Race Facegen: Hidden Gender Presets - Now EGT issues

[Myst42]

A long time ago, I remember seeing something about a thing in the CS that determined other racial features

Didn't pay attention back then... now it's one hell of a regret.

 

Elaborating:

There's something that makes dark elves be blue toned no matter what texture you put them on (trust me, I tried). And no, it's now a wrong texture path, the texture is still being correctly applied, as well as the normal and age map and they're not guilty. Yet no matter what, there's a still a blue tone being applied to the face in game, even if you set skin tone to neutral in the CS race fagecen

 

I can live with this in dark elves, but argonians are just wrong. I made new textures for them. Given the right skin tones, they look good, but the race preset keeps making albino women and pitch black males regarding skin tone.

 

I remember seeing this thing about a preset that was gender defined or something, determining the variations between genders in vanilla races. That must be the thing responsible for the crappy argonian skin tones

 

Anybody knows or remembers exactly where to change this?

 

EDIT:

To better explain:

 

 

 

Dark Elves use a grey texture

But Females look blue

Argonian texture is a certain tone of green, but males in game look vary very dark

While females look albino

And the race skin is actually set to neutral

 

 

 

 

 

[movomo]

If it can't be manipluated in CS, it would be reasonable to assume that it is either defined in the .egt files or simply not possible.

My guess is that (at worst) it's some kind of hardcoded combination of the 50 images.

[Myst42]

I've been trying some things like:

-Returning to vanilla argonian resources in an attempt to identify if it's any of my resource's fault or perhaps my race tweaking plugin

-Suspecting of egts and age maps

 

None of this gave good results. Vanilla textures were orange and females still look albino, you just notice it less.

Vanilla head files are about the same tone as the ones I have, and look very white on my textures, and very pale on the orange vanilla ones

Using the same assets in a new race gave the same results

 

This probably means:

-If it was the egt, it must have been wrong since the very beginning since I don't think the new one is very different, in fact it's making the neck seams better.

-This reinforces the gender hypothesis, as all gender changes make pale females, but you can notice weird things only under certain textures. Reason why dark Elf females are blue. If imperials were using the same textures, females would be blue too (tested)

-There must be something that defines gender changes, I dunno why but I remember seeing something like that, a certain file, setting, texture or shader which was to be uses whenever you choose gender

-If it's one file to rule all changes (still need to do more tests on custom races) This path is leading further away from a plausible solution

[movomo]

I should have been clearer. There *is* gender offset, and I think the difference is hard coded combination of vaious textures in the .egt file. You can nullify it if you carefully adjust the facegen, so making female look like male or vice versa, but that's the default setup. I think you must edit the .egt file itself to change that behavior.

 

I don't know what operation the game does in the facegen menu. Addition? Multiplication? Perhaps multiplication and addition by varying degrees depending on the facegen slider.

 

Have you tested that for the FF race or Evy race? They use their own .egt file. Especially, Evy race's egt changes the overall skin tone to the opposite direction.

[Myst42]

Update:

I've used a number of different files now.

Tested textures in entirely custom races, even used different heads. This time I used a human head (06) to test the color change and it produces the same results.

 

Tried the egt approach and made new discoveries.

• Seems most egts continued the vanilla tradition on pale females as they all look blue on dark elf textures
• All but those which don't. FF egt was giving very promising results. But the new problem, is that the tone is not just the head tone, but the body tone as well. I got decent tone head, pale body.
• And also, using FF head egts on head 06 may produce unpredictable messes. And though it looked good on every other human race, when using dark elf textures it showed a weird chess pattern shading
• Then a blank egt was attempted, and all problems seemed to go away (used the same blank for body and head). Even got better neckseams. Unfortunately, ability to choose skin tones as variations within members of a same race, went away too.

 

Session conclussions:

-Egts are actually the ones to blame

-Crappy egts everywhere

[movomo]

UV map is applied to the textures in .egt files as well. So it's no wonder head06 nif with FF egt produced messy face skin. You can see that clearly if you unpack it with egt unpacker. (m2 option)

The best egt files are Junkacc's. Though I doubt if it will "solve" this particular issue.

 

So.. what if you make new .egt files (body, head, ears) somewhat mimicking FF head's?

[Myst42]

After a more thorough search, I came back to Junkacc's files, they're the best for fixing neckseams.

Ideal egt files would be somewhere between those ones and FF head, no neckseams, no weird skin tones.

 

Dunno if that's possible.

 

I could try to build the "perfect egt" but I haven't actually messed with egts myself before

I would need that egt unpacker and then it's a mater of making another with the right textures?

Perhaps one could see what's the common feature that makes FF head skin tone friendly and apply it to Junkacc's textures?

[movomo]

To figure it out, we need to know exactly how those color differences affect the final skin tone.

 

Well, we don't know, so let's just guess. If you unpack Junkacc's egt file with m1 option, you'll notice that some of them show notable blue color (either pure blue which is B 1.0, or cyan, which is G 1.0 + B 1.0)

In FF egt file on the other hand, some of those blue-ish files are not completely blue, sometimes even yellow or just red. I suspect that's the major difference that make FF egt special.

 

Anyways, what if you want to make it less pale... what if you multiply them by 0.5 (thusly resulting darker color)? Wouldn't that make the facegen slider work in a subtler way? In my theory, it would add only 0.5 to a color element when it normally would add 1.0, and subtract 0.5 when it normally would subtract 1.0.

 

Of course you must do the same for the other egt files as well.