Suntan mod? Modding question.

[tasukete]

Hello everyone. I've been looking for a mod that changes your character's complexion based on exposure to sunlight (i.e. something that makes your tan darker when moving around outside during daytime, but also with an inbuilt 'decay', making you paler for the time spent in dungeons, interiors or at night). Having been unsuccesful to find such a mod, I wanted to take a stab at it myself, but I've come across one major obstacle before I could even begin:

 

Is there a way to access the complexion through a script?

 

You can adjust it manually in the construction set for any NPC, under the tab "face". However, I've found no clues how to change it for the player except for the good old showracemenu in the console ingame, and I've also found no reference as to how this is stored in neither the construction set documentation nor the OBSE documentation. I'd be grateful for any lead.

[movomo]

Unfortunately: you can't.

 

As far as I know.

 

You can give the blockhead a try, though. That one lets you swap body assets on the fly including meshes, morph files, textures.

[tasukete]

Unfortunately: you can't.

 

As far as I know.

 

You can give the blockhead a try, though. That one lets you swap body assets on the fly including meshes, morph files, textures.

 

Thank you for your reply and pointing me to blockhead. I'd heard of it but since I'm fairly new to scripting, I had not looked into it. As the plugin is now though, I don't think it will help me. The only solution to my problem I could come up with is to make textures of varying darkness and have it switch them... an excruciatingly ugly solution I daresay.

 

One thing gives me hope, though: The author has provided get and set commands for individual NPC's ages (like it's set in the racemenu for the PC), which could mean he'd be able to implement the exact functionality I was looking for. I think I'll head over to the bethsoft forums and ask nicely.

[Poontank]

Besides issues with the mere technical functionality, another problem I see with changing a character's complexion: This setting is not only influencing the skin tone but the overall facial shape and expression as well.

Altering a character's complexion for a visible skin tone difference will also change the face itself. Sometimes rather drastically I imagine.

 

Although the mod concept is brilliant, I have my doubts about using the complexion setting to achieve the desired result. Sure, using a set of interchanging ever-darkening textures is a kind of clumsy and awkward solution, but this would at least ensure the facial shape will be preserved at any time.

[tasukete]

Besides issues with the mere technical functionality, another problem I see with changing a character's complexion: This setting is not only influencing the skin tone but the overall facial shape and expression as well.

Altering a character's complexion for a visible skin tone difference will also change the face itself. Sometimes rather drastically I imagine.

 

Although the mod concept is brilliant, I have my doubts about using the complexion setting to achieve the desired result. Sure, using a set of interchanging ever-darkening textures is a kind of clumsy and awkward solution, but this would at least ensure the facial shape will be preserved at any time.

 

Thank you for your answer, although I don't seem to be having the same effect of compromising facial shapes by changing the complexion (see reference image:). All I did was change the complexion manually in the racemenu, although it might be possible we're talking about different attributes and I'm just a dufus translating (I'm playing a German Oblivion). Path to reach the value in the racemenu is as follows: Face > Complexion > Skin > Skin tint dark/light (second slider from the top). [German original: Gesicht > Teint > Haut > Hautschattierung dunkel/hell]

 

Edit: Just realized you're probably talking about the 'Skin' slider in the racemenu root... I never touch that for the exact reason you pointed out, so I didn't even have it on my radar when trying to explain things. Sorry.

[movomo]

That doesn't seem to be a facegen age change. Facegen age is something you set before you enter the detailed face shaping menu where you set the eyes and the hair style.

 

Speaking of complexion... one issue that Poontank is pointing out is that complexion change is not a reversible process. It heaviliy depends on your facegen textures, egt, age overlays, by default they can't normally be reversed once changed, and tweaking them to reversible cycle is not a trivial task. I'm not certain if that also changes facial geometry (theoretically it should not happen as it only changes the texture overlay), but I can tell that reverting it back to normal skin would be tricky at best. Wrinkles may remain, strange color around the mouth region, brighter/darker cheek, whatever stupid lookings like seeing a vanilla vampire, and so on.

[Poontank]

Yes, I meant the setting governed by the bottom slider in the in-game race menu's starting screen (or the middle slider in the CS's general face settings tab). This one is indeed responsible for skin tones and the overall facial shape.

 

Actually I didn't realize you were talking about 'complexity' as a separate setting in the skin tone menu since I'm not really familiar with this menu at all - for three years now I have facegen texturing switched off in the ini. Can't stand the look of age maps and the vanilla Redguard skin tone.

 

Cute character you've got there by the way!

[tasukete]

That doesn't seem to be a facegen age change. Facegen age is something you set before you enter the detailed face shaping menu where you set the eyes and the hair style.

 

Speaking of complexion... one issue that Poontank is pointing out is that complexion change is not a reversible process. It heaviliy depends on your facegen textures, egt, age overlays, by default they can't normally be reversed once changed, and tweaking them to reversible cycle is not a trivial task. I'm not certain if that also changes facial geometry (theoretically it should not happen as it only changes the texture overlay), but I can tell that reverting it back to normal skin would be tricky at best. Wrinkles may remain, strange color around the mouth region, brighter/darker cheek, whatever stupid lookings like seeing a vanilla vampire, and so on.

 

Yes, I've tried quite a lot with them but seem to screw up every time (my character retaining a mustache I can't get rid of, that sort of thing), also neckseams (therefore the collar), but I happily suffered these consequences for glorious brown butt. Since it seems such a pain to work with though, you've convinced me that facegen texturing isn't a good solution for such a mod.

 

Yes, I meant the setting governed by the bottom slider in the in-game race menu's starting screen (or the middle slider in the CS's general face settings tab). This one is indeed responsible for skin tones and the overall facial shape.

 

Actually I didn't realize you were talking about 'complexity' as a separate setting in the skin tone menu since I'm not really familiar with this menu at all - for three years now I have facegen texturing switched off in the ini. Can't stand the look of age maps and the vanilla Redguard skin tone.

 

Cute character you've got there by the way!

 

I didn't realize you could turn them off until this very day, LOL! I totally get why you did it though, the faces look much, much smoother. I'd like to leave it turned off... but brown butt... ARGH quite the dilemma I'm in now. Thanks by the way, I'll pass on the compliment. Took me quite some time to get to the face, but it wasn't all my own work; used the face exchanger to steal Athena's face from the Apachii Goddess Store and tweaked it from there.

 

So now since face gen texturing kinda died for my endeavor, I'm quite lost to be honest. If using textures to get the gradual changes I want, it'd need to be 30 or more, depending on the outer boundaries of how pale/tan a character should be able to get. Also, it'd need to be done for each body texture individually.

 

A possible solution would be to make semi-transparent overlay textures for each stage, which would come closer to a one-fits-all solution and would also consume less space. I guess this would have to work quite similarly to the non-blockhead setbody mod. An even more elegant solution would be to make exactly one semi-transparent texture and have it applied/equipped multiple times for varying degrees in tint. Given my very limited experience in modding though, both solutions could turn out to be a total clusterfuck.

[xartom]

^ Some use of age map overrides maybe?  Or just the tough long way of photoshopping a mass of textures that look darker. Either way and some abuse of 'sun damage' in a script is all I can think of to help.

 

Still trying to figure out how to switch out textures to bloodied up ones when the pc's health falls below a certain amount then switch back to normal texture.

[tasukete]

^ Some use of age map overrides maybe?  Or just the tough long way of photoshopping a mass of textures that look darker. Either way and some abuse of 'sun damage' in a script is all I can think of to help.

 

Still trying to figure out how to switch out textures to bloodied up ones when the pc's health falls below a certain amount then switch back to normal texture.

 

Age map overrides... I'll have to look into that. I've seen that people decompressed the *.egt files to edit agemaps and repackaged them for better looking facegen texturing, but I don't see how that'll enable me to access the associated sliders through a script.

 

My idea with the transparent overlay textures kinda died I guess. I think I'd still need a model to wrap them, so this solution would make the whole mod bodyshape dependant. Quite a bummer.

 

As for photoshopping the actual body textures... I still think it's a really ugly solution. Not only would it be a lot of work that I don't see myself accomplishing in a satisfactory way (I'm a total noob at texturing), it would also bloat the mod's size to immense proportions, given the seamless transitions I'd like to aim for.

 

Sun damage is a nice idea indeed. I already thought about adding a sunburn scenario dependant on the current skintone (darker complexions will have higher tolerance, naturally), and thought about adding sunscreen potions to alchemy vendors. This all is vain mind games though given that it seems to be impossible to implement the core functionality in an acceptable way.