Cellan Race - Otters

[Bad Dog]

...and today OS has gone back to exporting my obj with a million disconnected tri's. I might have to break down and get 3DS max but it is NOT in the budget.

[Blaze69]

1 hour ago, Bad Dog said:

...and today OS has gone back to exporting my obj with a million disconnected tri's. I might have to break down and get 3DS max but it is NOT in the budget.

Maybe try exporting from NifSkope instead? Or reinstalling BS? Otherwise, it has to be a problem with the mesh itself; I've never had such problems with the OBJ import/export.

 

Again, if you want you can send me the files you are trying to import (or export) and I can take a look at them in case I can do something about it.

 

BTW, I've been thinking about something: did you have to edit the body mesh itself to get the new bits to fit? Or did you simply made them puffy enough that they cover the normal crotch and that's it? You've kind of answered my question already, but I want to make sure.

 

The thing is, I may be able to set up a custom UUNP set with your new bits so that people can choose whichever body shape they want and still get the otter pussy without being locked into a certain body shape. Should be pretty easy to do as long as you didn't change vertex count and order on the pussy mesh and there are no edits to the main body mesh.

 

EDIT: okay, so, about your previous post explaining your issues: if you have a working _1 hand mesh and the OBJ for the _0 version, you can send both my way and I can try to set them up. The method I have in mind should ensure 100% that both meshes are the exact same with only a different shape, so if the _1 still works after saving it again, the _0 should work as well.

 

Otherwise, if the _0 OBJ itself is borked, OS includes multiple references and slider sets and it would be possible to use them to fit the hand to the _0 wrist seam in OS itself without the need to go through Blender (this applies to both male and female hands).

[GDelscribe]

I have a key for 3dsmax 2k12 laying around somewhere still I may be able to give that to you privately if I can find it; I wanna try to help as much as I can and its not like Im using it anymore lmao

[Blaze69]

22 minutes ago, GDelscribe said:

I have a key for 3dsmax 2k12 laying around somewhere still I may be able to give that to you privately if I can find it; I wanna try to help as much as I can and its not like Im using it anymore lmao

That would probably be helpful, yes. I'm not up to speed on Max versions but if the official nif plugin for Max works with that 2012 release, it should make working on nifs way easier than with Blender (without taking into account the differences between programs and only looking at nif importing/exporting and editing, that is). IIRC it also happens to be one of the few versions of Max that can be used to create working Skyrim animations with the Havok Tools plugin, so that's a bonus too, I guess. Hope you can find it and send it to BD indeed.

[Bad Dog]

RE the 3DSMax license, please, if you're not using it. 

 

I do want to get into animations. Mostly to move the damn tail out of the way.

 

OKAY, I dunno what caused all the problems, but I have a new test version to put up. There's something about some of the meshes that cause OS to screw up; never did figure out exactly what. But others don't and I'm just refitting the seams, so I found one that worked and went from there. 

 

I did have to refit the pussy to your new body mesh--the crotch comes just a hair lower on it. It does just cover the existing mesh without modifying it. I think that's going to be an ongoing hassle with different body shapes. This is your recommended body with the new pussy. 

 

I'm happy with this so unless I get feedback, remaining work on this mod is:

• Make some hair. The otter head shape doesn't go with the beast hair because it's lower and flatter. I don't want to lose that shape, because otters. (They may have problems with circlets too. I might fix the worst offenders, but I'm not signing up to do all the headgear.)
• Pussy jewelry.
• Sheathing schlong.
• Fix the normals on the male feet
• NPCs, maybe some with tats as we discussed upthread.
• Whatever is needed to make it compatible with YA, which is probably nothing.

CellanRaceA0.03.7z

[Blaze69]

2 hours ago, Bad Dog said:

OKAY, I dunno what caused all the problems, but I have a new test version to put up. [...]

Well, after checking the files and the content of the plugins themselves, so far I've got this to report:

• CellanSchlong.esp and CellanNPC.esp have "CellanRace.ESM" as master but file is actually an ESP. Easy to fix with Wrye Bash or by renaming the race plugin to ESM, but still.
• Male _1 feet mesh has the "Has Normals" flag enabled (_0 is fine).
• Female head mesh has the "Has Normals" flag enabled.
• Female body only includes _1 mesh; _0 one is missing.
• 1st person hand meshes for females (1stPersonOtterFemaleHands_1/0.nif) are missing.
• Keyword in race data should be "ActorProxyKhajiit" instead of the new "ActorProxyCellan" one (which is actually useless).
• Vampire version of the race points to vanilla beast skeletons: skeletonBeast(_female).nif
• Vampire version of the race points to vanilla SkinNakedBeast
• [...]
• Basically Vampire version of the race is actually 100% Khajiit duplicate, but this should only be fixed once the main race is edited and fixed itself.
• Race data only includes Khajiit head textures in list so if you touch the "Complexion" slider it locks you into Khajiit textures.

Next I'll load it up ingame and check it out there.

 

BTW, are the female body meshes to be considered final? If so, I can look into creating that UUNP slider set afterwards.

 

EDIT: after some ingame testing, I've got a few more comments:

• Females have no skin tint presets, they are all the same white color.
• Female head normal map looks weird around the nose. Male nose can be pasted over it to fix it more or less. (I've got a edited normal I can share).
• Females are freaking tiny ingame, even with race scale set to 1.05. Part of it is an optical illusion due to the 3rd person camera not taking into account the downscaling caused by the feet transform and part of it is due to them being actually tiny due to that very same transform. Fixed when removing transform from feet and using a plantigrade skeleton, though, so the plantigrade version of the race should be just fine.
• Female textures could use some seam-blending (I can do diffuses and speculars in Mudbox, but for normals you would be the one to do it). Male ones too but to a lesser extent.
• I will eventually give females the Cheetah neck from YA (aka no fur layer) in my own setup for better and more seamless texture blending and less clipping with gorgets/collars/neckpieces and stuff; not sure if you would be interested in it or prefer the current shape, but I'd say my idea is worth a try at least. Can even be done without actually removing the fur layer mesh by using the "downscaled UV" trick from the YA heads, so "restoring" the layer would be simply a matter of importing the original UV back in Outfit Studio. Just my two cents, though.

Next up, I'll look into the UUNP thing. I think I can do some workarounds to take care of the difference in base body shapes, but there is a slight chance of the end result looking bad on any preset that is not the base body shape it was built for (in this case, 7B Natural).

 

EDIT 2: scratch that part about the UUNP set, seems like the Labia mesh has been edited and no longer matches the original one in vertex count and order. Was this intentional (i.e. did you add or remove vertices), or was it a side-effect of the problems you were having?

 

In any case, is there any chance you could morph the original Labia mesh from UUNP Special into your custom otter shape while keeping the count and order? Maybe with that shrinkwrap script boo posted for you. Only after the other stuff is done, though.

[Bad Dog]

Shit, that's a bunch of stuff that just shouldn't be. I tested _0 and _1 weight bodies for a quick example. I'll look.

 

Add to the list of things to do: Vampires. I haven't touched them yet.

 

The labia mesh has been edited. It's its own thing now.

[Bad Dog]

Oh, but thanks for testing and reporting. Clearly I've been looking at this too long.

[Blaze69]

11 hours ago, Bad Dog said:

Oh, but thanks for testing and reporting. Clearly I've been looking at this too long.

No problem.

 

And to be fair, since most of the work has gone into the assets themselves, it's only logical that the plugin would be in need of some cleanup. There's no need to do it yet, better to get the assets done and ready first. Except for maybe the master list problem in the Schlong plugin, that can be a problem; but otherwise I wouldn't worry about it just yet. Also if you want I could do the cleaning myself so you only have to check everything is the way you want it to be and be done with the plugin afterwards.

 

EDIT: are body textures final or are you planning on more edits? I want to start working on some seam-blending on them in Mudbox but I don't want to put work into it if they are going to change before the full release of the mod. Also I'll be happy to send you the blended textures once I have them, but as I said before I can only do diffuses and speculars.

 

And as for the plantigrade feet, I created some quick UUNP feet textures for the Lungaris for my updated release and I thought they could come in handy when creating the textures for the Cellan, since both Lungaris and Cellan seem to use Sabrelion-based textures. The Lungaris ones are desaturated (so you would need to add some color to it to match the Cellan base texture) and the feet soles look a bit bad (tried to add some pads to it but the end result is weird so you would have to re-do the area), but it should be a good base to work on and they are pretty seamless too.

[Bad Dog]

Textures are almost-final. I did a shitload of seam work already--if there are particular seams that bug you let me know.

[Bad Dog]

Anybody care if cellans are an ESP or ESM? Formally, since other mods can add to them they should be a master. And it's all-unique forms, so nothing else will step on them.

[Blaze69]

23 minutes ago, Bad Dog said:

Textures are almost-final. I did a shitload of seam work already--if there are particular seams that bug you let me know.

Well, most notably the neck mismatch. Best way to fix it would be to give them the Cheetah neck as I suggested, though I should still be able to blend it a little better with the chest  too if you want to keep the fur layer. You can check out the SabreCheetah pics and the one with the Tiger girl from the Thalmor Embassy I posted in the YA thread to see what can be achieved with that; I like to think they look pretty seamless.

 

Also some seams around the groin in the transition from torso to leg UV islands/regions (minor ones, but still visible). And maybe the wrists, though I would have to check to see if there's actual seams in there.

14 minutes ago, Bad Dog said:

Anybody care if cellans are an ESP or ESM? Formally, since other mods can add to them they should be a master. And it's all-unique forms, so nothing else will step on them.

The shark race mod uses an ESP tagged as ESM for the main plugin and so far there doesn't seem to be any bugs coming from it (and saves me the trouble of having to convert back and forth from ESP to ESM whenever I want to edit any of the sub-plugins in the CK). It all comes down to whether it needs to load after another plugin that's only available as ESP; as long as it doesn't, then there shouldn't be any problem with making the main race plugin an ESM.

[Blaze69]

So, @GDelscribe, I'm reposting what I said in the Yiffy Age thread re the possible Cellan NPCs in case you missed it:

Quote

Speaking of which, if/when those NPCs are added and you want to give them dialogue or quests or stuff like that, I can lend a hand with it. Can't do very fancy stuff yet, but I've been doing some work on the NPC plugin for the sharks and I kinda way my way around it now. Oh, and also found a way to add soft links to SL, so you can add scenes or dialogues that lead to sexy times if you have SL but are harmlessly skipped if you don't and don't actually make SL a hard requirement.

So if you want to look at implementing some NPCs with your lore for them and maybe some dialogue or quests or stuff like that, let me know. AFAIK Bad Dog wants to do at least some NPCs but nothing more complicated than placing them and giving them schedules and such, so if you want to add something more complex, I may be able to help. As I say above I can't do fancy stuff yet (like having NPCs talk to each other or something like that), but I got at least the basics of quest and dialogue creation, so there's that.

[GDelscribe]

I'd definitely appreciate that. It could be fun to do that. Im still gonna be looking into making a worldspace+books but yeah it'll be really nice to create a little swath of NPCS to bang to interact with.

[Blaze69]

5 minutes ago, GDelscribe said:

I'd definitely appreciate that. It could be fun to do that.

Cool. Note that I can't guarantee I'll be able to do anything you may want to, and I also have my own race mod plugin to work on, but I'll do my best to help. Let me know once you have some ideas and we can go through them and see how feasible they are. As previously stated, feel free to PM me if you want to go in depth but don't want to clutter the thread.

5 minutes ago, GDelscribe said:

it'll be really nice to create a little swath of NPCS to bang to interact with.

FTFY. And well, quoting myself yet again... "Oh, and also found a way to add soft links to SL, so you can add scenes or dialogues that lead to sexy times if you have SL but are harmlessly skipped if you don't and don't actually make SL a hard requirement". So there's that, lol .

[Blaze69]

In other news, @Bad Dog, I've been working on textures and assets and this is what I've got so far:

 

 

 

I've done as I mentioned and got rid of the fur layer at the neck. Also blended the diffuse texture so that there isn't a mismatch between chest and head. I think it turned out pretty good. FYI I pasted the neck area from the YA normals over the Cellan ones so it would blend better (the base Cellan normals alone caused a very blatant seam). You can see the edited head normal with the fixed nose (copied from male) too.

Spoiler

 

 

 

Also came up with some quick and dirty texture for the plantigrade/human feet. It still needs some work and cleanup and also adding details like pads (so far the sole is white like the belly but thta¡s it). But should save you some time if you think they are good enough to use them as a base.

Spoiler

 

 

 

And BTW, you were right, the diffuse textures themselves were seamless as far as I could tell after loading them into Mudbox. I'd say the seams are actually caused by the normal itself (and perhaps the specular, but seems to be the same as the YA one and I don't have seams with that, so I'd say it's just the normal). The most noticeable seams are at the wrists, arms and legs:

Spoiler

 

[Bad Dog]

I fixed the normal. FYI, after making the MSN in XNormal I just blend the seams in the texture. Dunno why XNormal leaves seams (now that I think about it, maybe I'll look again at blender's normal map generation and see if it's better). Rather than do a high-poly model, I make a tangent-space normal from the diffuse and then turn that into an object-space normal with XNormal. That way it follows the hairs in the fur pattern and I don't have to fool with high-poly models. I do have to do some tweaking, inverting dark but prominent elements like noses. Probably how the female nose got wonky. 

 

Also fixed the female specular around the hips. Minor detail but when you're zooming in close on, uh, that area, it's noticeable. 

 

What's the basis of the SL trick? I know how to check for SL without throwing an error in a script, but not how to check in dialog.

 

I like the fur layer at the neck seam. Unless GD has a strong preference, I'll likely stick with that. Might steal your textures around the neck tho.

 

[Blaze69]

24 minutes ago, Bad Dog said:

What's the basis of the SL trick? I know how to check for SL without throwing an error in a script, but not how to check in dialog.

Alright, alright, I'll tell you the secret. Lol .

 

I have a handler quest set to Start Game Enabled with a script that includes this bit:

[...]
Form property SexLabRef Auto

Event OnInit()
	DebugInfo("Quest initializing, searching for SL")
	doInit()
EndEvent

Function doInit()
	;Search for the SL plugin.
	if (Game.GetModbyName("SexLab.esm") != 255) && (Game.GetModbyName("SexLab.esm") != -1)
		;SL is installed, we can call GetFormFromFile without spamming the log with errors.
		SexLabRef = Game.GetFormFromFile(0xD62,"SexLab.esm")
		DebugInfo("SL Found, calling GetFormFromFile")
		;Set the Global to 1 so dialogue conditions (and quest ones, if/when we get to that point) can work properly.
		;There is no current way to set it to 0 if it was 1 before, but then again uninstalling SL on the fly is a bad idea anyway.
		if aaaSharkIsSLAvailable.GetValue() != 1
			aaaSharkIsSLAvailable.SetValue(1)
		endIf
	endIf
endFunction

That way, if SL is installed, I register it with the quest (in the SexLabRef entry) so I can call its functions later and switch on a special Global Variable that controls all the SL stuff in the mod. If it's not present, the Global remains as 0, and no SL content shows up ingame. And Papyrus doesn't throw any errors thanks to the GetModByName check before calling GetFormFromFile (which would actually throw an error if the file you are calling isn't actually available). Simple.

 

That's pretty much it, but I also took the liberty of creating my own "function" to handle the interaction with SL's scripts:

Function MyStartScene(Actor[] actorArray, String TagsYes, String TagsNo)
	;Custom function to start SL scenes. Includes options for allowed and banned tags. Shouldn't throw any errors if SL is not installed.
	;actorArray is an array with the involved actors (duh) and needs to be created on the script fragment.
	;Mostly done so triggering anims is easier and shorter to code.
	if SexLabRef
		DebugInfo("Calling SL to start scene")
		sslBaseAnimation[] animList = (SexLabRef as SexLabFramework).GetAnimationsByTags(actorArray.Length, TagsYes, TagsNo)
		(SexLabRef as SexLabFramework).StartSex(actorArray, animList)
	endIf
endFunction

That way, whenever I want to start a SL scene via dialogue, all I need to do is create an array with the involved actors and call this function with whichever tags I want to include or filter out, if any.

 

Here's an example of the script fragment for the dialogue entry:

Function Fragment_0(ObjectReference akSpeakerRef)
Actor akSpeaker = akSpeakerRef as Actor
;BEGIN CODE
actor[] activeActors = new actor[2]
activeActors[0] = PlayerRef
activeActors[1] = akSpeaker
aaaSharkQGeneric.MyStartScene(activeActors,"Cunnilingus","Aggressive,AggressiveDefault,Necro,Sleeping,Lesbian,Furniture")
;END CODE
EndFunction

Here I call for a SL scene between the player and the speaker (in this case Mizuno from my plugin). The player is set in slot 0 because most anims have the female/reciever in that slot; if I wanted Mizuno to be the reciever and the player to be in the male position I would set them the other way around. Then I want the anim to include the "Cunnilingus" tag, but I don't want any anims with the other tags;: don't want aggressive/necro anims (for obvious reasons), don't want lesbian ones (because the other actor is male), and don't want to spawn a piece of furniture out of thin air either.

24 minutes ago, Bad Dog said:

I like the fur layer at the neck seam. Unless GD has a strong preference, I'll likely stick with that. Might steal your textures around the neck tho.

Fair enough. I'll send you my current textures so you can use them (or parts of them) however you see fit.

 

EDIT:

Quote

[...] Dunno why XNormal leaves seams [...]

Do this: before you use XNormal to bake, load the mesh you are going to use into Blender as OBJ, run a "Remove Doubles" in Edit mode with ALL vertices selected, and export.

 

Skyrim nifs can't have the same vertex in 2 different UV islands so the nif format duplicates the vertices where two islands meet (like for example that line in the UNP legs) and assigns one vertex to each island. The two vertices end up with different normals and cause that seam when baking even if the texture you are baking is 100% seamless. By doing the Remove Doubles before running it through XNormal, you get rid of those pesky duplicates and the seams they cause.

 

It's still possible to get seams when baking, but from my experience the probability of it happening is much lower if you get rid of the doubles first.

[Bad Dog]

Nice. So you can test a global variable in a dialog tree? That's the part I was missing.

 

Good info about the node duplication, thanks. I've seen UV seams turn into splits in the mesh without knowing why. But usually I'm exporting the obj from blender so I shouldn't have doubles. Will need to check. 

[Blaze69]

5 minutes ago, Bad Dog said:

Nice. So you can test a global variable in a dialog tree? That's the part I was missing.

Yes. GetGlobalValue == X. Easy conditional function to use, and gets the job done just fine.

5 minutes ago, Bad Dog said:

Good info about the node duplication, thanks. I've seen UV seams turn into splits in the mesh without knowing why. But usually I'm exporting the obj from blender so I shouldn't have doubles. Will need to check. 

AFAIK as long as the mesh you are using has been through a nif at some point (and back) and you haven't removed doubles again afterwards, it will have them.

[Bad Dog]

Found out what was making all my meshes turn into little triangles. Jesus on a cracker.

 

I didn't set the shading to smooth in blender. So it thought when I exported, it wanted every edge to be sharp. And the only way it has to make a sharp edge in a nif file is to separate the faces...

[Bad Dog]

Nearly ready to upload a new kit. Last holdup is the male feet. I regenerated them from the female feet and now the _0 and _1 won't play together. Verts match--I'm not getting an explosion--but it's doing the thing where it uses the _0 mesh until you get to weight 1, at which point it switches over to the _1 mesh all at once, no interpolation. Dunno why. I'm using the OS/OBJ method to generate the _0 version from the _1 version. Something's still wonky in the nif, but I dunno...

 

oh. BRB.

 

Nope, that wasn't it. Thot it might be the stringextradata node screwing things up. So, no idea why this isn't working. Will look some more tomorrow.

[Blaze69]

9 hours ago, Bad Dog said:

Nearly ready to upload a new kit. Last holdup is the male feet. I regenerated them from the female feet and now the _0 and _1 won't play together. Verts match--I'm not getting an explosion--but it's doing the thing where it uses the _0 mesh until you get to weight 1, at which point it switches over to the _1 mesh all at once, no interpolation.

Make sure the NiTriShapes have the exact same names in both nifs, and also run the "Remove unused strings" option from one of the "Spells" menus in NifSkope (dunno which one exactly); this should reorder string indexes and ensure they are also the same across both nifs. See if that fixes it. If not, then try running a "Reorder Blocks" spell too and make sure the index for the TriShape is the same across both nifs afterwards.

 

EDIT: Otherwise, there's another way that should guarantee the _1 and _0 meshes are the exact same and the only change in them is in shape (as it's supposed to be). You need one of the meshes as nif and the other as OBJ (doesn't matter which one is each, but I usually go for _1 as nif and _0 as OBJ):

1. Load the nif into OS.
2. Do Slider -> New Slider. The name doesn't matter because you are not going to save it or anything.
3. Enable Edit Mode on that slider (pencil icon to the left of slider).
4. Make sure the mesh you want is selected in the list, and do Slider -> Import Slider Data -> From OBJ. Select the OBJ file for the other weight.
5. If everything goes right, OS should import the OBJ. Then, the slider will go from the _1 version to the _0 one (or the other way around depending on which weight was the OBJ and which the nif).
6. Exit Edit Mode on the slider. Set the value to 0%. Export.
7. Set the value to 100%. Export as a different nif.

That should make both nifs identical because the only difference between both exported files is the slider value and that slider only changes shape, so stuff like the nifskope data or the properties are identical between both nifs.

 

[Bad Dog]

I like your method and will try it tonight. Seeing the scaling work in OS would make me happy.

 

I think it is something about the block names and orders--one nif insists on putting the trishape at the bottom of the list, the other at the top. (ctrl-up/down appeared to fix it, but it snaps back when you close and re-open.) So I'll play with your other fixes too.

[Blaze69]

7 hours ago, Bad Dog said:

I think it is something about the block names and orders--one nif insists on putting the trishape at the bottom of the list, the other at the top. (ctrl-up/down appeared to fix it, but it snaps back when you close and re-open.) So I'll play with your other fixes too.

For some reason one of the last Bodyslide/OS updates changed the nif export settings so the bones go first and the actual TriShapes go at the bottom, but NifSkope (and probably the Blender tools as well) put the TriShapes first instead. Don't really know why that change was made to OS; apparently is supposed to be the "right way" since most vanilla meshes have the TriShapes at the bottom too, but I like the NifSkope standard one better.

 

FYI whenever I edit any nif, I always run this sequence of Spells afterwards: Reorder Link Arrays -> Reorder Blocks -> Remove Bogus Nodes -> Remove Unused Strings -> Combine Properties* (only on armors and stuff that could have duplicate NiAlphaProperties or whatever) -> Update All Tangent Spaces. That leaves it all nice and clean. I think the one you want in order to place the TriShapes back at the top of the list is Reorder Link Arrays, but IMO you should run all of them if it's not much of a hindrance.