[Wip] Official Tnt Custom Race Thread - Or, What The Femboy Idea Turned Into

[Jarka Ruus]

11 hours ago, Savren said:

I don't know what is femboy definition here but i do like feminin boy. But with shape of boy because i love male and their shape. This is my femboy version. Maybe i can find another version of femboy in this thread. Interesting. 

 

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That's really good, are you using the male body?

Anyway I think the definition changes from person to person, some like them more masculine, like you, others prefer them to be extremely feminine and others, such as myself, a medium between the two.

[SavrenX]

Yes im totally use male assets. 

[Jarka Ruus]

10 hours ago, Savren said:

Yes im totally use male assets. 

That's impressive, honestly I don't know if there's anything like this here, most of the bodies are based on female assets.

If you wish you can share it, pretty sure there would be people interested and I think having more variety is never a bad thing.

[SavrenX]

2 hours ago, Jarka Ruus said:

That's impressive, honestly I don't know if there's anything like this here, most of the bodies are based on female assets.

If you wish you can share it, pretty sure there would be people interested and I think having more variety is never a bad thing.

For the body i'm using SAM body. This body mod got smooth normal map and skin. You can reduce all size within racemenu. Literally you can make very skinny feminin boy with real shape of male. My other pic maybe can explain more. we can have smooth, skinny even muscle femboy. 

 

But this is my way to make femboy. So i don't want to force anything. I just show alternative.

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[SavrenX]

That way i don't have trouble with any male assets ( hair, eye, head tri, ect ) even armor.

[Jarka Ruus]

3 hours ago, Savren said:

That way i don't have trouble with any male assets ( hair, eye, head tri, ect ) even armor.

Did it take long getting the face to look that good? One of the reasons why I stay away from male meshes is how hard it is to get the face looking just like I want, while it's much easier starting from the female head mesh.

[SavrenX]

If about face, well we must combine it from other map face of course and sculpt it. But face is not a big problem for me than refit whole armor for this new female body ( flat chest need proper refit ). Plus i still love the boy in male boy form. 

[Jarka Ruus]

2 hours ago, Savren said:

If about face, well we must combine it from other map face of course and sculpt it. But face is not a big problem for me than refit whole armor for this new female body ( flat chest need proper refit ). Plus i still love the boy in male boy form. 

I understand, converting armors can be really tedious.

[tacobandit]

On 1/17/2018 at 7:07 AM, Savren said:

For the body i'm using SAM body. This body mod got smooth normal map and skin. You can reduce all size within racemenu. Literally you can make very skinny feminin boy with real shape of male. My other pic maybe can explain more. we can have smooth, skinny even muscle femboy. 

 

But this is my way to make femboy. So i don't want to force anything. I just show alternative.

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So what face meshes did you use? Because those look fantastic!

[SavrenX]

5 hours ago, tacobandit said:

 

So what face meshes did you use? Because those look fantastic!

No custom mesh. It just vanilla male head. I just messing with head tri and made some custom map + textures.

[tacobandit]

14 hours ago, Savren said:

No custom mesh. It just vanilla male head. I just messing with head tri and made some custom map + textures.

 

Fancy, morphing is something I just never got the hang of, but you seem to be good at it!

[ItalianDragon]

Hello everyone !

I wanted to apologize for my lengthy silence. Plenty of things happened IRL which made my modworking a bit of a pain.
I've continued to look at the animation problems I was having and I may have found a suitable solution to it, namely PCEA2.
It allows the player to use any animation set he/she wants regardless of the gender. I gave it a try both with a vanilla character (dark elf) with the catwalk animation (this one: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/5053 ) and it works perfectly fine.
I just did a test with the femboy race and it works just fine as well. So the next step on that field would be assembling a package of animations that I'd ship alongside the race to have fitting animations. The bonus of proceeding like that is that if a player doesn't like the animation I chose, he/she can freely change it with an another one that better suits the player.

That's all for now, I'll make sure to keep you updated as soon as I have something new.

[ItalianDragon]

So I have another quick update for you all.

I did manage to get an armor to show up on the femboy race. Like you can tell from the screenshot, it's not exactly a "perfect fit", as it uses the male meshes all over.
I'm looking in the process to tell the game to use different meshes for a specific race and from what I can tell it's totally doable (I just have to understand clearly how to do that). For instance its what happens with Argonians/Khajiits (they use different meshes for the helmets as example).

I've also looked at how to add SoS to the body with the documentation that is given by the team who made SoS and it seems relatively straightforward. I'll try in the upcoming days to add SoS to the body and see if everything works well.

Also, I've noticed that there's a slight color mismatch between the head and the body with the race. It's almost unnoticeable when you're looking from afar but up close it's noticeable so I'll have to look into resolving that.

That's all for now folks !

PS: Happy birthday to me. 28 candles on a cake (damn time sure flies xD ).
 

[ItalianDragon]

So I've made the "fat" mesh for the race. I'm not as satisfied as I was with the "slim" one but if necessary I'll refine it some more in Mudbox and 3DS Max.
As usual do tell me what you think of it

[Newbie2015]

Hi. Happy birthday to you,  i wish you all the best and thank you for working on this mod. Good luck.

[ItalianDragon]

On 19/2/2018 at 8:16 PM, Newbie2015 said:

Hi. Happy birthday to you,  i wish you all the best and thank you for working on this mod. Good luck.

Thanks ! And you're very welcome.

Speaking about the mod, I tried to test the newly created mesh but ended with a garbled mess.I looked at the structure of the skeleton with NifSkope and sure enough it's all out of whack again. I'll either try to reorder it by hand or try to find a way to freeze the skeleton and (hopefully) prevent this mess.

EDIT: For whatever reason I reorder the bones in NifSkope (they're just offset by two in the list so bone 8 should be bone 6,etc....) and save but then reload the mesh, the reordering I just did isn't saved at all IDK why it's happening but it's pretty damn frustrating :\

[SoulMystique]

On 2/19/2018 at 12:05 PM, ItalianDragon said:

So I've made the "fat" mesh for the race. I'm not as satisfied as I was with the "slim" one but if necessary I'll refine it some more in Mudbox and 3DS Max.
As usual do tell me what you think of it

 

Full. Body. Boipussy.

[ItalianDragon]

Hello everyone !

It's update time for the femboy mod, and a lot of things have happened since my last post. Due to that there's all sorts of news.

So the first one is that I managed to find someone to help me out figuring out my mesh issues on the Nexus's Discord server in the person of Death Octimus.
The reason for those was that the method I used to make them playable (copy-paste over branch in NifSkope) is a good idea but it's better meant for items such as armors, clothes or static objects. However it's ill suited for more complex (structurally speaking) nifs such as player bodies.
Due to that I sadly had to accept that those meshes weren't going to do the trick to meet an acceptable level of quality in the game. However smart me had had the idea of backing up the BodySlide preset I had made so recreating the bodies wasn't an issue.

Speaking of issues there was another issues with the bodies.
As some folks here probably remember, I had an issue a long while back, where subdividing with Mudbox would give me all sorts of weird faces and such. To circumvent that I had to quadrify the whole mesh to get it to work in Mudbox. The problem is that in doing so, I messed up the NiSkin modifier of the mesh, which in turn caused all sorts of issues with the mesh.

Long story short, the meshes were broken in many many ways.

I figured that with the new help I had and 2018 having just began I'd start anew on that end.
So, I have gotten the latest version of BodySlide/OutfitStudio, AKA BodySlide 2.
The transposition process was a bit of a pain as there's a large gap of versions between the version I used to make the meshes back then and the latest one (I used BodySlide v. 2.0.0.10 to make the bodies back in 2014 and the version I downloaded to start anew is v. 4.4.2). I had to basically screenshot the slider values and remake a body preset in BodySlide 2 that had those exact same values. While there is an option to export the slider preset you make in the software so you can import it, the large gap in versions caused that process to simply not work.

Now this switch also has an excellent advantage and that is a de facto compatibility with Skyrim SE and Fallout 4. This means that with a bit of work a femboy body/race is a possibility for these games as well.

The knowledge of Death Octimus also helped me on another aspect and that is the workflow I was following. It was as follows: import nif in 3ds Max, export the mesh as obj, import in Mudbox, modify it, export it as an obj, import it back in 3ds Max, export it as a nif and then do the copy-paste branch process.
Now he informed me that there was a much simpler solution to such a complicated workflow and that was to simply get 3ds Max 2016. The reason is that from what I've been able to see, Mudbox is gradually being integrated into 3ds Max. Due to that, Mudbox is gradually becoming a bit obsolete.

This new integration means that the whole quadrification process in Maya is now unnecessary, as a plugin to enable Nif support for that version of Max exists. This single handedly resolved a good part of the issues I was having.

Since I had also kept the older meshes, I attempted to follow the tutorial ousnius made, which suggested the usage of the ShrinkwrapModifiers.
However that process (done in Maya 2017) proved to be pretty unreliable, as sometimes the process seemed to work, other times only partly and even not at all sometimes.
That's when my good samaritan offered to help me with the modelling process, directly in Max 2016, an offer I gladly accepted.

Thanks to his help the mod has progressed at a dramatic rate: the "slim" body has been at a record pace (just an hour or so), this time with a proper NiSkin. This means that the textures work with it right out of the bat. I've also been able to create the proper conversion reference (CBBE Slim to what I'm calling from now on Femboy Slim) without having to fiddle with the textures as I used to have to do.

As of now I have to remake the "fat" mesh which like I had mentioned, wasn't fully meeting my expectations and the chain of events that happened in the past two weeks will help me in making one I'll be happy with.

With his help I'll also start working on custom textures for the body for a proper femboy look.

Thanks to all that I'm expecting to get the mod working properly and maybe a beta release a lot sooner than I thought (no clear date on that as of now but that will probably change).


That's all for now (contrary to the usual posts I make there was a lot to say here for once ).
As usual I'll keep you all posted on the progress on the mod and I hope that by next time I'll have news as exciting as these

 

[SoulMystique]

Huzzah

[Marisa Kirisame]

But... it still uses CBBE UVs, right?

[Findri]

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[ItalianDragon]

On 12/3/2018 at 10:40 AM, Marisa Kirisame said:

But... it still uses CBBE UVs, right?

The UV's are indeed unchanged.

[ItalianDragon]

Hello everyone !

I wanted to apologise for the very very lengthy silence on my end, as I was both busy IRL and had some mildly serious issues with my PC (two DIMM slots on my motherboard died, K.O.-ing my PC for about a week).

Modding-wise I've been searching far and wide for a solution to the dreaded "T-pose" bug I have when I switch behaviour files but that search didn't bring my any help. I did find that some folks were having that happening to their characters but it happened as a bug of unknown causes and its never been a result the player wanted (the whole point of these topics in general were "My male character is using female animations ! How do I fix that ?"). I attempted to test the behaviour file switch on Skyrim SE for testing purposes but the editor for it game me quite a few eyebrow-raising results. For instance the SE Creation Kit instead of picking the behaviour files from SE's files was fetching the one Oldrim uses. I scouted the files to find the behaviors SE uses but I simply could not find the files at all.

As one of the last shots I can think of I messaged Fore, the author of FNIS to see if he had any idea about what was happening when I'd switch behavior files and how to fix it. So far I haven't received any response so I'll keep you posted on that. I'm planning on messaging manslay3r on youtube, who is the man who makes the  "GamerPoop" video series. Why messaging him in particular ? Well, to put it simply, in a few of his skyrim videos he pulls off the whole "looks like a sexy lady but actually is a burly nord" scenes, with the proper body and animations. I've been thinking about asking him how he pulled that off as it can give me a potential solution.

 

Another potential solution would be making behavior files specifically for the race but from the documentation I've seen to managed to do that it looks insanely complicated (I expected it to not exactly being easy but not that extreme) so I'm not pushing that way very hard.

If all that is for naught, well I'll just go for the PCEA2 route, as much as it annoys me in a way (I don't like to make a mod that has a list of requirements that is like half a mile long).

I've also delved deeper into OutfitStudio to get a better understanding of the software. This has been a useful thing to do as I realized that I was doing my outfit conversion wrong as I'd download the "ready to use" armor and load it up in OutfitStudio and then proceed to make the changes manually to get the outfit to match the body. The actual proper solution is as simple as loading up your body preset in BodySlide and selecting the outfit you want in the drop list. Now this solution makes the conversion very very simple (it's quite literally a "load up- export" process). However the problem (a minor one however) is that to ensure a perfect fit with the femboy body that process has to be done twice: you need to load the vanilla femboy body (the  female body I generated with BodySlide) to match the outfit properly, export the outfit from BodySlide, load up Outfit Studio, load the femboy body and then import the outfit mesh, conform the shape to the mesh and then (at last) export the final mesh that can be assigned in the CK so it is usable in Skyrim.

I'd have like to have a simpler process but alas that's the only workflow I found that gives the best results. Importing the outfit directly in Outfit Studio and conforming it right out of the box leaves much to be desired with a good amount of outfits as it struggles to conform the outfit to the body when there are dramatic changes in body shapes (for example if you were doing a conversion from 7B Bombshell to UNP Skinny). The software does conform the shape but leaves large gaps between the body and the outfit which need to be fixed by hand which, from what I've attempted get results that vary from "This looks fantastic !" to "Oh god why....". The biggest culprits of the latter case are complex armors with plenty of geometry that requires fine tuning (the armors from TERA or the Merta Assassin armor are examples of this) and armors who have very large breast sizes as you need to dramatically shrink those to fit the body accordingly, a process that is difficult to achieve without royally effing up the shape of the armor.

I've also bought a tutorial off Cubebrush for a small price (35 bucks) that covers a full modelling process from start to finish (starting from the basic modelling and ending up with the texture making/baking). Now since I'm merely modfying the shapes BodySlide made the first part isn't particularily relevant to this mod but the texturing part is particularily important, as I don't know Substance Painter 2 very well. From the tutorial itself I've been able to start tinkering with SP2 and making some texturing practice.

On a less important side I've been setting up the mods required to make some nice screenshots for the mod once it's complete (it's a very minor thing but I thought I'd share regardless ^^).

That's all for now folks. I'll keep you posted as usual on the mod, whether I make progress or face some roadblocks.

Cheers !
 

[offnightmare]

On 1/17/2018 at 5:07 AM, Savren said:

For the body i'm using SAM body. This body mod got smooth normal map and skin. You can reduce all size within racemenu. Literally you can make very skinny feminin boy with real shape of male. My other pic maybe can explain more. we can have smooth, skinny even muscle femboy. 

 

But this is my way to make femboy. So i don't want to force anything. I just show alternative.

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Wow those faces look really good.

[ItalianDragon]

Hello everyone !

I just wanted to post a quick update on the progress I've made on the mod.
I've continued to work on the "fat" mesh and I'm getting pretty close to a satisfactory result. As it stands now the mesh needs a bit more polishing but it's essentially in its final state (check the screenshot attached to the post ^^).

I'm still looking at the way to get race-specific armor meshes but I haven't found a lot of helpful info, mainly because race modding to the extent of what I'm doing is rare (most people from what I can see simply make reskins of existing races and that's about it). I'm pretty sure it's perfectly doable as in vanilla Skyrim, Khajiit and Argonians have specific meshes so there is a way to achieve that, I just need to figure out what the process is.

Alternatively I could add the armors as standalone but I'm not enthusiastic about doing that, as it'd add unnecessary cluttering to the item pool and the last thing I want is to have mod users having to sort out two dozen variants of the same armor. I'm considering getting the Tera Elin race and pulling it apart in the CK to see how that aspect is handled so I can replicate it.

That's all for now and as usual I'll keep you posted.

Cheers !