Neck Seam

[movomo]

Junkacc, I guess you are right about auto-recalculation on export in vanilla blender 

I doubt however if Oblivion uses the specular color for skin materials. If I remember correctly ambient/diffuse color are hardly used - at least meshes that have specular map don't seem to use any of 3 color property or nispecularproperty - and the skin shader prevents specular color from taking effect.

I'm not entirely sure about this, could you show me any pic that shows specular color difference in a skin material?

[junkacc]

 

With the last guy, if you kill him and take off his clothes, it looks perfect for some reason.

 

This is due to the fact that 99.9% of all clothes and armors contain a portion of exposed body.  That exposed body part then has UV map instructions and that is where the seam can come back.  The only way to eliminate this is to hand edit the UV map for each and every clothing and armor that contains an exposed neck.  

 

Now can you see why necklace\chain mods came into existence?  Necklace\chain plugins are merely a desperate attempt to generically fix something that could take hundreds upon hundreds of hours to manually correct.

 

 

It can't be. This is lower/10/m/shirt.nif, the thing he's wearing. So the neck part is coming from the UV from Robert's:

 

 

The shirt part maps to the shirt texture in lower/10/m/shirt.dds -- ignoring the unsupported non-square texture of Blender2.4:

 

 

So in theory this should work. As long as the exposed skin mesh in shirt.nif is snapped to _male/upperbody.nif. I don't know, the engine is doing something strange. So we get strange results like this:

 

 

And sometimes it works great:

 

 

Gah I don't know... some bonus pix of my chick converted to imperial male trash:

 

 

[Myst42]

Anyway, I'd be interested in the armor pack you're doing elalquimista. How extensive is it? I ask because I've realized some of these stock armor & clothes replacers also need work to fix neckseams. Oh and since you'll be using my stuff, can I have the face data for this chick?

 

Hmmm...  I'm not sure exactly what you mean by problems with clothing and armor

I'm guessing it's related to the vertex location of the neck line and possibly the material type but I'm not sure if anything else is involved.

 

However once a perfect head mesh plus egm, egt and texture files are done, it shouldn't be a problem to give the final touch to every clothing and armor mesh, provided everything can be build from a source body type that fits perfectly.

 

About what was said about exposed body parts, the idea is to use the same HGEC or Robert body to be cut down and used for replacement of those body parts... I was hoping UV wouldn't be a problem since all those are using the same UV as the main body

 

The likely reason to why the neck seam appears could be from the body part having different material property in the clothing piece than in the body... I guess

 

As for the matter of the extension of the project, is s large as it can be. I'm considering every single clothing and armor model. Of course not all of them are changed in major ways, a lot of them are only improved versions of the vanilla models... added bbb, better sculpting and better behavior during animations done through mesh editing and vertex paint. Im currently only missing some things:

 

 

-Heavy champion

-Elven top

-Iron

-Leather

-Dwarven: This one needs to be a total remake like I did with the orcish one... vanilla one sucks

-Thief

-probably some clothing

-Probably some DLC stuff

 

 

Most of the things I'm missing are only small editions, except for the dwarven armor.

I'm thinking of releasing a beta version, since this has been taking forever and a lot of it is already perfect to my opinion

Also this replacement is entirely lore friendly and very sober. So I wont be releasing more skimpy armors but instead armor you can believe it's really an armor and not a string suit... This does not mean either is entirely un-sexy... I made an effort to try to give both protection, and style.

 

Will see If I can release something on weekend

 

As for your request of having Ariadne's face data... 

 

 

At risk of not ever seeing your stuff and being stuck with my own files cause you may think its about being selfish I must tell you I can't do that

I'm willing to share every mod project I made, help with whatever is needed and even do other people's dirty work, but my characters never... unless of course some trials are past, years of knowing a person, friendship and blind trust in them.

I understand most people here in LL use lovers mods and treats their characters and NPC like sex slaves, and it's their game, but I wouldn't like to see any of my characters used like that... I remember something Chakaru said once on Nexus about her character Pym. Something like "Every time I see Pym using some skimpy clothing or used for sex mods is like part of my soul dies"... or something like it... It got stuck like glue to my memory. So it's a personal call that I wont share my chars... unless of course... years, friendship and trust. I hope this can explain my point... I'm sorry and I hope anybody reading this can understand.

As much as I'd like to continue with this project, protecting my creations is top priority to me

 

HOWEVER... Her race is available... sadly I made a mistake with the hair since it's based on my own cosmetic compilation, so the hair on the version here wont work because of wrong path (Damn I have to fix that...) But when knowing if only the minimal about hairs it's really easy to fix, and probably you dont even want fixing it, you probably want to add new hair cause the version I released here is using Ren's, and that option is very limited compared to the gigantic amount of custom hairs out there. I recommend either SKS hair, SKS New or FumoFumo Reworked hair pack... adding hairs is easy as cake...and I even added a tutorial with it.

 

If you want to bargain for the resources  , there are other prices I can afford, other modding favors, converting stuff for body types, creating meshes fixing meshes, a bit of animation... but my chars are priceless to me.

 

 

[junkacc]

Oh well, fair enough. Although I don't have as much attachments to my chicks since I keep coming across better ones in-game --> One of the perks of using Head06. Anyway, Ariadne looks like Hermina Cinna, one of my favorite NPCs

 

 

 

She becomes a mega MILF with age-mapping enabled.

 

I should release my stuff soon too. What size are you making the female armor for? They should work great with the heads as long as you snap the necks to one of the bodies in gerra6's setbody reloaded.

[junkacc]

 

Junkacc, I guess you are right about auto-recalculation on export in vanilla blender 

I doubt however if Oblivion uses the specular color for skin materials. If I remember correctly ambient/diffuse color are hardly used - at least meshes that have specular map don't seem to use any of 3 color property or nispecularproperty - and the skin shader prevents specular color from taking effect.

I'm not entirely sure about this, could you show me any pic that shows specular color difference in a skin material?

 

 

At first, I was obsessing over those, then when the Blender guy said they weren't used, I thought I was seeing things, but then he clarified that specular is used... so then I thought I could see a difference. I think there definately is a small difference with specular but I might be delusional... i don't know heheheh

[Myst42]

HGEC normal, M Lowerbody, D-Cup upper for armor, C for clothing. For male... I guess it would be one of the average variants of Robert Male, v5 is the current one... but If I'm not mistaken there are issues with some mods that still use v4. Not my problem though since in my folders everything is standarized to one version... but I'd still like some insight in this from other people because compatibility should be optimized

All are contained in Setbody Reloaded, but since everything is derived from HGEC, even the monster ones like Manga or DMRA probably have very similar if not the same neck seam.

 

In any case is simple enough to replace a neck in any body... copy + paste body parts... and almost any neck can belong to any body

[gregathit]

 

 

With the last guy, if you kill him and take off his clothes, it looks perfect for some reason.

 

This is due to the fact that 99.9% of all clothes and armors contain a portion of exposed body.  That exposed body part then has UV map instructions and that is where the seam can come back.  The only way to eliminate this is to hand edit the UV map for each and every clothing and armor that contains an exposed neck.  

 

Now can you see why necklace\chain mods came into existence?  Necklace\chain plugins are merely a desperate attempt to generically fix something that could take hundreds upon hundreds of hours to manually correct.

 

 

It can't be. This is lower/10/m/shirt.nif, the thing he's wearing. So the neck part is coming from the UV from Robert's:

 

3DUV.jpgbUV.jpg

 

The shirt part maps to the shirt texture in lower/10/m/shirt.dds -- ignoring the unsupported non-square texture of Blender2.4:

 

shirtUV.jpgshirtUV1.jpguntitled.JPG

 

So in theory this should work. As long as the exposed skin mesh in shirt.nif is snapped to _male/upperbody.nif. I don't know, the engine is doing something strange. So we get strange results like this:

 

 

 

 

 

Again, you are understanding the "concept" but missing the detail.  To see what I am talking about open the male nude upperbody nif in one nifskope window.  Now open the lower/10/m/shirt.nif in a separate nifskope window side by side with the nude upperbody nif. 

 

Yes, they are both pointing to the same texture (or damn well should be).....HOWEVER the UV wrap instructions may be slightly different.  To see if they are, right click on the nude body and choose "texture" then "edit UV".  A window will pop up showing the uv wrap placement.  Now leave that and go to the shirt.nif and right click on the bare skin exposed at the neck and do the same thing (right click, then choose "texture" then "edit UV").  Now look and see if the vertices for both UV wraps are at exactly the same spot.  If so then you can mark that one off the list.  If not then you and attempt to move the ones for the shirt nif (use the select all connected and then move all at once).

 

Another thing to check is that ALL NiMaterialProperty settings are EXACTLY the same between the two files.  Make sure Ambient, Diffuse, Specular, Emisssive colors are all the same between both nif files as well as the glossiness.

[junkacc]

They are the same.

 

 

 

 

Anyway, this reminds me, I wanted to ask someone. This UV thing I haven't delved into it yet but,

 

1. In Blender2.49b for some reason the UV view starts really far off, so far that the whole map is less than a pixel. I need to zoom into it. Anyone know why that is?

 

2. And once, the UV lines were so close together that I wanted to zoom in further but once the UV filled my screen, it wouldn't let me zoom any more. Now why is that?

[Myst42]

That's what I thought. Using the same source body file for body, clothing and armor should have the UV map being the same. As they are part of the same source file

The neck should only be a piece of the original body, therefore have the same UV map... although one should be careful to have the NiMaterialProperty remain the same for all skin meshes, that includes Ambient, Diffuse, Specular and Emissive 

 

Usually when no texture is loaded in the UV layout, it treats the UV like that 1 pixel thing and It wont zoom anymore

Loading an image in the UV layout for blender should give you an image the right size and the UV map should fit the texture size

[gregathit]

As elalquimista stated, check that ALL NiMaterialProperty settings are EXACTLY the same.  You would be surprised at the number of variations that you will find.

[junkacc]

HGEC normal, M Lowerbody, D-Cup upper for armor, C for clothing. For male... I guess it would be one of the average variants of Robert Male, v5 is the current one... but If I'm not mistaken there are issues with some mods that still use v4. Not my problem though since in my folders everything is standarized to one version... but I'd still like some insight in this from other people because compatibility should be optimized

All are contained in Setbody Reloaded, but since everything is derived from HGEC, even the monster ones like Manga or DMRA probably have very similar if not the same neck seam.

 

In any case is simple enough to replace a neck in any body... copy + paste body parts... and almost any neck can belong to any body

 

Doesn't the Lovers stuff require a certain size for the animations? And the CLS in Claudia is HGEC-HcupA + RA bottom. I think the most popular are Hcup variants with LL bottom, but then this being LoversLab DMRA is quite popular too.

 

As for myself, I can pretend my chick's tits get squished to size E with armor and clothes . I also think the BBB is overdone with most clothes since clothing dampens the B.

[gregathit]

Lovers doesn't "require" any particular body size, but it does favor DMRA or Hgec Hcup.  Pretty much any of the standard HGEC lowerbodies will be fine.  Boobs larger than Hcup or DMRA will start clipping on "some" animations.  Lower bodies are a bit more forgiving, but anything too much larger than RA and you may experience some clipping.

[junkacc]

 

LOL Smooth EGT. Fixed it so it's exactly the same but without the neckseam. This will be included because all Head06 races have that EGT as default. People have made their characters with Smooth EGT.

 

But I wouldn't use it for NPCs unless you want green faces. Albeit with proper skin textures NPCs with green faces are rare, but still immersion breaking when encountered.

[Myst42]

Doesn't the Lovers stuff require a certain size for the animations? 

 

Sorry, but I couldn't care less about lovers needing a larger breast 

I really really despise monster boobs, DMRA and whatever other thing similar... it's the difference between erotic and porn... it destroys the beauty and sensuality of things for me... again that's just my own personal opinion I believe I have a right to have. 

 

Though on the other side, I do experiment on things and in the far past I've experimented on lovers mods... they work fine with smaller breasts except for a few animations... And it's nearly imperceptible. Ideally it likes H cup like Greg said, E cup works good too... there's even the issue of people ehemm... using child races with smaller sizes... Something someone should've put a warning or a safe but nobody did... 

 

AND... lovers mods takes all clothing off so it doesn't matter what size are clothes, the body may be completely different.

[gregathit]

Exactly, while the LAPF animations are designed around H-cup and DMRA, only a few (less than 10%) of the animations involve breast grabbing, so you could indeed have C-cup or even smaller breasts and never have any issues.

 

If someone ever takes up learning to animate, then they could rather quickly fix those few animations for their favorite cup size as I have posted some of the blend files (and will add the rest eventually) here:  http://www.loverslab.com/topic/17765-blend-files-for-oblivion-lpk-animations/

 

 

[junkacc]

 

Doesn't the Lovers stuff require a certain size for the animations? 

 

Sorry, but I couldn't care less about lovers needing a larger breast 

I really really despise monster boobs, DMRA and whatever other thing similar... it's the difference between erotic and porn... it destroys the beauty and sensuality of things for me... again that's just my own personal opinion I believe I have a right to have. 

 

Though on the other side, I do experiment on things and in the far past I've experimented on lovers mods... they work fine with smaller breasts except for a few animations... And it's nearly imperceptible. Ideally it likes H cup like Greg said, E cup works good too... there's even the issue of people ehemm... using child races with smaller sizes... Something someone should've put a warning or a safe but nobody did... 

 

AND... lovers mods takes all clothing off so it doesn't matter what size are clothes, the body may be completely different.

 

 

At least E with LL!!!

 

Just kidding. But if you want a more realistic look, why not ZKEC. It's got the slender wrists and smaller hands with more realisticly proportioned body. ZKEC is a great body but sorely lacking in the armor and clothes department. It doesn't even have a stock armor and clothing replacement. It would be greatly appreciated by the ZKEC loving community I'm sure.

 

Preferably, femaleupperbody_Explorer_E + femalelowerbody_Wide_BBB

[Myst42]

ZKEC... hmmm tempting...

I've never tried it, but I've heard wonders of it

The reason I was doing this for HCEC is compatibility for a a bit more stuff... But maybe ZKEC could work too

Now ideas start to appear... I made an edition of SetBody in order to get rid of those monster boobs and slut bodies I don't like, and leave only my favorite types and some strange ones with hooves, paws etc...

Maybe ZKEC and underwear could be part of it...

 

Damn you! I have to stop imagining things or else I'll never be able to stop

[junkacc]

ZKEC... hmmm tempting...

I've never tried it, but I've heard wonders of it

The reason I was doing this for HCEC is compatibility for a a bit more stuff... But maybe ZKEC could work too

Now ideas start to appear... I made an edition of SetBody in order to get rid of those monster boobs and slut bodies I don't like, and leave only my favorite types and some strange ones with hooves, paws etc...

Maybe ZKEC and underwear could be part of it...

 

Damn you! I have to stop imagining things or else I'll never be able to stop

 

Yes... I'm not into skimpy armor either. They should look somewhat functional.

 

I always had plans to switch to ZKEC as soon as someone released a stock replacer... I might do it myself one day using the gerra's lattice thingy but that's for another day

[junkacc]

I'm about to release my files just need to do some final testing with real textures. I made it so that you should get good results as long as the head and body texture are exactly the same color, which is good -- no more fudging to get them to match.

 

Can you believe the EGT files were completely wrong all this time? Even Bethesda's default EGTs are wrong. The only guy who got it right is the_philanthropy, the author of OFF (Optimized Facegen Files). Sadly noone really used his stuff. Everyone used Luchare's body EGTs with Smooth EGT for the head, which only work together in a narrow band of showracemenu slider values. Everyone was stuck trying to trick the textures into working together but it would only work for a very limited range before falling apart.

 

Anyway, that's one thing. The other is that since Oblivion uses one head texture for male and female, if one were to use Robert's head texture (which works great with his body texture), it wouldn't work with any of the HGEC textures. Like below, the females who have the ozmo set work great but Robert's doesn't work. Also, the head06 textures that came with Robert's doesn't have enough red in the lips. Fine for player characters since that's in your control but not for NPCs who end up with green lips when using Smooth EGT.

 

 

Anyway, anyone up for some testing? These are just some of the EGTs I made. I did many versions of OFF combined with Smooth. Please look for discoloration on the body, and overly orange faces. I had to redo the body because it was wrong, and I chose the most non-fudgy way to combine the faces but it might have turned out too orange.

 

https://mega.co.nz/#!vBZiSThA!GLKaujFE7YsYDSehswexrwgS6YBNVlJeQS7bnc_qBQ0

 

Oh and don't worry if you still have neckseams. You need some other files and must meet some other strict requirements. Those will come soon.

[Myst42]

I got a little confused here and I'm currently away from my base of operations but I still downloaded

The confusion is about what is really needed and what's missing

 

If I get the picture, heads, morphs and egt files are fine?

All that's missing are textures

Any Head06 will do?

If that is correct I should be able to do the testing

[Nepro]

My best way of dealing with the neck seam is to avoid it.

No body/head texture will do the job perfectly 100% because under one shading/lighting the NPC seems to not have any seam while under other lighting intensity (s)he may have freaking damn seam and I don't talk about extreme changes in lighting.

http://oblivion.nexusmods.com/mods/34082//?

I personally use Neck Seam Concealers Expanded by Khettienna. This mod has an option to dynamically distribute the seam concealing amulets to all female NPCs. 

[movomo]

My best way of dealing with the neck seam is to avoid it.

No body/head texture will do the job perfectly 100% because under one shading/lighting the NPC seems to not have any seam while under other lighting intensity (s)he may have freaking damn seam and I don't talk about extreme changes in lighting.

http://oblivion.nexusmods.com/mods/34082//?

I personally use Neck Seam Concealers Expanded by Khettienna. This mod has an option to dynamically distribute the seam concealing amulets to all female NPCs.

The problem here is mainly involved in the specular map on the head part.

Even if you somehow manage to perfectly match the neck color map and the specular map, that's not the end. You still get the crap because of egt file, which consists of around 50 differential textures as tga format.

Modifying all of them is naturaly an agony.. Junkacc's work is a good job indeed.

You have an another option though. turn of the bFacegenTexturing option and say goodbye to egt.

[junkacc]

I got a little confused here and I'm currently away from my base of operations but I still downloaded

The confusion is about what is really needed and what's missing

 

If I get the picture, heads, morphs and egt files are fine?

All that's missing are textures

Any Head06 will do?

If that is correct I should be able to do the testing

 

No, just testing the EGT for any artifacts. You still need the fixed TRI, EGM and NIF for mesh gaps (not texture seams), and the normals and agemaps need to be setup in a particular way. In the meantime, just make sure the colors where the head meets the body on both your head texture and body texture are the same.

 

Anyway, there's some artifacting with the smooth EGT and I think it's too orange but that'll have to do. Can't fix it because of the head and it's not that noticeable. There's also the OFF based EGTs that work fine anyway.

 

And yeah... like movomo and nepro pointed out with the angle based neckseams, I tried to reduce that as much as possible.

 

 

There's no way to completely remove it without knowing the cause, but almost gone.

 

I actually like how the EGTs turned out. This is with textures with nothing on them. Only the color of the EGT coming through:

 

 

Now just need to do the documentation. Might take awhile because I hate documentation.

 

Oh does anyone have a spreadsheet of all the NPCs based on sex? I managed to get the race ones off of the construction set but can't seem to find a way with male and female.

 

[beta000]

What information do you need on this spreadsheet, I can get you almost anything except face gen data.

[junkacc]

Thanks looks like I won't *need* it, but would still be nice to have. Turns out in the Textures/faces/Oblivion.esm folder, a male has a number that ends in _1 and a female _2. But would be nice if you could send it to me

 

Ok next question. How much documentation is needed?

 

Since I will release this as a modder's resource, how much do I assume modder's know?

 

Example:

1. I've made 6 EGTs for the OFF body and 7 for Luchaire's. I also had to fix Luchaire's body EGT and Smooth head EGT. Luchaire's body EGT is incompatible with OFF body. Thus you should NEVER mix the heads of those together. If you're using the OFF body, you must only use the OFF heads and vice versa.

 

2.

a) Using OFF results in redder lips and clean blemish free faces. Good for females.

b- OFF allows for better control of features as usually the sliders only do what they're advertised to do.

c) Luchaire/Smooth allows for more variation and wilder colors. Good for player characters, no good for NPCs

d) So an example of the 6 OFF based EGTs goes like this.

 

(100%OFF --> 90%OFF+10%Smooth --> 50%OFF+50%Smooth) x 2 (Highbrow and Lowbrow variety)

 

similarly, the Luchaire body EGTs has a mixture of OFF and Smooth

 

3. You can make different races/sexes use different head EGTs by assigning each with a different EGT, but this can quickly get expensive memory wise and computationaly. A better solution is to pre-render the faces and put them in textures/faces/Oblivion.esm. This is where a spreadsheet of race/sex by NPC ID comes in handy.

 

4. I was lying when I said you can have only one body EGT. You can have one for females (upperbodyhumanfemale.egt) and one for males (body.egt). So it is possible to mix but still risky. You don't konw what other mods will do.

 

5.

 

6.

 

.

.

.

 

Gah... see what I mean? I already grow tired of writing this stuff and it's only the beginning of the EGT info. Haven't even started the mesh and texture instructions.

 

Or I could just throw it out there and let modders/users haphazardly butcher all the work I put into it... what do you think?

 

And who thinks a minimalistic approach to textures is better?

 

>>

 

I swear, my old texture looks so dire now.