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

[ItalianDragon]

Hello folks !

I hope you're all safe in these troubled times just like I am.

I've spent the past days working on a translation for a client so my work on the femboy mod hasn't progressed much.
Tonight I felt motivated and spent some more time polishing and refining the mesh and I'm honestly really happy with how it's progressing.

 

Spoiler

As you can see it looks more and more like the mesh I'd made in Mudbox which means I'm also getting closer and closer to the actual detailing pass.

There are a few things I'll have to dig into like decimating and retopologizing the mesh.
Why so ? Well as you can read up top the mesh sits at 1.1 million polygons. Needless to say, if you load a mesh this big in Skyrim it's gonna break the game (and that's assuming you even manage to export it in the first place considering how .nif models break once you're past 65k polygons). That's where decimation and retopology come into play alongside normal maps to preserve this nice "HD" look for a fraction of the weight. I'm considering putting the limit to 2500 polys as it seems to be what other HD body mesh authors settled for and I presume that if they did stop to that limit it means it's a good compromise between definition and game load.

That's all for now folks !

Take care and stay safe !

[Yanazake]

Original OP here, and oh Geezums, you're doing some amazing job here!

 

I honestly forgot this existed and... Well, I'd change a few things like at least what the name was supposed to mean, but wow, you're way farther ahead than whatever I could have done for this mod!

 

For the first time in years I have a computer for myself again, even if it's just a laptop and thought "well, let's try skyrim again! Maybe I'll use bodyslide and craft a girlish boy body from UNP".

 

While I can try to make some bodyslide outfits with whatever is ready here, I'm not sure how else I could help.

 

 

There's one question in my head, tho... Are you still following my same focus? Like, making two male variants, one twink and one very girlish for a number of races?

[ItalianDragon]

2 hours ago, Yanazake said:

Original OP here, and oh Geezums, you're doing some amazing job here!

 

I honestly forgot this existed and... Well, I'd change a few things like at least what the name was supposed to mean, but wow, you're way farther ahead than whatever I could have done for this mod!

 

For the first time in years I have a computer for myself again, even if it's just a laptop and thought "well, let's try skyrim again! Maybe I'll use bodyslide and craft a girlish boy body from UNP".

 

While I can try to make some bodyslide outfits with whatever is ready here, I'm not sure how else I could help.

 

 

There's one question in my head, tho... Are you still following my same focus? Like, making two male variants, one twink and one very girlish for a number of races?

Heyo Yanazake ! Long time no see !

Glad you like what I've done (or am doing more like x) ).

Haha yeah I'm very stubborn so I just don't give up ^^
I'm particularily motivated by the fact that we used to be several folks working on a mod like that of our own and I seem to be the only one left who's still actively working on it, meaning that if I were to stop working on it we wouldn't get anything at all in that matter. So I just continue ^^

Well your help could be needed later on when the mesh is game-ready so it can get all the outfit of the game fit for it. I've experimented with that quite a bit and it's a rather time consuming process so extra help is welcome for that.

Well my focus is basically set on making one femboy variant to each existing vanilla race so you have Argonian- Argonian Femboy, Breton - Breton Femboy and so on. That way there's no risk of overlap and conflicts. For the whole animations aspect I'd tried to dig in on that but it didn't work out as well as I hoped so for that it'll mainly be relying on PCEA2 so that folks can pick & choose what they prefer.

So overall more simplicity and less risk of crashes/conflicts.

For the body mesh itself I'm working towards a full Bodyslide body so each player will be able to just tweak the body in any way he/she wants so there's no real need to make two variants anymore.

[Yanazake]

M'boii this is amazing! I will indeed do what I can with the bodyslide thing. For now, guess I'll look for a "quick and dirty" way of playing. I remember there was a breastless argonians mod, and I intended to use that as a personal placeholder as the model is basically vanilla.

[ItalianDragon]

5 hours ago, Yanazake said:

M'boii this is amazing! I will indeed do what I can with the bodyslide thing. For now, guess I'll look for a "quick and dirty" way of playing. I remember there was a breastless argonians mod, and I intended to use that as a personal placeholder as the model is basically vanilla.

Glad ya like

Another thing I forgot to mention is that I'm condiering adding an optional HDT anus version as while females have a plethora of options in that aspect (AIO HDT Pussy, Clams of Skyrim for example, just to name a few). male characters have a grand total of.... zero options. So I feel that adding that isn't a bad idea at all.

Downside to that is the complexity of the thing as from what I've seen HDT physics are a maix of weighting and rigging and that's a long and tedious process with plenty of complexities.

In the meantime indeed if you want to play you could get the latest bodyslide and just generate a flatchsted mesh and then add SoS's UNP addon. It's not as good as custoom-made meshes but it's better than nothing ^^

[ItalianDragon]

Hello folks !

It's the beginning of a new week and I have some more femboy news for everyone

 

I've worked more on the mesh in Zbrush and as far as I can tell I'm very much done in rebuilding the old mesh. It just need a few last touches here and there and that step will be complete. Next step will be the whole improvement aspect of it so I still have quite a bit of sculpting to do ^^

Here's the mesh as of now:
 

Spoiler

I was also thinking on how to proced next to ensure maximum compatibility. I was tempted to start from the most basic version (no HDT, no SoS gap so basically the equivalent of CBBE in its NeverNude version) but I quickly realized that if I was to do it in that order, I'd never have the definition needed to do the more detailed ones or the BodySlide version as it requires quite the amount of geometry to provide an acceptable level of definition and shape smoothness. So instead I'll go the other way around, ergo starting from the full HDT + SoS and basically making a version each time with "less stuff".

Now there are other things I'll have to look into such as how to make sure the gap for the SoS penis mesh has the right size as it's something I don't really know how I should approach it. There's also the "how to export the sculpt as the thin mesh that is used ingame" part which I don't know how to do just yet but hopefully that one is simple enough to do. Plenty more searching in perspective ^^

That's about it for now folks.

Take care and stay safe !

[Blaze69]

7 hours ago, ItalianDragon said:

Now there are other things I'll have to look into such as how to make sure the gap for the SoS penis mesh has the right size as it's something I don't really know how I should approach it.

You should be able to export the SOS schlong meshes from either NifSkope or Outfit Studio as OBJs and import them into ZBrush as reference for the vertex position and count. You need to make sure the number of vertices at the seam is exactly the same across both meshes, because mismatched vertices will cause gaps when animating or interpolating to get the shape for weights 1-99 even if the 0 and 100 weight nifs are seamless.

 

Do note that NifSkope export applies a x10 scale on meshes (not sure why), so either export from Outfit Studio instead (which should give you the actual final scale used in the nif) or export from NifSkope but remember to scale your meshes x0.1 right before getting them rigged/ingame.

Quote

There's also the "how to export the sculpt as the thin mesh that is used ingame" part which I don't know how to do just yet but hopefully that one is simple enough to do.

The _0 and _1 meshes must have the exact same vertex count and order, as well as bone weights, shader properties, etc. The only difference between them should be the vertex positions. I know ZBrush can move vertices around without changing their count or order (AFAIK that's how Nightro sculpts the shark heads for my race mod), but I don't know the exact process for that.

 

Even then, it's probably better to get one mesh ingame as a working nif first (either _0 or _1, whichever one you prefer) and then create the other weight version using it as a base.

[ItalianDragon]

5 hours ago, Blaze69 said:

The _0 and _1 meshes must have the exact same vertex count and order, as well as bone weights, shader properties, etc. The only difference between them should be the vertex positions. I know ZBrush can move vertices around without changing their count or order (AFAIK that's how Nightro sculpts the shark heads for my race mod), but I don't know the exact process for that.

 

Even then, it's probably better to get one mesh ingame as a working nif first (either _0 or _1, whichever one you prefer) and then create the other weight version using it as a base.

No I meant as in "how do I export it as a body mesh like the other ones and not like a statick mesh". Body meshes are basically hollow shells and I don't really know how to achieve that ?

[Yanazake]

3 hours ago, ItalianDragon said:

No I meant as in "how do I export it as a body mesh like the other ones and not like a statick mesh". Body meshes are basically hollow shells and I don't really know how to achieve that ?

Oh, that, did you do the retopology part? You sculpted it, but if the polygons are already where they should be, I believe you skipped something.

That said, I barely know how to mess with Blender, and it's what I was using for small edits or personal creations in the past.

[ItalianDragon]

49 minutes ago, Yanazake said:

Oh, that, did you do the retopology part? You sculpted it, but if the polygons are already where they should be, I believe you skipped something.

That said, I barely know how to mess with Blender, and it's what I was using for small edits or personal creations in the past.

Oh that's with the retopo ?
It should be easy enough to do then since Zbrush does that on its own with Zremesher but I honestly haven't toyed with it juet yet.
Thanks for the info !

[ItalianDragon]

Hello folks !

Sorry for the lengthy silence, I've been quite busy IRL so updating the thread slipped my mind quite a bit.

So you'll be happy to hear that I've been practicing far and wide with Zbrush and the program feels now very easy to use. I might've had some rough beginnings with it but it's really grown on me. I've sculped a practice mesh of sorts to learn how to use the tools and experiment on the whole procedure to follow for a game ready asset.
So the first thing that is pretty great is that Zbrush has an integrated UV mapping tool who is quite intuitive to use. If it doesn't satisfy me I can always rely on 3Ds max for that who has a relatively accessible UV mapping tool (although nowhere near as accessible as Zbrush's).

As of now I'm banging my head on the normal map baking mainly because my test mesh, just like the rebuilt femboy mesh uses the dynamesh feature instead of relying on levels of detail. Due to that I'm tinkering around trying to figure out how to render the normal map. I did try using xNormal and while it did render something it pretty much was a dud. I attempted the procedure using Substance Painter but the result wasn't exactly better. So there's clearly something I'm doing wrong somewhere and I just don't quite know what. So, more digging in perspective.

THis search will have to wait a bit as I've upgraded my PC a bit (new PSU and new AIO cooler) and unfortunately said AIO has a particularily noisy pump so I'm sending it back for RMA. So for a bit I won't have a useable PC although I'll be able to stay in touch with my phone. As for the "why" of the upgrade ? Well my trusty H80i that served me well since 2015 had gotten quite loud and given my hearing issues, the less noise the better so I've bought on a whim a H150i RGB PRO XT. Going from a small rad to a 360mm one did a lot of good to my CPU (and my ears ). The reason is almost the same behind the PSU swap: while it was still working fine it was 7 years old (!) and so it was time to retire it. It had the net upgrade of improving system stability overall and well, a more stable PC means better productivity

That's about it for now. I'll keep you posted on any progress I make.

Take care and stay safe !

 

[ItalianDragon]

Hello folks !

I have a small progress picture for you before my AIO RMA-induced hiatus !

 

Spoiler

Of course a lot of the detailing is still WIP but I'm really happy with how it's going on.
Also you'll be happy to hear that I finally nailed the baking of a normal map with the test model ! I'm still not 100% sure what I was doing wrong but I did get a normal map baked. I'll have to look into ways of giving it more detail and all that (the map was pretty decent but I felt that I could get more detail out of the hi-poly model but maybe it's just me).

That's all for now folks and hopefully I'll have some more news soon enough

Take care and stay safe !

[ItalianDragon]

Hello folks !

At last my PC is back online !
The RMA process was longer than I thought mainly because the shipping of my cooler to Corsair for RMA took forever.
I've also dodged a major bullet regarding that as when I popped the case open to take it out and ship it after a bit of Warframe and Elder Scrolls Online I was greeted by a strong smell of wiper fluid. Wiper fluid contains ethylene glycol and it's also an ingredient of the coolant used in AIO's. Needless to say smelling that coming from what is supposed to be a closed loop is VERY abnormal. I didn't find any traces of liquid damage anywhere in the PC (thankfully) so I think I avoided a disaster by a hair's breath.

The replacement one is quieter and runs noticeably cooler. For reference I used to have the coolant hit 38 °C with an ambient temp of 23-24°C when under load. The replacement hits 26 °C under load with an ambient temp of 30°C in the same conditions. This also confirms that the strange noise I was hearing was abnormal and likely what I suspected AKA the pump sucking in a mixture of coolant and air resulting in worse cooling and abnormal pump noise. So overall a narrow save that prevented a potentially catastrophic disaster.

Mod-wise I've spent the downtime looking at tutorials regarding Substance Painter/Designer and I did find what I was looking for which is the proper export settings for Bethesda games. Now while the tutorial I found was for Fallout 4 since Substance Painter won't export as a DDS directly it means that I should be able to get the right format for Skyrim by sending the files through Photoshop for a quick "import-export" process.

That's unfortunately all I've been able to do during this downtime but now with the PC back online I should be able to do a lot more research and progress vastly more quickly than before ^^

That's all for now folks !

Take care and stay safe !

[ItalianDragon]

Hello folks !

Sorry for the long silence on my end ^^

To compensate for that I have some pretty great news ! I've finally ironed out the kinks of the modelling/Exporting/UVMapping part and I've finally managed to get my test sculpt exported, UVMapped and with a proper normal map working in Outfit Studio . Since the workflow for Skyrim/SSE is pretty much identical it means that it'll work just as well for the femboy body .

 

I've also been working on practicing my painting skills in Substance Painter and thankfully things are going relatively well. While the software is pretty new to me it's not too far from Photoshop (which I'm very familiar with) and so I've fairly rapidly gotten used to it. I've dropped the idea of using Substance Designer completely as the program is way too complex. Perhaps I'll muter the courage to dive in it and do stuff with it but for now it's outside of the scope of the mod.

I haven't been able to work on the mod as much as I wish I'd have mainly due to the scorching temperatures we're getting here (I've hit 33°C/89.6°F in side my apartment (!)) and even at night time temperatures only decrease slightly (never gotten below 25°C/77°F, even in the middle of the night). Needless to say it's difficult to work when you're sweating bullets and getting heat-induced headaches.

I'll be leaving tomorrow for my usual two weeks of vacations so during that time I won't be able to work on the mod. Rest assured though that once I'm back I'll resume working on it.

Orders of the day when I'll be back will be:

- Continuing to sculpt the...
 

Spoiler

(I'm pretty sure you weren't expecting a Beavis & Butthead joke )

(I did say I wanted anus physics for the mod after all ^^.).

- Working on practicing the weight painting because just like the name implies... it's a pain. Thankfully the latest versions of Outfit Studio have made the process more and more simple and accessible although it still remains a challenging process and it's pretty much essential to get it right if you don't want the mesh to behave strangely when it gets animated (strangeness ranging from weird deformations to flat out clipping through other meshes).

 

So I'm definitely making progress but there's still a long way to go before I can finally push out some sort of "beta" release for everyone ^^
After that once it's fine and proper the whole mesh conversion part will start ^^

That's all for now folks !

Stay safe (and refreshed) !

[Ashen1]

On 7/30/2020 at 10:24 AM, ItalianDragon said:

I haven't been able to work on the mod as much as I wish I'd have mainly due to the scorching temperatures we're getting here (I've hit 33°C/89.6°F in side my apartment (!)) and even at night time temperatures only decrease slightly (never gotten below 25°C/77°F, even in the middle of the night). Needless to say it's difficult to work when you're sweating bullets and getting heat-induced headaches.

Make sure you stay hydrated, I also suggest getting a portable A/C unit. 

Source: Me (my hvac system went out at the beginning of summer and I just got it fixed today) 

Stay healthy and hydrated?

[ItalianDragon]

On 8/13/2020 at 4:46 AM, Ashen1 said:

Make sure you stay hydrated, I also suggest getting a portable A/C unit. 

Source: Me (my hvac system went out at the beginning of summer and I just got it fixed today) 

Stay healthy and hydrated?

Given my diabetes insipidus I drink at the bare minimum a gallon a day during the summer so it helps somewhat. Unfortunately I handle heat pretty poorly so even with that I'm toast x_X I did look at portable A/C but they're noisy and I have pretty nasty hearing issues so ?

[Ashen1]

Damn that sucks. Thankfully autumn is just around the corner, so you wont have to suffer for long.?

 

 

PS. I also just realized the funeral urn emoji looks like a butt plug ⚱️    

[Melphegor_Star]

Hey there is no version of this mod for the SSE?

[ItalianDragon]

On 8/28/2020 at 9:36 PM, Melphegor_Star said:

Hey there is no version of this mod for the SSE?

Since the mod is unreleased for now no (I'm still working on it after all). However I'll port it to SSE and Fallout 4 after I've released it in a stable fashion for Oldrim

[Melphegor_Star]

52 minutes ago, ItalianDragon said:

Dado que el mod no ha sido lanzado por ahora, no (todavía estoy trabajando en él después de todo). Sin embargo, lo trasladaré a SSE y Fallout 4 después de haberlo lanzado de manera estable para Oldrim.

OK thank you for answering

[ItalianDragon]

Hello folks.

Just a quick update for everyone.
Hit an unexpected hurdle in the shape of my GPU starting to artifact when playing Fallout 4 yesterday. Did an emergency repaste but it was too late and the card is basically half dead (getting artifacting all over the screen and drivers refuse to work no matter what). SO it's safe to say my trusty GPU has a foot into the grave.
I've bought a used Nitro version of it who will hopefully show up by they end of next week at its earliest so until then I won't be able to work on the mod as performance is now not great and borderlining on unstable.

This means that for a bit the work on the mod will be on hold but rest assured I'll get back on it as soon as I have a worthy replacement

[ItalianDragon]

Hello everyone !

At last since Monday I've been back online with the second hand Fury Nitro (slightly more powerful version of the GPU I had before) and I've been able to test out some things for practice.

I found an excellent plugin for mesh weighting but unfortunately it requires a rig to function and the one I found not only is for Max but also uses the default bodies. There's one for Maya but it's for female bodies. I was looking into it as weight preview in Outfit Studio can be a bit troublesome sometimes and I was wondering if there was a better option around. There's a few more options on that matter I want to explore but of course if those don't work out I'll just use OutfitStudio and be done with it.

That's about all for now (which isn't much unfortunately).

Take care and stay safe !

[Yanazake]

On 9/19/2020 at 9:22 PM, ItalianDragon said:

Hello everyone !

At last since Monday I've been back online with the second hand Fury Nitro (slightly more powerful version of the GPU I had before) and I've been able to test out some things for practice.

I found an excellent plugin for mesh weighting but unfortunately it requires a rig to function and the one I found not only is for Max but also uses the default bodies. There's one for Maya but it's for female bodies. I was looking into it as weight preview in Outfit Studio can be a bit troublesome sometimes and I was wondering if there was a better option around. There's a few more options on that matter I want to explore but of course if those don't work out I'll just use OutfitStudio and be done with it.

That's about all for now (which isn't much unfortunately).

Take care and stay safe !

I was thinking about using outfit studio myself, but I couldn't because for the longest time I was stuck with JUST a raspberry Pi and a lame laptop. Got a decent pc now even if it's just integrated graphics. Question now is, we should seriously consider outfit studio to speed this up - it's been years with little progress, and with that we can easily convert stuff no matter the version of the game. I need to get back at it, It's been probably over four years since I actually tried to mess with skyrim at all due to lack of hardware.

I'll try to get Outfit Studio again and check the options available in there.


ALSO, I UPDATED THE FIRST POST WITH SOME THINGS, AND REMOVED SOME BAD WORDING.

[ItalianDragon]

Hello folks !

Sorry for the silence on my end.

So what have I been up to ?
Well texturing, tons and tons of texturing practice. While Substance Painter is very similar to Photoshop it has its own quirks like the lack of a magic wand-style tool and that makes some texturing habits I took from photoshop a bit... problematic to say the least.
On a positive note I did manage to get my test mesh (who isn't femboy related at all really) forking in Fallout 4 textures and all so I can quite confidently say that I have the process fairly well ironed. The only problem I'm facing is that the specular map won't generate but I don't know if it's an issue with how I picked the mateiral preset ofr how I've been working. WHile I can generate one by hand in photoshop, letting Painter do its thing yields massively better results (obviously).

I didn't work much on the sculpt lately (because well, I was focused on the texturing practice) and also because work on my end suddenly spiked so I've had to focus on that obviously. That said I feel that I'm closing in on the end of the whole process. Texturing in Painter really isn't that difficult and the sculpt is basically 90% complete (just need the anus part and some tweaking here and there). Perhaps I'll be able to get something playable for everyone as some sort of beta by the end of the year if things go as smoothly as I hope they will (which as you've probably realized if you've followed this thread for long enough, that isn't something that always happens unfortunately).

Regarding the usual end-of-year plans for once... I don't know. I usually celebrate Christmas with relatives and then go abroad as usual but as you're well aware with COVID everything is a big mess (hell we're back under quarantine here since new cases are going through the roof). Officially quarantine is supposed to last only one month but I honestly don't know if it will be extended (or not). So maybe I'll be abroad as usual, maybe I won't, depending from how it'll evolve. The usual train trip (which I already have the tickets for) is kinda in a limbo and so much in the same way I can't really say if I'll be able to work on the mod in late December. If I'm stuck here in quarantine I'll just work on it as usual. If I'm not well I'll resume once I'm back from vacations as usual.

That's about it for now folks. Take care and stay safe !

[ItalianDragon]

7 hours ago, Yanazake said:

I was thinking about using outfit studio myself, but I couldn't because for the longest time I was stuck with JUST a raspberry Pi and a lame laptop. Got a decent pc now even if it's just integrated graphics. Question now is, we should seriously consider outfit studio to speed this up - it's been years with little progress, and with that we can easily convert stuff no matter the version of the game. I need to get back at it, It's been probably over four years since I actually tried to mess with skyrim at all due to lack of hardware.

I'll try to get Outfit Studio again and check the options available in there.


ALSO, I UPDATED THE FIRST POST WITH SOME THINGS, AND REMOVED SOME BAD WORDING.

Heyo Yanazake !

Well OutfitStudio has evolved quite a bit over time so you'll find new functions that you can work with in it even better.
Glad you got an upgrade on your end (even if it's a small one ^^).
Now for your question I'd say yes for BodySlide/Outfit Studio because the list of armors/outfits in the game is really really long so doing them by hand woul be a huge pain (especially considering how you gotta do it twice, once for each "slim" and "fat" mesh).

Also I checked your updated post and on my end I'm 100% gonna make it work with beast races as well. Thanks to a friend who showed me a nifty trick, I now have an easy way to transfer existing textures to a new model using xNormals. This theoretically means that I'd be able to pretty much add a femboy version of custom races like Selachii, Lungarii, etc...

Mounted combat/dragon riding will be a non-issue since the skeleton will be identical to a "regular" race. I however haven't started looking at the werebear/werewolf/vampire transformations. From the digging I've done in the game's files those are just one mesh but are registered as an entirely separate race. So theoretically speaking it'd be possible to make a custom body mesh for those transforms who'd apply only to the custom femboy race but that's something I haven't looked into at all. From a theoretical standpoint however they should work just fine with the vanilla transformation meshes. Maybe releasing an update that adds those at a later date is something we could do. Normal map making is something I'll do with Substance Painter (I'll make the textures myself so I'll make those as well).

For the tri file for the head mesh I did bump in the issue when working in Outfit studio as I needed the neck part for some high collared outfits but I didn't find a way to fix it unfortunately. I suppose it stems from the lack of weight slider for the head or something of that order. As for the smol khajiits and argonians, on my end I'll make the body mesh work with all the races so they'll inherit the same body. I'll just have to look into making proper textures for them too. My main upcoming headache will be texture matching between what the head's and the body's (along with hands and feet too obviously).