Character Armor Modeling Questions

[radbomber]

 

 

I recently installed the Anime Mod Race by TurkeyTail and decided to test it with Devious Devices (surprisingly works pretty well by itself) and noticed that gags will hover in front of the characters face due to the head model. I have been pondering on starting to learn how to do things on Blender and decided to see if I can learn how to make some of them work on the character model. I started out by working on the tape gags and about midway through attempting to make them match up with the models, a thought came to me. "I don't think changing the gag model in blender isn't going to effect where the game places the gag on the character." The tutorial I am using isn't mentioning how to do custom placements and I can't find one that answers this question. So my question is "Is there a tool or application that modders use to make this custom placement or does my blender file actually take care of that?" Please remember this is my first time trying something like this. I will also attach the files I have so far so I would love some opinions. 

 

Spoiler

 

Spoiler

Spoiler

 

Spoiler

 

Spoiler

 

Spoiler

Edited September 4, 2022 by radbomber

[NobodyImportant33333]

What you will find is that every piece of head gear will be scaled to compensate for the extra head size as per the configuration with the custom skeleton. This means the item will be scaled differently to how it looks in Blender and Outfit Studio. One method is to Follow FancyPantzzz's tutorial on skeletal helmet fitting and scale the headgear back accordingly; the formula is x=1/s where s is the skeleton's head or neck scale for headgear resizing, and x is the scale you need to apply to the head and neck bones in Blender. I don't fancy this method, even if it's feasibly the best option, simply because it gets rather tedious moving and scaling bit by bit then hopping into the game to see if the scale looks correct, plus it's no good if you're trying to add face morphs to the helmet.

 

A more advanced method would be to use FancyPantzzz's guide on skeletal fitting to reverse the fitting, making it so that what you see in Blender is what you see in Skyrim. DON'T replace the skeleton file with the vanilla one. and be warned; you ever hear the phrase 'can of worms'? This is more like a sandlot of worms. Once you revert the skeletal fitting, every headgear will no longer be scaled to fit the head, and will therefor clip into the head. Every helmet will need to be manually adjusted to fit the Elin head.

 

If you were to do this with the existing helmet meshes, the changes would apply to the vanilla races as well. This is something we don't want, so we need to make copies of the meshes and set up armor addons for the custom race to use those meshes when equipping the armor. However, we can't have a helmet style exclusive to Elin because it's referencing a vanilla race for its armor. In order for Elin to have its own meshes for the armor, the armor race reference will have to be disabled.

 

Unfortunately, this means that nothing the Elin wears will appear, since none of the armor addons apply to Elin. For this, you'll need to make use of the UUAMR patcher to add your race to the armor addons. Following the instructions on the UUAMR mod page on Nexus, you setup a folder where copies of every armor mesh you have (modified or otherwise) will go, and this folder will be referenced when running the patcher, which will add any number of custom race Armor Addons to the Patch.

 

It turns out that there's a heap ton of steps involved just to allow the armor of a custom race to look different from vanilla. I suppose you could stop at having a version of the armor made for the Elin, if you're okay with adding more inventory objects, as opposed to changing the armor race back to itself and having it's own armor addon for all of the armors. It would be a very ambitious undertaking to do all of this, but if there was a team committed to this, or an extremely dedicated individual, something like this could see the light of day.