How do you make the living dead a different color from regular corpses via Aura spells like Detect Life or Detect Dead? [Solved)

[Darkpig]

I noticed that the Gray Cowl in the Gray Cowl of Nocturnal mod by MannyGT highlights corpses differently than everything else and I cannot for the life of me replicate it. Does anybody have a sliver of an idea how Manny does this? If not is there a workaround I am not seeing?

Edited November 1, 2023 by Darkpig
Solved

[Seijin8]

2 hours ago, Darkpig said:

I noticed that the Gray Cowl in the Gray Cowl of Nocturnal mod by MannyGT highlights corpses differently than everything else and I cannot for the life of me replicate it. Does anybody have a sliver of an idea how Manny does this? If not is there a workaround I am not seeing?

 

I would guess it has multiple magic effects attached to the spell, each with conditions and their own hit/effect shaders.

[Darkpig]

11 hours ago, Seijin8 said:

I would guess it has multiple magic effects attached to the spell, each with conditions and their own hit/effect shaders.

That was my guess too but there is two magic effects that are attached to the Cowl and only one of them is linked to the hit/effect shaders. The other one just holds the description of the item. Is it possible for the hit/effect shaders to hit different objects differently while linked to the same magic effect?

[Seijin8]

1 hour ago, Darkpig said:

Is it possible for the hit/effect shaders to hit different objects differently while linked to the same magic effect?

 

Not as far as I know.  Nexus is down atm, so I can't look up how he did it right now.

[Seijin8]

Okay, looked into it.  He is using a scene to trigger both the "Gray Cowl Detect Life" and the "Right Eye of Coldharbour" effects simultaneously.

If you want to replicate the effect, you can just put both magic effects on one spell and conditionalize them to only hit the specified type of target.

[Darkpig]

1 hour ago, Seijin8 said:

Okay, looked into it.  He is using a scene to trigger both the "Gray Cowl Detect Life" and the "Right Eye of Coldharbour" effects simultaneously.

If you want to replicate the effect, you can just put both magic effects on one spell and conditionalize them to only hit the specified type of target.

I should also mention I am using the LE version of Skyrim and Gray Cowl mod. I doubt Manny would have changed much with the SE version. Anyway I am not the most familiar with scenes but I noticed they are almost completely different. Both of them are linked to different scripts, different spells and different quests. The only thing they have in common is the favor 17 quest. Are the dead bodies somehow linked to that quest? I'd be surprised if they were since I assume this is just the brawl quest. Anyway I tried attaching those effects to an item and it didn't quite work as planned. I will try it with just a spell later. This is what I'm seeing on my end:

 

Spoiler

First is the manny_GF_GrayCowlDetectLifeManagerScene:

 

 

 

 

And then the manny_GF_EyeOfColdharbourManagerScene:

 

 

 

 

Also the effects turned me into a disco ball but nobody else.

 

 

 

[Darkpig]

You were at least partly right that it does in fact have to do with the magic effects. More specifically the hit shader Manny used outlines everyone living or dead but at the same time the aura only affects animated people/things. Weird. I replicated this by modifying the vanilla LifeDetectedEnemy shader so I doubt there are any other factors:

Spoiler

 

 

 

I am guessing Effects\GhostShaderGrad.dds is vanilla since I couldn't find it in the extracted BSA folder for the mod. Still give MannyGT a shoutout for creating an awesome mod.

 

@Seijin8

 

Thank you for helping. Still I figured out how corpses are highlighted in the Gray Cowl mod but I still am unable to sense them through walls. Also the outline only works on dead bodies for a few seconds and then it needs to be recast. I should have paid more attention. The aura that can be seen through walls only seems to work on animated people/objects but how do I reverse this to work on non-reanimated people and destroyed automatons?

[Seijin8]

5 hours ago, Darkpig said:

The aura that can be seen through walls only seems to work on animated people/objects but how do I reverse this to work on non-reanimated people and destroyed automatons?

 

At a glance, you'd need to adjust the magnitude and area/duration values where the magic effect gets applied in the spell.

 

For seeing through walls, there is a toggle for something like "area effect ignores LOS".

[Darkpig]

On 10/30/2023 at 12:23 AM, Seijin8 said:

I would guess it has multiple magic effects attached to the spell, each with conditions and their own hit/effect shaders.

It was so simple yet I overthought it. All I had to do was set one of the conditions to GetDead and it works. Maybe it was because I had issues with sleeping draugr in the past when using that condition but that's all in the past. I'll consider this thread solved.

 

Edit: Oh and thank you for sticking with me through this.

Edited November 1, 2023 by Darkpig