The Path to Awesomeness

[Myst42]

Skyrim makes me angry. Some pictures of it look so amazing and envy takes a deep root in the core of my soul...

But then again so did Oblivion a few years ago...

 

In order to achieve a certain level of awesomeness I'll ask a more serious request if I could get some guidance in the road to awesomeness...

 

First I'd like to share some pictures I've seen and that I consider to be somewhat the "gold standard" for Skyrim awesomeness. What everyone interested in art shots and cool mods should ever aspire too. A lot of it belongs to VictoriaG though...

I'm asking mostly for recommendations on ENBs, character design, mod collecting, and anything else that could be the key to producing the desired effect. Now I'll post pictures and I could also mention what I like about them In case anybody knows anything

 

Sorry to ask so many things but I just fail to see my goal as one small request... and when I tried to install that "Real Vision ENB" I stumbled upon a wall of text and a million different files I've no idea what they do, in the base ENB page the story was the same. And I'd like to make sure that I install the right settings instead of navigating through a million little files that will not take me where I want... ans save me the million of different walls of text in the process

 

 

Let's start with this little follower... I like how her face ended up and I really like the color effects, lighting and focusing on this ones

 

 

 

I mentioned I'm very interested in the art of character creation, and I like cute faces, but If possible, I'd also like to have them as realistic as possible and I'd like to mix cuteness with realism for my main character, but also being able to have less cute faces being awesome as well, like these ones

 

 

 

And who does one have to f%# in order to get this level of realism? 

 

 

 

I also mentioned I was interested in what ENBs or graphic mods are they using, the color effects, the blurriness and the overall epicness of the shots...

 

 

 

And last but not least I'm interested in random things like the outfits, poses for humans and human expression and creature poses (dragons don't just stand still waiting for you to take their picture) and places with giant mushrooms

 

 

 

 

Oh I forgot to mention regarding character creation, I think the best mod I know of, is ECE right? but I'm not sure it's enough

 

Any help is deeply treasured like the sweetest nectar

Thanks

[Irrational]

Surprisingly, ENB does a lot for Skyrim's textures and models. I prefer to shy away from "realistic" ENBs, because the saturation, contrast and brightness tend to be too high and lacks atmosphere. I like ENB's that focus on atmosphere because they bring out the subtleties a bit more. The most current one I use is Somber Lut Sepia because of the feel of the filters is very moody. I also mainly use ECE for my character creations and I get technical editing the vertexes. Character design is a skill, you have to understand the golden proportions of the human facial structure in order to make attractive characters, the rest is determined by what body, textures and spec maps you decide to use. There's a thread on this forum that'll help you find the secret to character creation:
http://www.loverslab.com/topic/8169-beautiful-women-and-how-to-make-them/

 

Disclaimer: Beauty is also subjective. So one's person's understanding is not the same as another's
 
Here's some examples of what I've been able to do:

 

[hryh23k9823u]

The best ENB in therms of realism I'd say is Polo ENB. It's a japanese ENB used my many modders there, it really focus on high end effects and realism. Most ENB here just adds a screen of unrelated (and dirty) shaders over the screen. I don't like ENB series, however. But certainly they're good to get some good screenshots like those. But then in movement all the clumsiness of the poor animations and the really old  graphic engine emerges again...

[Myst42]

Hmm... I'll have to take a careful reading at that thread later on

 

I get what you mean, about character creation being a skill

As that has been my thought from the very beginning. However there is a part to the beautiful character creation that is not related to skills, and it's always mesh/morph/texture and finally, mod dependent, and before you can squeeze your skill to it's limit, you should make sure you're not limited by the previous factors.

 

To the best of what I had on the moment, I took my chances

 

But I had no ENB back then and I still don't. And I think there's a chance I'm still missing something. I haven't stopped then, I kept changing little things, little morph features, the eye color is no longer the same but more similar to the one I wanted which is a sort of "aqua" color... But still not convinced

 

Regarding ENB's it seems it's a must for nice pictures now. I thought landscapes looked nice when I was playing my game. Then I looked upon those pictures and I thought, "Holy crap my game looks like shit!"