Popular Post drp23 Posted November 26, 2024 Popular Post Posted November 26, 2024 (edited) Last year I set out to make a simple unique player race, initially based on Daz G9. It was actually “finished” last October, but was put on hold because It needed to use a custom .mat for some of the textures, and there was no way to make a .mat until ~2 months later. In those two months, I stumbled across what I believe to be the source assets for vanilla starfield's humans on 3dscanstore.com. So I bought some of those, and found them to be far better looking than anything from Daz, though less versatile. I started working out ways to get the best out of both of them, had a few ideas…and managed to feature-creep the project so much that over a year later, it's only very recently reached a playable state. If all continues going well, the project goes into a public (discord) beta in the not too distant future, then I’ll do a full release later on (though that’s going to be a while.) Brief overview/planned features: - This is a unique player race, with full body, head, and all headparts replaced. Besides hair, there are zero vanilla meshes for the body or any of the headparts. - The aim is to create a playable race and customization framework for users to make whatever they wish, with more control than could be achieved with just a body replacer. I know this isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. I decided to do player-specific race for a lot of reasons, but the biggest reason was so I didn’t have to live under the tyranny of another Bethesda neck seam, and simply replacing the vanilla head without re-generating NPC faces + textures is a terrible idea for performance reasons. - It's current “default” shape is so close to the vanilla female body that almost all of the vanilla outfits fit without clipping out of the box. That doesn't mean that you won’t be able to make anything you want of course, but it aims to prioritize more natural, realistic shapes. - All the normal chargen options will still exist in game, but the best features will be in an optional external chargen system that runs entirely in blender. There are several reasons for doing this: It bypasses pretty much all limitations of the vanilla chargen system, gives users total freedom to make basically whatever character they want, down to every pore, freckle, and wrinkle if desired, for both the texture and the actual shape of the mesh. Features like scars, body piercings, tattoos, etc can be baked into the character directly, which is not possible in chargen yet. This way allows for higher fidelity textures, saves VRAM, and gives much more flexibility. External chargen also allows you to bypass the hardcoded 1k face texture limit (chargen textures over 1k resolution get forcibly downscaled and end up looking significantly worse than vanilla resolution). The majority of the skin detail is sampled from scan data, and will be baked at export - all characters made have a 100% unique set scan-grade textures generated. - It will come with a full set of default morphs, just like CBBE, BHUNP, Fusion Girl, etc all have, but thanks to blender's geometry nodes, it is out of the box compatible with all daz g8, g8.1, and g9 body morphs that don't change the character's proportions (like arm length, height, etc.) It is also very easy to add support for any other body's morphs if there are any others that warrant support (though many non-native morphs might not look great due to topology differences). Once it is possible to edit vanilla SF animations (or simply add offsets to some bone transforms per-animation) it's probable that all morphs and proportions can be supported, as well as body shapes from other sources, such as the animation-ready body scans from 3dscanstore.com, or characters ported directly from other games. - As for heads, it is compatible with all head/face morphs from Daz g8, g8.1, and g9, scanned heads/faces from 3dscanstore.com and texturing.xyz's Vface, as well as keentools' facebuilder, and Epic’s metahumans. No modelling ability or extra software is required. For those who want to sculpt their own head shape, scripts and geometry nodes correctly place all headparts, fit the eyeballs, generate the skeleton_facebones, and generate all of the performance morphs for face animations, including vertex color morphs, unique and precisely fitted to whatever shape you made. - For those who want to use this race but keep their existing vanilla face preset - It has 100% support for vanilla starfield face morphs. The head mesh has a morph that was wrapped + aligned at 3x subd, all chargen morphs and textures were transferred with extreme precision, then corrected if neccessary. All 700+ vanilla chargen/face customization texture options have been projected/transferred to the new UVs. The morphs were checked for Sarah, Andreja, and Amoli and match exactly. - If you’re worried that this is going to be a ton of effort, too much work, and not worth dealing with – exporting will be basically one click, for everything, all at once. The entire export process is scripted – When satisfied with the body shape and skin, all textures are automatically baked at whatever resolution you choose, performance morphs are generated, headparts are all conformed and fitted (eyes, brows, lashes, teeth, and all hair, plus all the morphs for those), the mesh is split into its individual parts, and everything is exported straight to the mod folder, ready to go. - Because all of the meshes, morphs, and textures are created from a single source at the same time, neck + arm seams are minimal. It is not possible to be 100% seamless due to vertex/UV quantization, among other things. (I do have a theoretical way to get to almost 100%, but its probably not necessary) - Bonus: users won’t ever have to worry about ChargenMenu or anything else being out of date, since morphs and presets can be handled completely outside of the game in most cases. All of the blender chargen features have been tested in isolation and work, but I have not yet started trying to put all of them into single user-friendly package. There are still some things that need to be decided before much progress on that can be made. The main thing needing to be figured out is performance (last time I tried it was using 24gb vram and 30gb+ of ram, despite half or more of the features not even being implemented at that point... I know of a lot of optimizations that can be done, but probably still need to squeeze out a bit more). The other main thing to be worked out is how to best handle clothes fitting - I've heard that OS+BS are in development, but I'm not sure yet if they could be compatible for what I need them to do. Outfit studio needs a conversion reference to convert clothes to different body shapes, this project by design doesn't really have a single reference, and there isn’t a good way to generate the procedural "clothes fitting" morphs (part of a seperate project, possibly more on that later...), and even if it could, i'm not sure if morph transferring can do as clean of a job as i'd want in all cases - there are other ways to do that with geonodes, cloth physics simulation, etc. but will almost certainly be much slower. __________ Don't have a lot of pictures at the moment - The face here is a blend of Victoria 9 and Sophie #102 – Texturing.xyz made with an earlier setup (blending face base shapes from multiple sources is supported). The texture-generator stuff wasn't implemented at all at that point, so I think the texture there is the one from the vface mixed with something from g9: and here's a basic default-ish body made when testing out the shape blending geonodes, made from g8, g9, and a little bit of a zwrapped 3dscanstore body. Mod authors, animators, etc: If you’re interested in testing/helping make decisions during the pre-alpha stage, I’d love to have a few more eyes on things, and some feedback/ insight on some of the other planned features I didn’t mention here (physics, muscular deformation/ bone modifiers, animations, etc). Mod users: I’m not quite ready to do a public beta – that will be soon – but I’m open to any and all suggestions/ideas/feature requests etc. I'll be posting updates periodically, and as soon as the beta is ready, i'll share a discord link here. Edited November 26, 2024 by drp23 mistakes were made 34
Popular Post drp23 Posted November 26, 2024 Author Popular Post Posted November 26, 2024 (edited) Oops, forgot to include proof it works Edited November 26, 2024 by drp23 28
djay135 Posted November 27, 2024 Posted November 27, 2024 looks great !! so I would be able to use this on companions like sarah and andreja right?
drp23 Posted November 27, 2024 Author Posted November 27, 2024 36 minutes ago, djay135 said: looks great !! so I would be able to use this on companions like sarah and andreja right? I do hope to eventually add companions yes. I'm putting that on hold for a while because I really want to do a total appearance overhaul for them using the blender stuff, and its going to be a little bit before that's all ready. You'd be able to replace anyone you want with it, though it probably shouldn't be used for too many NPCs because of the performance hit. As it stands, its much higher poly than vanilla bodies, and uses an additional mesh (this has head, torso, arms, and legs instead of vanilla using just head + body + hands). Not to mention all the unique head parts, some of which are much higher poly than vanilla counterparts 1
DevoutlyWicked Posted November 28, 2024 Posted November 28, 2024 I am already very much looking forward to adding this to my game. Giant KUDOS to you on some difficult and time consuming work that many of us will not be able to live without once it is implemented. I do want to clarify one thing. You posted that it will morph with the in game sliders and wanted to be sure that things like weight and muscle definition changes won't be an issue or deform the overall body look? Some previous body mod (and clothing) efforts required a zero center body slider or you got distortions/clipping issues. Once again, I'm totally looking forward to this. Sign me up for the download as soon as you are ready to release it. DW
drp23 Posted November 28, 2024 Author Posted November 28, 2024 51 minutes ago, DevoutlyWicked said: You posted that it will morph with the in game sliders and wanted to be sure that things like weight and muscle definition changes won't be an issue or deform the overall body look? Some previous body mod (and clothing) efforts required a zero center body slider or you got distortions/clipping issues. For the in-game morphs, no more than people are accustomed to, but those depend on how clothes and things are made more than anything else. To be honest though, in my experience so far, the more morphs you apply in game, the worse things will look. That's always been true to an extent, but in older games, animations and skeletons weren't as complicated, meshes were lower poly, and textures weren't as detailed, so this was less noticeable. For example, if you do a "bigger boobs" morph, the mesh is stretched out in that area, once you throw physics in there, it gets a little bit worse too. If I thought I could get away with not having in game body morphs at all, and have all of the morphing done externally, I would do that in a heartbeat (but I know everyone would hate that and me for doing that, so don't worry 😂) One of the things being figured out is if a blender-based bodyslide alternative is possible, and if mod makers would actually utilize it well enough to be worth the effort. Instead of making bodyslide files, they'd make a .blend file that has just the body at base shape and the clothes, then (if necessary) have a stack of modifiers + geometry nodes or whatever on the clothes that would be applied during the batch build process. Those modifiers/nodes sort of serve as a set of "instructions" for how to build the clothes - they could be anything from just conforming the mesh to fit like bodyslide does, to physics simulation, or whatever really. I use a system like this already in a personal .blend file with a bunch of clothes I've ported and it works quite well so far - no mesh stretching or stretched textures, no uniboob issues, etc. In some cases, its actually less effort than setting up bodyslide files for an outfit in OS. Another possible use for it could be used to automatically mask off parts of the body that are under clothes and remove that geometry for (somewhat) better performance and no clipping, though I have not actually gotten around to adding that because I keep putting off making the extra skin AA records. 4
Dakhma Posted November 29, 2024 Posted November 29, 2024 Hey I am not so familiar with this g9 body stuff, but I am used to the UBE body mod for Skyrim, are the sliders going to be as in depth like that body? Specifically muscle wise?
Mark263 Posted November 29, 2024 Posted November 29, 2024 On 11/26/2024 at 9:46 AM, drp23 said: - It will come with a full set of default morphs, just like CBBE, BHUNP, Fusion Girl How about Jane Bod?
Mark263 Posted November 29, 2024 Posted November 29, 2024 I wonder if Tiger san will view this thread, it's just a dream if he becomes interested in your work and creates his own muscular morphs for women 1
drp23 Posted November 29, 2024 Author Posted November 29, 2024 15 hours ago, Dakhma said: Hey I am not so familiar with this g9 body stuff, but I am used to the UBE body mod for Skyrim, are the sliders going to be as in depth like that body? Specifically muscle wise? Yes, G9 body is referring to daz genesis 9. Daz genesis 8 and 8.1 are what UBE is based on to my knowledge. The morph.dat files used by starfield have a limit of 128 morphs maximum, but there are tens of thousands of morphs available for g8, 8.1, and 9, and this is compatible with all of them that don't alter character proportions. The morphs included will be my own. I aim to be as comprehensive and inclusive as the 128 morph limit allows. 4
Dakhma Posted November 29, 2024 Posted November 29, 2024 1 hour ago, drp23 said: Yes, G9 body is referring to daz genesis 9. Daz genesis 8 and 8.1 are what UBE is based on to my knowledge. The morph.dat files used by starfield have a limit of 128 morphs maximum, but there are tens of thousands of morphs available for g8, 8.1, and 9, and this is compatible with all of them that don't alter character proportions. The morphs included will be my own. I aim to be as comprehensive and inclusive as the 128 morph limit allows. Thank you appreciate your work!
drp23 Posted November 30, 2024 Author Posted November 30, 2024 On 11/28/2024 at 11:28 PM, Dakhma said: Specifically muscle wise? I see a lot of questions about muscular morphs, here are some samples of what kind of stuff is possible: Really there's not much of a limit. It can go more or less, or anywhere in between. In the blender scene, it's not outside the realm of possibility to have a setup that allows adjusting every muscle individually. 9
NotBasileus Posted November 30, 2024 Posted November 30, 2024 (edited) This looks awesome! And honestly this looks like more of the kind of generation leap I have been expecting to see over tooling and resources we had in the past (as opposed to, say, "where is CBBE for Starfield?"). Really solid work! If you find yourself limited by software licensing or other resources that require financial support to build out all this, let me know. Edited November 30, 2024 by NotBasileus 4
drp23 Posted December 1, 2024 Author Posted December 1, 2024 3 hours ago, NotBasileus said: This looks awesome! And honestly this looks like more of the kind of generation leap I have been expecting to see over tooling and resources we had in the past (as opposed to, say, "where is CBBE for Starfield?"). Thanks! Yeah, CBBE's impact on the bethesda modding scene cannot be understated, it was truly great for its time. If you total all downloads for all the mods that depend on it and its derivatives, its easily in the tens of millions. But with starfield, the ceiling is so much higher than it's ever been, pretty much across the board, and I knew from the first time I saw someone make that comment that a CBBE port just wouldn't cut it in 2024. (To me at least). 3 hours ago, NotBasileus said: Really solid work! If you find yourself limited by software licensing or other resources that require financial support to build out all this, let me know. Appreciate the offer! None I can foresee at the moment, but if you know anyone who knows their way around python, is somewhat familiar with the blender API, and isn't afraid of dumb ideas, send them my way . 5
mdc4211 Posted December 1, 2024 Posted December 1, 2024 Fantastic! I have a really (probably) stupid question. This isn't a body replacer, and adds a new RACE record (PC only not for the vanilla NPCs), right? Can it work with the default chargen (sounds like, "no")? Bottom line: I don't understand what the "RACE" in starfield can do, and how it interacts with everything else, but it looks really powerful.
Djlegends Posted December 1, 2024 Posted December 1, 2024 3 hours ago, mdc4211 said: Fantastic! I have a really (probably) stupid question. This isn't a body replacer, and adds a new RACE record (PC only not for the vanilla NPCs), right? Can it work with the default chargen (sounds like, "no")? Bottom line: I don't understand what the "RACE" in starfield can do, and how it interacts with everything else, but it looks really powerful. it works with chargen...
joojo95 Posted December 1, 2024 Posted December 1, 2024 first of all, this is amazing! Can't wait to see more about it! also, i have to ask this on behalf of my bbw doods out here... Are we getting good, realistic weigth morphs? I'm not talking huge blobs and inflation stuff, just plain old normal chubby bodies, which tend to get overlooked a lot
drp23 Posted December 1, 2024 Author Posted December 1, 2024 (edited) 4 hours ago, mdc4211 said: Fantastic! I have a really (probably) stupid question. This isn't a body replacer, and adds a new RACE record (PC only not for the vanilla NPCs), right? Can it work with the default chargen (sounds like, "no")? All of the existing morphs and face textures have been transferred, so you will be able to 100% recreate a vanilla preset with no noticable visual difference. I have checked it for Sarah, Andreja, and Amoli (at Jemison mercantile) by looking up their morph data in CK and applying their morphs in blender and they are indistinguishable. 1 hour ago, joojo95 said: first of all, this is amazing! Can't wait to see more about it! also, i have to ask this on behalf of my bbw doods out here... Are we getting good, realistic weigth morphs? I'm not talking huge blobs and inflation stuff, just plain old normal chubby bodies, which tend to get overlooked a lot I'm glad you ask - Realistic weight morphs are 1000% a priority, going as far as having some dimpling for cellulite. Thats is actually part of how I aim to make the physics/movement look a lot more realistic: Starfield supports normal (shading) morphs, the plan is to make some cellulite morphs, have some morphdriver BMOD records to drive those along with springbone BMODs for a slight jiggle to make character movement look extremely realistic. It won't be like the jiggle from CBP, I want it to be extremely realistic, and it will be accompanied by some bone driven morphs for details. for example, when the character's leg moves backwards + it compresses the fat on the butt, you'll see dimpling on the skin and the leg's creases will actually fold into themselves. I am 99.99% sure I'll be able to make all of that work, but the real challenge with that will be calibrating the values to be realistic. But yeah, that little detail is one of the things i'm most looking forward to 😂 Edited December 1, 2024 by drp23 edit: clarity 7
EsPred Posted December 2, 2024 Posted December 2, 2024 6 hours ago, drp23 said: All of the existing morphs and face textures have been transferred, so you will be able to 100% recreate a vanilla preset with no noticable visual difference. I have checked it for Sarah, Andreja, and Amoli (at Jemison mercantile) by looking up their morph data in CK and applying their morphs in blender and they are indistinguishable. I'm glad you ask - Realistic weight morphs are 1000% a priority, going as far as having some dimpling for cellulite. Thats is actually part of how I aim to make the physics/movement look a lot more realistic: Starfield supports normal (shading) morphs, the plan is to make some cellulite morphs, have some morphdriver BMOD records to drive those along with springbone BMODs for a slight jiggle to make character movement look extremely realistic. It won't be like the jiggle from CBP, I want it to be extremely realistic, and it will be accompanied by some bone driven morphs for details. for example, when the character's leg moves backwards + it compresses the fat on the butt, you'll see dimpling on the skin and the leg's creases will actually fold into themselves. I am 99.99% sure I'll be able to make all of that work, but the real challenge with that will be calibrating the values to be realistic. But yeah, that little detail is one of the things i'm most looking forward to 😂 Jesus fucking Christ. Are you sure that's even possible? I remember there was this Miles Morales thing that when he bent his arm his bicep would deform too, but I'm not sure if that was a tech demo. If you pull it off, it'd be the first time I see bending muscles and skin live in a video game. Good luck. Pretty much the whole Starfield community depends on you lol
drp23 Posted December 2, 2024 Author Posted December 2, 2024 (edited) 1 hour ago, EsPred said: Jesus fucking Christ. Are you sure that's even possible? I remember there was this Miles Morales thing that when he bent his arm his bicep would deform too, but I'm not sure if that was a tech demo. If you pull it off, it'd be the first time I see bending muscles and skin live in a video game. Good luck. Pretty much the whole Starfield community depends on you lol It's actually in vanilla starfield already, just mainly limited to things that you wouldn't normally notice. The 1st person hands have flexing + corrective morphs for the fingers bending and the wrist rotating. In xedit or CK check out bone modifier records like BM_Human_R_Index_Curl, or look for other ones that say "morph driver". Pose driven morphs aren't really an uncommon practice in games nowadays, but most games don't get dissected the way bethesda games do, and most communities don't value those sorts of things as much as bethesda modders do. I am shocked that nobody has tried to do anything with those to my knowledge - they have tons of potential, but people seem to always overlook them for some reason.... Actually if you search on the main starfield modding discord, I'm the only person that's ever said "bone modifier" at all 😂 Edited December 2, 2024 by drp23 4
EsPred Posted December 2, 2024 Posted December 2, 2024 3 hours ago, drp23 said: It's actually in vanilla starfield already, just mainly limited to things that you wouldn't normally notice. The 1st person hands have flexing + corrective morphs for the fingers bending and the wrist rotating. In xedit or CK check out bone modifier records like BM_Human_R_Index_Curl, or look for other ones that say "morph driver". Pose driven morphs aren't really an uncommon practice in games nowadays, but most games don't get dissected the way bethesda games do, and most communities don't value those sorts of things as much as bethesda modders do. I am shocked that nobody has tried to do anything with those to my knowledge - they have tons of potential, but people seem to always overlook them for some reason.... Actually if you search on the main starfield modding discord, I'm the only person that's ever said "bone modifier" at all 😂 I remember that knee bend problem that happens with certain bodies while crouching with certain animations in fallout and Skyrim. I remember thinking "imagine if the muscles shifted and deformed like a real leg when you crouch" I just didn't think it was possible.
Djlegends Posted December 2, 2024 Posted December 2, 2024 11 hours ago, EsPred said: I remember that knee bend problem that happens with certain bodies while crouching with certain animations in fallout and Skyrim. I remember thinking "imagine if the muscles shifted and deformed like a real leg when you crouch" I just didn't think it was possible. thats due to CBBE forcing its own body type that doesn't work well with vanilla skeleton, TBD/AB/UNP never had these issues 1
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