert' for the Phallus Attachments. I'd had some cables leading up into the body from the start, but I realized they really needed to actually connect to something. Thus:

 

 

The dildo model isn't actually new, I just don't think I've brought it up before. It's actually half of the double-dildo model from one of the Leito animations, IIRC. I had originally intended to use a dildo model from the SeXtreme assets, but when I tried changing the textures I found that it had an extremely weird and noticeable sort of join line exactly on the top and bottom of the shaft. Digging around more netted this, and it takes to new textures beautifully. I'm including the original fake flesh tone as well as the brass, along side...

 

 

One stone dick. 

 

Of course, the insert is just something of an affectation on the on-body model, given that it's literally buried in the torso. What it really needed to be there for was for the ground models. 

 

Dicks, dicks everywhere.

 

Yes, I'm finally getting a start on this, the final major part of the project. Unfortunately this may also be the part where I end up having to make some major and very annoying compromises.

 

When I was building the ground models for the earlier DMA stuff the main problem I was running into was figuring out which borrowed collision boxes would work best for each type of part. That's less of a concern here, as I can mostly just reuse the same collisions from those ground models. I say 'mostly' as the phalluses have been of some concern. I don't have anything else that's quite the same size and shape, and the closest matches both have issues. The one I used for the tails is much too large, but it displays well in-inventory. The glove collision I used for the forearm armors fits a lot better and looks good on the ground, as seen above, but the inventory view... Does this:

 

 

So yeah, not quite right. But that I can probably fix by just digging around and experimenting until I find a collision that works the way I want.

 

My bigger problem is a matter of lighting. I build the ground models like I build all of my models, by using Outfit Studio. This... isn't exactly something OS was designed to do, given that it has no actual ability to see the collision model (which often makes things a pain in the ass), but I have no capability with other modeling programs and have figured out ways to bodge it into doing more or less what I wanted it to do. But it does this inexplicable thing where, entirely too often, it will 'invert' the lighting on a ground model built with it. That is to say, the parts that are supposed to be lit will show up as shadowed in-game, and vice-versa. It will also sometimes do this to meshes that have been mirrored using its mesh transform commands, as I found out very early on in this project, and I discovered that it could be fixed by giving the model a once-over with the 'edit alpha' brush in OS's color tools. I don't know the details of why that works any more than I know why it's doing this in the first place, but it's managed to fix the problem when it crops up so far.

 

Until now. 

 

The problem has been consistently showing up when I try to generate ground models for the Doll parts, with the inversion appearing on the entire model. Giving it the once-over with the alpha brush fixes it... but only on the brass parts. The lighting on the skin meshes for both the flesh and stone versions stays inverted, and I'll be damned if I can figure out how to fix it. 

 

 

This is Very Irritating. Having the detached body parts lying around was something I was looking forward to seeing, so having it compromised in this manner is a major disappointment. They're still functional as models, so if I have to I can proceed with them even with this obnoxious bug, but I'd be much happier if I could find some way to squash it. It's just that everything I've tried so far hasn't worked, and I don't know enough about what's causing it in the first place to know what else to try.

 

But you can still get the idea of what I was going for, even if it is just a bit off. 

 

 

It does get a more ridiculous if you enchant one of these, though. The effect shader combines with the inverted lighting to do, well, this bullshit:

 

 

Yeah.

 

Sadly the ground models for the new faces display the same issue, as well as one that's almost as annoying but that I was actually expecting. I've brought up that experiment with 'detachable heads' from a couple years ago before. There were a few things that kept me from proceeding with it, and one of them was that the skin tones absolutely, positively would not show up on the ground models. It can have the shader set to face tint, with the tint mask properly linked in the textures and everything else set up the same as the properly functioning body models, but for whatever reason Skyrim refuses to accept it on a ground model. Instead you just get the flat base skin texture.

 

 

Obviously this is also quite irritating, but it's not a surprise. I'm still annoyed, but I'm also far too committed to the new faces to abandon them over this. And these haven't displayed some of the other weirdnesses that the detached heads did, like the severely malfunctioning eyelash textures. But this does mean that you won't be able to see which tone is which in-inventory, which makes using them slightly more difficult. And again, they still have the inverted lighting on the skin meshes, with the added bonus that doing the once-over with the alpha brush a bit too enthusiastically apparently makes the eyebrows show up as white-ish. Yay. 

 

 

So yeah, that's where I'm at right now. I'd love to get the ground models' skin issues fixed before release, but given that I have no idea how to do that I might have to release it despite them. I've also got to get around to actually finishing the hair side of this project. That all turned out to be more of a pain in the ass than I initially expected. Did another cull through just recently and marked off the ones that were having major problems, although during that I found that there's some of the SeXtreme masks that don't really play well with the hairs in general. Mostly stuff like the foreheads being too high or the cheekbones being too wide. Can't really be helped considering that those face models are extremely non-native to Skyrim, though, so most of that's going into the 'you're just going to have to put up with it' box. The ones that had issues with the Charmers faces, however, got ditched, or had the issues fixed if they were minor enough. Still need to check that work and then collate the survivors so I can get them into the main mod and see what their contribution to the parts count is.

 

Maybe if I try hard enough, I can reach three pages!