Bad Dog's Horse Race

[RaverLord Nito]

Amazing Work!!

 

[Blaze69]

6 hours ago, Bad Dog said:

Still to come: Hoof-y hands

Yay!

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If I can figure out how to make eye reflections work I'll improve those cuz they suck now.

Part of it is due to wrong shader settings on the nif data. I had the same reflection bugs with the human-texture-compatible meshes so I just grabbed the fixed human eye nifs from Fair Skin and copied all the shader settings to my edited eyes, and it seems to have fixed the issue.

 

Did the same for the original horse eyes + textures and they are still uber-shiny (but the reflection isn't as weird), though, so I guess some tweaks to your eye normal/spec/envmap textures will also be needed for that.

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I'll include Blaze's eyes if people like them.

Seems like that's the case so far.

 

Only assets you would need to pack would be the alternate human-UV-compatible eye nifs. All the eye textures I've set up for them so far are vanilla Skyrim ones, so the textures are already there and they will be affected by eye texture replacers (the one shown in the pic above comes from one such replacer, though I don't remember which one right now). Of course if you found any human/elf/orc textures you really liked for them, you could pack them as well, but still.

 

As I said I'll see if I can get some shots of other options to show what they all look like (roughly, since the final look will depend on the installed eye texture replacer(s) or lack thereof).

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Might be fun to take a zebra skin and see what I can do with it.

Ooh, it would be nice to have a zebra option as well.

 

Zebras would probably need their own separate skins, though; even if we set up the stripes as an overlay so their color can be edited (in which case we would still need to create the zebra stripes overlay itself), the base textures would have to be edited since the current ones don't look particularly zebra-y and also don't allow for a fully white skin tone. I still think making a proper zebra texture with the stripes built-in may look better, though.

 

In any case, I'd say adding zebras as a separate race included in the pack (regardless of whether any zebra-like customization options are added to base horses as well) with somewhat different stats would make sense, considering zebras and horses are not the same species. Just my two cents, though.

[Raydric]

On 2/16/2020 at 9:03 AM, ASlySpyDuo said:

Horses are huge. That means they have huge tits. RIP AND TEAR!!

 

 

Also the fluffy male feet for anyone curious but can't check ingame:

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I had not seen it

did you create new stripes?

it is incredible

[poblivion]

16 hours ago, Blaze69 said:

The more I play around with this, the more I think it turned out better than I expected, lol. ?

 

Thought going for a "realistic" face design wouldn't look that well compared to the more "cartoony/stylized" look most art seems to go for, as opposed to other races that do look pretty good when done in a realistic style (e.g. canines or felines). But this still has a certain charm to it.

 

Anyhow, here's a quick'n'dirty shot of my WIP (and as of now unnamed) mare. Also shown are the human-texture-compatible eyes I'm working on:

 

 

I should probably try and get more shots of the other eye texture options of both males and females. I'll see what I can do if I have the time for it.

 

Don't touch her anymore, she's perfect, her eyes are beautiful, all is beautiful, great work

 

 

[Bad Dog]

9 hours ago, Blaze69 said:

Part of it is due to wrong shader settings on the nif data. I had the same reflection bugs with the human-texture-compatible meshes so I just grabbed the fixed human eye nifs from Fair Skin and copied all the shader settings to my edited eyes, and it seems to have fixed the issue.

 

Did the same for the original horse eyes + textures and they are still uber-shiny (but the reflection isn't as weird), though, so I guess some tweaks to your eye normal/spec/envmap textures will also be needed for that.

Huh. Pretty sure I copied the shader settings from vanilla. I spent a bunch of time setting the Eye Reflection Center correctly, and that helped a lot on the left eye but not on the right eye, which makes no sense. Fair Skin tho doesn't use the Eye Envmap shader at all--It's just using Environment Map, which doesn't use the Eye Reflection Center settings. Maybe they figured you do just as well letting the standard normals and specular mechanism handle reflections. I think maybe KK did this with the Lykaios too. 

[LordFlawn]

1 hour ago, poblivion said:

Don't touch her anymore, she's perfect, her eyes are beautiful, all is beautiful, great work

I second this, those eyes are great! ?

[rifted]

Sheathing schlong sounds awesome even better if its was compatible with https://www.loverslab.com/files/file/6139-sos-grower-extended/

 

[Blaze69]

1 hour ago, Bad Dog said:

Huh. Pretty sure I copied the shader settings from vanilla. I spent a bunch of time setting the Eye Reflection Center correctly, and that helped a lot on the left eye but not on the right eye, which makes no sense. Fair Skin tho doesn't use the Eye Envmap shader at all--It's just using Environment Map, which doesn't use the Eye Reflection Center settings. Maybe they figured you do just as well letting the standard normals and specular mechanism handle reflections. I think maybe KK did this with the Lykaios too. 

The thing about human assets is, chances are if it can be fixed altogether, someone will have done so already, so whenever those can be used as reference to fix the same bugs on beast races, it's relatively easy to fix. Just need to find the fixed human assets and copy the settings.

 

On top of that, if HHaleyy of all people has set up the eye shader data like that, it's very likely (if not guaranteed) that it is the best way to fix it or at least gets the job done good enough for the "waifu 'shooters", so it must be up to standard, lol. 

3 hours ago, poblivion said:

Don't touch her anymore, she's perfect, her eyes are beautiful, all is beautiful, great work

1 hour ago, Flawn said:

I second this, those eyes are great! ?

lol, alright, I'll keep it like that. I mostly just whipped up a quick character preset to test out the race and showcase the eyes (hell, don't even have a name for her yet as I said). Glad to hear she was received so warmly, and guess she's a keeper now.

 

Kinda wish the body wasn't so plain, though. I mean, horses aren't exactly known for fancy markings like for example zebras are or whatever, but AFAIK there's still some coat variance and it would be nice to have some options to break the monotony of the current body. Guess if a zebra variant/skin is ever made, I may consider turning her into one (or making a separate zebra character). On the other hand, the good thing about the base skin texture being feature-less is overlays should work pretty good on it, so maybe it could be worth looking into those for extra customization, at least for the PC.

 

Anyhow, got some more things to test and add like for example a working RaceCompatibility quest/script, but once I have them all I'll send the edited file to Bad Dog so he can shuffle through it and pick what he wants to add to the main release (which hopefully will be at the very least the new eyes).

[poblivion]

10 minutes ago, Blaze69 said:

The thing about human assets is, chances are if it can be fixed altogether, someone will have done so already, so whenever those can be used as reference to fix the same bugs on beast races, it's relatively easy to fix. Just need to find the fixed human assets and copy the settings.

 

On top of that, if HHaleyy of all people has set up the eye shader data like that, it's very likely (if not guaranteed) that it is the best way to fix it or at least gets the job done good enough for the "waifu 'shooters", so it must be up to standard, lol. 

lol, alright, I'll keep it like that. I mostly just whipped up a quick character preset to test out the race and showcase the eyes (hell, don't even have a name for her yet as I said). Glad to hear she was received so warmly, and guess she's a keeper now.

 

Kinda wish the body wasn't so plain, though. I mean, horses aren't exactly known for fancy markings like for example zebras are or whatever, but AFAIK there's still some coat variance and it would be nice to have some options to break the monotony of the current body. Guess if a zebra variant/skin is ever made, I may consider turning her into one (or making a separate zebra character). On the other hand, the good thing about the base skin texture being feature-less is overlays should work pretty good on it, so maybe it could be worth looking into those for extra customization, at least for the PC.

 

Anyhow, got some more things to test and add like for example a working RaceCompatibility quest/script, but once I have them all I'll send the edited file to Bad Dog so he can shuffle through it and pick what he wants to add to the main release (which hopefully will be at the very least the new eyes).

I thought of such stupidity, what to try to use the actual tiger texture for zebra? ?

[Blaze69]

19 minutes ago, poblivion said:

I thought of such stupidity, what to try to use the actual tiger texture for zebra? ?

Nah, I don't think that would work. Zebras have such a characteristic stripe pattern that if we're making a custom skin for them, we might as well make it from scratch instead of just reusing the tiger stripes, at least IMO.

 

Also the rest of the body is gray-ish while it would actually have to be the same white as the belly in that pic to match the zebra black-and-white colors. Hell, after checking out a pic of it, it just feels too perfect to not be artificial, lol. Nature is weird sometimes.

Spoiler

 

Speaking of pics, going by what few ones I've seen, zebras seem to have more rounded ears compared to horses.

Spoiler

 

So regardless of whether an actual zebra race is made as well, those rounded ears could probably be added as an extra morph option for the heads (cough @Bad Dog cough).

[poblivion]

36 minutes ago, Blaze69 said:

Nah, I don't think that would work. Zebras have such a characteristic stripe pattern that if we're making a custom skin for them, we might as well make it from scratch instead of just reusing the tiger stripes, at least IMO.

 

Also the rest of the body is gray-ish while it would actually have to be the same white as the belly in that pic to match the zebra black-and-white colors. Hell, after checking out a pic of it, it just feels too perfect to not be artificial, lol. Nature is weird sometimes.

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Speaking of pics, going by what few ones I've seen, zebras seem to have more rounded ears compared to horses.

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So regardless of whether an actual zebra race is made as well, those rounded ears could probably be added as an extra morph option for the heads (cough @Bad Dog cough).

You're right

 

Zebra skin images can help with create a new texture. I'm pretty sad to see the skins, zebras are one of my favorite animals.

[Bad Dog]

Putting together some a NPC file now and discovered that if I have special morphs, they don't show up in the CK. Obvs. So they aren't available to the NPCs. So I'll prolly double up the nostrils and such on an unused vanilla morph so they're available.

 

Same with ears... I can make multiple shapes but they won't be available to NPCs unless I put them on some vanilla slider, like brows or lip shape.

[Blaze69]

Okay, on the topic of edits, my alternate eye options seem to be working fine, so I should be posting them soon. I also have more edits on my plugin, though, like for example a working RaceCompatibility script (== vampirism/lycanthropy support) tweaked stats, a custom racial spell, and some bugfixes. Not sure if I should post my edit here for anyone that may want to give it a shot or just send the file to BD and let him decide what to add to the main download (@Bad Dog, any thoughts on this?).

 

Anyhow, about those adjustments I made to race stats and such, this is what I've got so far:

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Name: Equine

Description: "The horse-like Equine race hails from the Ali'kr deserts of Hammerfell, where they dwell in close alliance with the Redguards. Little is know for certain about them, as even their existance is kept a secret and they are an extremely rare sight outside of their homeland. Legend goes they were the ones that taught the Sword-Singers of Yokuda their skills in a time long past."

 

Skill bonuses:

+10 One-Handed

+5 Two-Handed, Archery, Block, Heavy Armor, Destruction

 

Racial ability:

Equine Endurance

"Your hardness and strength provides extra protection against damage. The discomfort caused by wearing helmets reduces this effect." (Yeah, the first part is inspired by a vanilla load screen about Skyrim horses, lol).

+20 armor rating when not wearing a helmet, +8 otherwise.

 

Name is untouched because I don't really have anything else to suggest, and description is a slightly "fancied-up" version of what's there already. The racial ability is the thing I suggested about giving them an armor bonus to make up for not being able to wear most helmets (with a condition so wearing helmets doesn't stack with the bonus). For the skills I basically just eyeballed it.

 

Thoughts on these? Any other ideas for fitting lore/backstory or maybe alternate racial abilities or skill bonuses? Does this sound alright, or should I just drop it and keep only the new eyes and maybe bugfixes only?

 

(Also I think I may try taking some more pics soon so I'll see if I can get anything worth posting).

[Raydric]

9 hours ago, Blaze69 said:

Okay, on the topic of edits, my alternate eye options seem to be working fine, so I should be posting them soon. I also have more edits on my plugin, though, like for example a working RaceCompatibility script (== vampirism/lycanthropy support) tweaked stats, a custom racial spell, and some bugfixes. Not sure if I should post my edit here for anyone that may want to give it a shot or just send the file to BD and let him decide what to add to the main download (@Bad Dog, any thoughts on this?).

 

Anyhow, about those adjustments I made to race stats and such, this is what I've got so far:

 

Name is untouched because I don't really have anything else to suggest, and description is a slightly "fancied-up" version of what's there already. The racial ability is the thing I suggested about giving them an armor bonus to make up for not being able to wear most helmets (with a condition so wearing helmets doesn't stack with the bonus). For the skills I basically just eyeballed it.

 

Thoughts on these? Any other ideas for fitting lore/backstory or maybe alternate racial abilities or skill bonuses? Does this sound alright, or should I just drop it and keep only the new eyes and maybe bugfixes only?

 

(Also I think I may try taking some more pics soon so I'll see if I can get anything worth posting).

I don't know with destruction +5.  Have you thought about restauration +5?

 

Restoration spell is described as: control over the forces of life.  (also combining that they are hervivoros)

The perfect spell for adventurers and especially for those who wear heavy armor, in addition to healing, gaining strength or stamina in combat, long trips in the deserts of Ali'kr of Hammerfell.

[CFU]

The bit of backstory reminds me of the Mongols. How about replacing the 2-handed with smithing or alchemy? Even in the desert, calvary was always used to make highly mobile, fast fighters that hit hard. Everything else could fit with most conventional images if "horse warrior"

Actually, is this 'backstory' set in stone? Because in such a barren place like a desert being able to talk for trade is just as useful as foraging would be. Speechcraft could be a possible minor bonus, contrasting the Reguard skills.

[Bad Dog]

Good suggestions. I like enhancing speechcraft -- horses are charismatic, after all. The racial characteristics should emphasize fast and strong. They should have a boost to swordplay if we're going to keep the Sword-Singer bit. 

 

Blaze, I think just post what you come up with so people can play, and I'll steal from it.

[Blaze69]

9 hours ago, Raydric said:

(also combining that they are hervivoros)

Hey, who says the horses here are herbivorous? They might enjoy some good steak here and there, you don't know that. ?

(Actually I guess that would be up to BD, but I would just make them omnivorous because otherwise the "lore" would contradict the PC being able to eat meat ingame and setting up maluses for eating meat or whatever feels like too much work for such a stupid and minor reason).

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The perfect spell for adventurers and especially for those who wear heavy armor, in addition to healing, gaining strength or stamina in combat, long trips in the deserts of Ali'kr of Hammerfell.

4 hours ago, CFU said:

The bit of backstory reminds me of the Mongols. How about replacing the 2-handed with smithing or alchemy? Even in the desert, calvary was always used to make highly mobile, fast fighters that hit hard. Everything else could fit with most conventional images if "horse warrior"

Sounds reasonable, I guess. Destruction -> Restoration and Two-Handed -> Smithing. Does that sound alright?

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Actually, is this 'backstory' set in stone?

As mentioned above, backstory is basically what BD whipped up as the description but fancied up a bit, so the race's lore would be up to him. I didn't have any other ideas and that one didn't sound bad at all so I simply rolled with it.

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Because in such a barren place like a desert being able to talk for trade is just as useful as foraging would be. Speechcraft could be a possible minor bonus, contrasting the Reguard skills.

2 hours ago, Bad Dog said:

Good suggestions. I like enhancing speechcraft -- horses are charismatic, after all. The racial characteristics should emphasize fast and strong.

The amount of skill bonuses/boosted skills is limited first by the amount of fields in the race data and second by the actual amount of bonuses vanilla races have (which IIRC is one less than the max available). So we can't really add more than one boost without removing others (assuming I'm not mistaken and there's indeed an empty slot in the vanilla setup, and even then that would be "unbalanced" with respect to vanilla races).

 

So assuming the two changes above are accepted and we also stick to the vanilla race limit of bonuses, that would leave only three skills to be replaced by Speechcraft: Archery, Block and Heavy Armor. All three sound fitting for "horse warrior" or "cavalry" to me, but I guess maybe Block would be the less fitting of them all. So does replacing Block with Speechcraft should be good, should it be one of the others, or should we just ignore "balance" and use the empty slot?

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They should have a boost to swordplay if we're going to keep the Sword-Singer bit. 

That's precisely why I gave them a +10 in One-Handed. Or do you mean a specific spell that increases sword damage or something? I assume that would be possible as well but I haven't set up effects like those so I'm not completely sure how to go around it.

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Blaze, I think just post what you come up with so people can play, and I'll steal from it.

Fair enough. I'll see if I can get it up before the weekend.

 

In other news, I did manage to take some shots that I think turned out alright so hopefully I'll have them posted soon as well.

[Blaze69]

Alright, so I managed to post the shots over at my blog. Here's an exclusive bonus one, because why not:

 

 

The others can be found in my latest blog entry:

Horses!

[Bad Dog]

I think your +10 one-handed is fine. Just making a generic point.

[rifted]

maybe something like Plainsrunning from wow beta for racial? longer you keep sprinting the faster you get up to a cap and revert to normal speed when you stop sprinting i think that would be a very thematic racial if it could be done.

maybe simpler version a power that makes you run faster till you take damage / enter combat

im very interested in some possible hoof like hand ideas i hope it isnt just a regular hoof at the end of the wrist though hoof like hands would be cool though

[Blaze69]

43 minutes ago, rifted said:

maybe something like Plainsrunning from wow beta for racial? longer you keep sprinting the faster you get up to a cap and revert to normal speed when you stop sprinting i think that would be a very thematic racial if it could be done.

maybe simpler version a power that makes you run faster till you take damage / enter combat

Enai's Morningstar has a Redguard race ability that makes them sprint faster and use less stamina, which could be fitting for this. Downside is they would end up with the same ability as Redguards for anyone using Morningstar, but the effect itself may be too good to skip it just because of this tiny fact.

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im very interested in some possible hoof like hand ideas i hope it isnt just a regular hoof at the end of the wrist though hoof like hands would be cool though

The only possible ref pic posted by Bad Dog so far has been this one:

Spoiler

 

Which as you may see it's basically a human hand with mini-hooves instead of fingers/nails/fingertips.

 

Searching on E6 for more refs yields mostly the same results, i.e. mini-hoof-tipped fingers, which range from "normal human fingers but with no nail and a shiny black tip" to "actual detailed mini-hooves".

 

Here's the few ones I've been able to dig up so far, to save some time and also in case there's any specific one people would like to be used as the reference or whatever.

(Disclaimer: images have been selected on the basis of whether they showcased hands with hoof-tipped fingers; the quality of the images themselves as a whole is not guaranteed, nor is the consistency of said quality. You have been warned).

Spoiler

Source: lizet

 

Source: lizet

 

Source: lizet

 

Source: brushfire

 

Source: goldenwolf

 

Source: wingedwolf

 

Source: rov

 

[poblivion]

With dark nipples would also look good

 

[CFU]

6 hours ago, Blaze69 said:

replacing Block with Speechcraft

Block is the least fitting, I agree.

So, @Bad Dog, how goes progress on the sheathing schlong?

[Blaze69]

11 hours ago, poblivion said:

With dark nipples would also look good

Spoiler

Yeah, that doesn't look bad at all. Certainly wouldn't mind having a texture like it (I mean the whole body, not just the nipples). Then again the belly and the white "sleeves" could be done with overlays instead of baking them into the base texture, but that would still need a new base body texture to match instead of just using the current edited Cellan one.

 

Anyhow, here's the revised info on the race:

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Name: Equine

Description: "The horse-like Equine race hails from the Ali'kr deserts of Hammerfell, where they dwell in close alliance with the Redguards. Little is know for certain about them, as even their existance is kept a secret and they are an extremely rare sight outside of their homeland. Legend goes they were the ones that taught the Sword-Singers of Yokuda their skills in a time long past."

 

Skill bonuses:

+10 One-Handed

+5 Smithing, Archery, Speechcraft, Heavy Armor, Restoration

 

Racial abilities:

--Equine Endurance

"Your hardness and strength provides extra protection against damage. The discomfort caused by wearing helmets reduces this effect."

+20 armor rating when not wearing a helmet, +8 otherwise.

 

--Stallion's Stride

"Equines sprint 30% faster and use much less stamina while sprinting."

+30% speed and carry weight and +5 stamina rate when sprinting.

 

As with the previous one, thoughts and suggestions are welcome.

[Bad Dog]

Texture comments noted.

 

I've played around with hoof-type fingertips but nothing I'm happy with yet. The above art is helpful.

 

Schlongs... I have a flaccid version I'm happy with but the whole mechanism was misbehaving. (Something about bone weights and HDT that I couldn't figure out.) I'll get back to it this weekend.