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

[Ashen1]

22 hours ago, ItalianDragon said:

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).

Have any screenshots? You know what they say, "two heads are better than one". ?

[ItalianDragon]

28 minutes ago, Ashen1 said:

Have any screenshots? You know what they say, "two heads are better than one". ?

Sure thing. For the record I'm using the SoS slider in Outfit Studio directly.

Low weight
 

Spoiler

 

High weight

 

Spoiler

 

 

I did look into the game's files and the head is just called "malehead". There's just no "_0/_1" associated with it. IDK how bethesda got the whole thing working to be honest. To make things more confusing there isn't just one .tri file associated with male heads but two. You have for example "malehead.tri" for the generic male body (which is the one in the pics pretty much), and then there's "maleheadraces.tri". If you have an idea of how it works it'd be of great help because I'm honestly quite perplexed.

[Ashen1]

I Think (somebody fact check me) one of them (race I think) is for facegen. head.tri I think is the base but don't quote me on it. ?

 

Edit: are you gonna use the male head for the race?

[ItalianDragon]

31 minutes ago, Ashen1 said:

I Think (somebody fact check me) one of them (race I think) is for facegen. head.tri I think is the base but don't quote me on it. ?

Possible. Maybe the second one then is for the weight slider ? Who knows.
I should tinker with that and see what happens.

[Ashen1]

17 hours ago, ItalianDragon said:

Possible. Maybe the second one then is for the weight slider ? Who knows.
I should tinker with that and see what happens.

I'll mess around with the files and the creation kit and see what I come up with.?

[ItalianDragon]

5 hours ago, Ashen1 said:

I'll mess around with the files and the creation kit and see what I come up with.?

All righty
If you figure out how it works that'll be fantastic

[ItalianDragon]

Hello folks !

I have some more femboy-related news for you all

I've worked some more on the model and started working on the whole "HDT Anus" part I'd mentioned before. I did hit quite a hurdle as in my usual Dynamesh approach wouldn't work (for whatever reason) which caused quite the problem as the newly dug in mesh part was awfully low resolution (think like Nintendo 64 games basically). Took me some tinkering and some asking around but I did end up finding a proper solution which makes me very happy.

So here's a WIP of how it looks like as of now:

 

Spoiler

The dark part is just a mask I've placed so that I don't deform the model outside ^^. I'm honestly very happy with how well this is coming together and this way of adding detail will come in handy for the pelvis part and the nipple sculpt as those involve very fine detail and I'm having doubts regular dynameshing will do the trick given this hurdle I've bumped into.

Regarding the end of year plans I still have no idea if I'll be able to leave or not. Tickets are booked but I am in limbo on whether they'll be useable or not as the government said that they'll "consider easing the restrictions from December 1st onward". So maybe as a Christmas gift you'll get a beta mesh to play with, maybe not, depends how things will evolve. Personally I have some serious doubts about the feasibility of the trip as the spike in cases was extremely high (we hit 86850 new cases in a single day (!!!) ) and knowing how people act like if there's no more pandemic once the lockdown is lifted I wouldn't be even remotely surprised if we're still locked down like this until late January.

 

Regardless of what may happen I'll keep you posted on any progress I'll make ^^

Take care people and stay safe !

[MeesterYellow]

On 8/2/2018 at 1:08 PM, ItalianDragon said:

Well as promised here's the folded penis to fill the empty gaps in the underwears/outfits you make.
Just drop the "Bodyslide" folder over your own and let it do its thing. Then just load the project, import your body mesh as a nif, make the necessary adjustments to the outfit and export it with reference ^^

 

Credits go to the VectorPlexus folks, Smurf and  B3lisario for the original meshes (both for the female and male one).

Underwear Filling.7z

Are there textures for this?

[ItalianDragon]

10 hours ago, MeesterYellow said:

Are there textures for this?

I'll prolly remake it tbh so use if if you absolutely must. Textures are just the SoS ones.

[MeesterYellow]

1 hour ago, ItalianDragon said:

I'll prolly remake it tbh so use if if you absolutely must. Textures are just the SoS ones.

Ahhh okay. Thanks!

[MeesterYellow]

6 hours ago, ItalianDragon said:

I'll prolly remake it tbh so use if if you absolutely must. Textures are just the SoS ones.

I have the texture but they're not detected. Perhaps because I'm on SE rather than LE.

 

 

[Ashen1]

Any resources for information on file types? I'm trying to figure  out the head thing but I'm finding zilch.?

 

Edit: (Good job on the anus btw?)

[ItalianDragon]

5 hours ago, MeesterYellow said:

I have the texture but they're not detected. Perhaps because I'm on SE rather than LE.

 

 

Oh yeah the mesh is for Oldrim. I don't have anything ready for SSE for the time being. Once I'll have a proper release out though I'll start working on porting the mod to SSE and Fallout 4.

[ItalianDragon]

3 hours ago, Ashen1 said:

Any resources for information on file types? I'm trying to figure  out the head thing but I'm finding zilch.?

 

Edit: (Good job on the anus btw?)

There's not much information on that kind of thing unfortunately as it's well past what modders usually work on.

I did just find this however:

Looks like that to have the proper head meshes we need to extract them from the tri file. I'm unfortunately inexperienced with Blender so IDK how to proceed with that, nor I know if it's doable with 3ds Max. Maybe look into that ?

[Ashen1]

14 hours ago, ItalianDragon said:

There's not much information on that kind of thing unfortunately as it's well past what modders usually work on.

I did just find this however:

Looks like that to have the proper head meshes we need to extract them from the tri file. I'm unfortunately inexperienced with Blender so IDK how to proceed with that, nor I know if it's doable with 3ds Max. Maybe look into that ?

I have 3ds max but it won't run on my half-a-laptop. I did find This and this though.

[ItalianDragon]

5 hours ago, Ashen1 said:

I have 3ds max but it won't run on my half-a-laptop. I did find This and this though.

You put the same link twice
Thanks for it though ! It'll sure come in handy

[Ashen1]

6 hours ago, ItalianDragon said:

You put the same link twice
Thanks for it though ! It'll sure come in handy

Crap! Sorry, This is the second link?

[ItalianDragon]

Hello folks, it's update time !

I've been testing and tinkering more on the mod and I Have some updates in that regard.

First and foremost the mesh density in terms of polygons should be in the 50k range. It's a good setting that keeps it nice and dense while staying below the limit past which things break apart (if a model has more than 65536 verts then parts of it don't export or appear invisible). This shouldn't affect performance in terms of pure game as this is more tied to rendering and textures so rest assured it shouldn't cause issues.

 

The nif export I did for the sake of experimenting also highlighted a side effect of the way I work in Zbrush, ergo splitting the model by subtool to make my work easier. Basically although Zbrush considers the whole mesh as one unit, when exported as an OBJ, each subtool is exported as if it was a separate model. See those complex armors you can find on the Nexus and other sites made of lots of separate meshes that are cobbled in one single .nif ? Well that's pretty much how it ends up. Problem is that it makes sense to have that happen for an armor (for the sake of modularity for example) but not so much when it comes to a body mesh. I'll have to scout around the web for a solution of some kind to avoid that.

This export also showed me a couple of issues that I hadn't seen with the model. FIrst one is that I didn't sculpt properly to spec the arms (which surprises me greatly as I was sure I'd done just that) and the second issue is that the added anus sculpt is just a tad too high. While the latter isn't super problematic (you could always align the SOS penish in Skyrim), for the sake of consistency I'd rather have it aligned properly. For the arms it's a simple fix which will involve a fair bit of sculpting but by itself it's nothing to lose sleep over.

 

When it comes to textures I did a lot of tinkering with the test mesh to practice things out and the like and I'm glad I did that as I've found out why the exported textures for it didn't include a specular map. Long story short: wrong material settings. For Bethesda games you need to pick a traditional "non-PBR, specular and gloss" setting and since well, I didn't, the software can't export something that isn't there (obviously). Thankfully this isn't affecting the femboy mod per se but I have a feeling that if I hadn't used that one for practice I'd have made that mistake with the body mesh and it'd have caused a pretty severe and upsetting setback.

So that's what's left to work on to get a beta release basically (HDT is something I'll look into later on).

Regarding the end of year plans I still have nothing set in stone. Government said that they'd ease up even more on the whole lockdown on December 15th if we're below 5000 new cases a day. This date is about two weeks away and we're at about 13000 new cases a day and it seems that  we're setting up for a spike in cases which could peak in about two weeks. Needless to say I'm very doubtful we'll get the proper criteria for this easing and I wouldn't even be surprised if we end up with restrictions until late January. Needless to say if this is what happens then the usual end of year plans faceplant for good which means more time to work on the femboy mod.

 

That's all for now folks !
Take care and stay safe !

[Jarka Ruus]

14 hours ago, ItalianDragon said:

Hello folks, it's update time !

I've been testing and tinkering more on the mod and I Have some updates in that regard.

First and foremost the mesh density in terms of polygons should be in the 50k range. It's a good setting that keeps it nice and dense while staying below the limit past which things break apart (if a model has more than 65536 verts then parts of it don't export or appear invisible). This shouldn't affect performance in terms of pure game as this is more tied to rendering and textures so rest assured it shouldn't cause issues.

 

The nif export I did for the sake of experimenting also highlighted a side effect of the way I work in Zbrush, ergo splitting the model by subtool to make my work easier. Basically although Zbrush considers the whole mesh as one unit, when exported as an OBJ, each subtool is exported as if it was a separate model. See those complex armors you can find on the Nexus and other sites made of lots of separate meshes that are cobbled in one single .nif ? Well that's pretty much how it ends up. Problem is that it makes sense to have that happen for an armor (for the sake of modularity for example) but not so much when it comes to a body mesh. I'll have to scout around the web for a solution of some kind to avoid that.

This export also showed me a couple of issues that I hadn't seen with the model. FIrst one is that I didn't sculpt properly to spec the arms (which surprises me greatly as I was sure I'd done just that) and the second issue is that the added anus sculpt is just a tad too high. While the latter isn't super problematic (you could always align the SOS penish in Skyrim), for the sake of consistency I'd rather have it aligned properly. For the arms it's a simple fix which will involve a fair bit of sculpting but by itself it's nothing to lose sleep over.

 

When it comes to textures I did a lot of tinkering with the test mesh to practice things out and the like and I'm glad I did that as I've found out why the exported textures for it didn't include a specular map. Long story short: wrong material settings. For Bethesda games you need to pick a traditional "non-PBR, specular and gloss" setting and since well, I didn't, the software can't export something that isn't there (obviously). Thankfully this isn't affecting the femboy mod per se but I have a feeling that if I hadn't used that one for practice I'd have made that mistake with the body mesh and it'd have caused a pretty severe and upsetting setback.

So that's what's left to work on to get a beta release basically (HDT is something I'll look into later on).

Regarding the end of year plans I still have nothing set in stone. Government said that they'd ease up even more on the whole lockdown on December 15th if we're below 5000 new cases a day. This date is about two weeks away and we're at about 13000 new cases a day and it seems that  we're setting up for a spike in cases which could peak in about two weeks. Needless to say I'm very doubtful we'll get the proper criteria for this easing and I wouldn't even be surprised if we end up with restrictions until late January. Needless to say if this is what happens then the usual end of year plans faceplant for good which means more time to work on the femboy mod.

 

That's all for now folks !
Take care and stay safe !

I have no experience with zbrush so I don't know if it has some kind of merge tool, though in case it doesn't you could always try blender or 3ds, also PBR assets should work for fo4.

 

Yeah, it sucks, here we still have 20000+ cases per day, so during the holidays the government is tightening the restrictions to avoid a 3rd wave, basically we won't be able to move from town to town from the 21st to the 6th of January.

 

Stay safe, too!

[Yanazake]

I'm glad someone is still working on this, because I'm less than a good choice for this at all now. There are still sexual tones in the mod's planning, and considering the forums, I doubt they'll go away at all. All I wanted was some androgynous option with the clothes to match. I've gone down the path of the Aces and I seriously could do with extra body options without the sex mod interventions.

And yet, I have high hopes for this compared to the other femboy mod.

Wish ya good luck, ItalianDragon. Give the bois some love.

[Yanazake]

Say, I contacted the skyrim player re-voiced author for the voice files they did, it's a less big guy voice, and more akin to Link, yes, the Hylian. They gave me an ok (this was years ago) and said I could use their voice on a new race. Now, while it would be great in this setting, I'm trying to figure out how to use the files on another race without affecting the main game male NPCs. The easy way out would be making a new race and call it a day, but how does one go about making it player exclusive without a new race?

edit: And to top things off, I found this... I'm probably going to try bodyslide after the holidays thanks to this.

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/37903

[ItalianDragon]

Hello folks !

First of all: happy new 2021 !
I hope you all had  great holidays

On my end I indeed did although there were some family complications which added a bit of a layer of complexity. All is fine now thankfully.
I managed to tear a muscle in my back so it caused a few issues which are now resolving (just some pain when I'm in some positions).

On a happy note I'm on my usual end of year trip and I'll be coming back on the 12th ^^

Since my last update I worked on fixing the texturing problem and indeed the non-PBR setting was the proper one. This means that the textures I see in Outfit Studio do match the ones I see ingame.
I've also experimented a lot with the specular/gloss maps to achieve the effects I wanted and while it's taking me a bit to get the result I wanted on the test mesh I'm happy overall with how it's progressing.

As usual once I'm back home I'll resume working on it and hopefully release something soon-ish.

Take care folks and stay safe !

[ItalianDragon]

Hello folks !

Sorry for the lengthy silence on my end, things were a bit complicated for a while (I was away for vacations, then had repair works done in my apartment, family-related stuff and so on). That made things a bit messy for a bit. Rest assured it's nothing serious though

Now about the mod you'll be happy to hear I made some progress and even quashed some pretty significant hurdles.

For instance I've been relying from the get go on pictures from the bodyslided mesh I had modified years ago but the problem like with every picture is that you can't be 100% aligned and that's what the problem was on my end, hence the misaligned anus sculpt and the like. I did get an idea (which I wish I had much sooner): "Since the old mesh is already UVMapped and textured, I surely can apply the texture somehow...". Sure enough, I could do just that.

This meant that I'd no longer have to rely on shoddy pictures and instead be as precise as I wanted to be. I tried to reposition what I'd already sculpted but that led to serious topological problems so I opted to just roll back a bit and just redo the sculpt of it. So two steps back and one step forward but I'm honestly totally okay with that. I've also taken the time to sculpt some more the pelvis area and I'm getting pretty close to the look I want to achieve.

This is how the mesh looks like now

Spoiler

 

 

Paralleledly I used my practice mesh as a crash dummy for the whole exporting/texturing process and I did end up finding a way to export the mesh as one unit instead of a mesh split in several subtools although it involves using 3ds Max but it's literally a 10 second process, even with a mesh as ridiculously detailed as mine is. So that makes several hurdles out of the way in one go. I also used it to practice weight painting and the process is actually simpler than I thought but just takes lots of time and patience to get right.

I'm currently thinking about how to approach the beast races texturing as I don't know if I should just do the skin directly on the model in Zbrush thanks to the layer system or if it's something I can just do at 100% in Substance Painter. That's something I'll have to look into. I've also thought about an alternate texture set (something more muscular specifically) but it joins the previous issue so if I figure one I'll figure the other.

So that's about all for now ! I'm honestly pretty happy about the progress I'm making and I think the biggest hurdles are behind me now.

Take care folks and stay safe !

[Thelewdgooberkitty69]

On 2/28/2021 at 3:43 PM, ItalianDragon said:

Hello folks !

Sorry for the lengthy silence on my end, things were a bit complicated for a while (I was away for vacations, then had repair works done in my apartment, family-related stuff and so on). That made things a bit messy for a bit. Rest assured it's nothing serious though

Now about the mod you'll be happy to hear I made some progress and even quashed some pretty significant hurdles.

For instance I've been relying from the get go on pictures from the bodyslided mesh I had modified years ago but the problem like with every picture is that you can't be 100% aligned and that's what the problem was on my end, hence the misaligned anus sculpt and the like. I did get an idea (which I wish I had much sooner): "Since the old mesh is already UVMapped and textured, I surely can apply the texture somehow...". Sure enough, I could do just that.

This meant that I'd no longer have to rely on shoddy pictures and instead be as precise as I wanted to be. I tried to reposition what I'd already sculpted but that led to serious topological problems so I opted to just roll back a bit and just redo the sculpt of it. So two steps back and one step forward but I'm honestly totally okay with that. I've also taken the time to sculpt some more the pelvis area and I'm getting pretty close to the look I want to achieve.

This is how the mesh looks like now

  Reveal hidden contents

 

 

Paralleledly I used my practice mesh as a crash dummy for the whole exporting/texturing process and I did end up finding a way to export the mesh as one unit instead of a mesh split in several subtools although it involves using 3ds Max but it's literally a 10 second process, even with a mesh as ridiculously detailed as mine is. So that makes several hurdles out of the way in one go. I also used it to practice weight painting and the process is actually simpler than I thought but just takes lots of time and patience to get right.

I'm currently thinking about how to approach the beast races texturing as I don't know if I should just do the skin directly on the model in Zbrush thanks to the layer system or if it's something I can just do at 100% in Substance Painter. That's something I'll have to look into. I've also thought about an alternate texture set (something more muscular specifically) but it joins the previous issue so if I figure one I'll figure the other.

So that's about all for now ! I'm honestly pretty happy about the progress I'm making and I think the biggest hurdles are behind me now.

Take care folks and stay safe !

can we use that

[ItalianDragon]

Hello folks

 

Sorry for the very long silence.

Unfortunatley I had to deal with a bit of a technical nightmare PC-wise (failing HDD and a slew of broken replacement drives from WD which culminated in an unplanned acquisition of a 4TB SSD), a RMA of my screen to try to quash a coil whine problem, an issue that is unfortunately still ongoing and some software problems because Kaspersky was being a twat. ANd there's been a bit of a downtime for a few days because of the COVID vaccine, because as you probably know, the second shot kicks like a mule

 

Now modelling-wise what have I been up to ? Retopology practice, retopology practice and retopology practice in 3D coat, to such an extent that for a good while it's what I'd do all day. Now the good news is that I have a pretty good grasp of the program itself after tinkering with it so much with the practice model I made. The other upside of the program, is the direct display of the amount of faces in both quads and tris, meaning that I'll no longer need to eyeball it and hope for the best. Now my questions are more tied with texture seams and the like, as I'd like to avoid gaps between the vanilla head, hands and feet and my body. I thought about importing those in 3DCoat directly and retopologize my model in a way that leaves the edges virtually identical to the vanilla body but that doesn't seem to be possible.

 

An issue I have however is that my mesh is so dense that 3DCoat can't handle it, so I need to find a way to reduce the polycount where it's necessary while keeping the model detail. It's a bit of a byproduct of how I made the model, so blame's on me for that one. I did try to decimate it in Zbrush but it makes me lose a lot of detail in some critical parts of the model so I have to find a solution to that problem somehow.

 

Now the texturing is relatively straightforward, with the exception of the specular map I haven't figured yet how to make it prime and proper (Substance Painter exports it as a single solid uniform blotch of color), so I'll have to dig a bit in the settings and options (or maybe just a tutorial) on how to get a proper matching one with the diffuse map.

 

Modelling-wise the body is pretty much feature complete, it just need polishing up and finishing some detail here and there. There's a lot of uneven topology around so I need to smooth that out properly. A few things need a bit of a touchup (mainly the clavicles/shoulders/neck) as they don't line up particularly well with the original mesh I'm using as a way to keep things as close to vanilla proportions as possible.

So overall things are still progressing quite well and I'm nearing the end of the modelling side of things.

 

 

I also wanted to address the elephant in the room that's shaking up Skyrim modding (and the nexus at large) lately: the modlists thing. Well, I'm 100% for it, so once the mod is released, modlist it to your heart's content.

 

Now when will it be complete ? Honestly I don't know but I'd like to finish it this year if possible. Of course it depends if I bump into another technical headache or not so I'm not confirming anything yet.

 

Anyhow that's about it for now folks

Take care and stay safe !