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Windsifter/Change Race Concepts


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6 hours ago, Bad Dog said:

(What happened to our spoiler tags?)

I think it was a bug due to a site software upgrade gone wrong. Ashal said it was fixed and I get the spoiler option again in the post editor so I guess that's it.

6 hours ago, Bad Dog said:

I wanted the ruff to be treated as facial hair so it could be mixed and matched with crests, ears, and horns. But RaceMenu isn't giving me a facial hair option when I set it up that way. Anybody got an idea why? Is there something special about facial hair? Everything else I just set up the head part and RaceMenu found it. 

Are any of the other head parts using the "Scars" slider? Because if not, you could use that one for the ruff. Provided it doesn't have any bugs with the tris like your scar meshes did, of course.

 

Otherwise, all I can think of would be to duplicate exactly any and all settings from the vanilla facial hairs to make sure nothing could cause that bug. Are you sure they are all tagged as "Playable" and male or female and have the right "type" selected?

6 hours ago, Bad Dog said:

Started to look at wings. That whole mechanism is bizarre--there are no ARMOs or ARMAs, just "art objects", whatever they are, and magic effects. I'm guessing the magic effect gives you the high jump ability as well. So I might just set it up as a racial ability and use the same mechanism, or I might see if I can use the nif in a normal ARMO. More as it happens. If it's not an ARMO I'm betting it's not going to pick up the body color, which is a hassle. 

I think that weird setup has to do with the way the wing animations work; you know, with them having their own "baked" anims in the wings nif and stuff. To get the wings on the race, you could have a dummy racial constant ability that applies the wing spell. That way all birds should get wings, and there's also the basis for a way to select different wings if you wanted to (I know Devious Devices used Art Objects for the gags with plugs and it would select a different plugged or unplugged AO depending on whether the "plug is on" effect is active or not; you could use some kind of similar setup to apply different wing "spells"/styles by player choice).

 

As for the wings matching the body color, have you tried setting the shader type to "Skin Tint" and the shader properties to match the body ones? That may force the wings to pick up on the skin tone even if they don't take up an ARMO slot, though I'm not sure.

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When I looked at my guy with wings using the console, it didn't think I had any armor on--which makes me wonder if skin tint will work. But no need to borrow trouble till I get there.

 

Setting up different spells with different wings is straightforward (I hope) and attaching those to races should be fine. And RaceMenu does let you set up new sliders and if I could figure that out you could cycle through basic colors that way. But it's not at flexible as setting whatever body color you like and having the wings match. (Of course, wings don't necessarily have to match--they don't on lots of birds.)

 

The missing facial hair slider is driving me up the wall. Scars were picked up no trouble, hair no trouble. Don't know what's different about facial hair. 

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Oh, also--I guessed the animations work like tail animations. Nif has a resource that points to an hkx file that holds the different animations and they just run in parallel when the right animation get started. But there's a bunch more stuff in the nif that I don't recognize so there seems to be more going on than that.

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Photoshoot!

 

Spoiler

Wings 3.jpg Wings 4.jpg Wings 1.jpg Wings 2.jpg Wings 5.jpg

 

Animated dragon wings does everything with potions. Mechanism is, potion applies a magic effect and the wings are the hit effect art of the magic effect. So they aren't body parts at all. Not sure why Anton went this route, though it is a very easy way to get the mesh applied to the body when and only when the magic effect is active. 

 

I briefly tried making a normal mesh with a BGED node pointing to Anton's, but it didn't animate and didn't hook to the body in the right place. He's doing some kind of magic to get the skeletons to line up. So unless I can figure something out this is what we have. I do have one or two more things to try.

 

With this mechanism, the wings do not pick up body colors, because they aren't really a body part. I'll have to provide a range of standard options. It might be possible to put the magic effect on the character as a racial ability, haven't tried that yet. 

 

As for the mesh, I'm reasonably happy for a first cut. I'm clearly going to spend the rest of my life weight painting, trying to get the flight feathers to lie right. And I'm going to play with colors so the spine of the feather is less prominent and maybe there's more of a basic overall pattern.

 

 

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Gull wings. And a seagull to go with.

 

Spoiler

Seagull 3.jpgSeagull 2.jpgSeagull 1.jpgSeagull 4.jpgSeagull 5.jpg

 

This pretty much completes the main work on the mod. Now I go back and clean up. Just about everything needs some refinement and females have to be made from scratch, tho that won't be so hard now that the basic assets are in place. Tails need to be made. Also dicks. 

 

What kind of dick is correct here? The talis, I suppose, need balls and such. They all could just have a sheath and balls. Most birdlike would be a the Argonian slit, adapted for these guys. 

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Jesus, my eyes. But yes, something like that. I can repurpose the original argonian schlong for that. But I think @GDelscribe is likely to want balls. The Talis might get their own equipment. 

 

In other news, wings do not pick up body color on game load but do pick it up when you color the body in RaceMenu, which is totally odd. So you can try colors out in RM but still need to put them in the nif to play with them. And I got "facial hair" working in RM--apparently it likes to have a "no hair" option? 

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18 minutes ago, Bad Dog said:

In other news, wings do not pick up body color on game load but do pick it up when you color the body in RaceMenu, which is totally odd. So you can try colors out in RM but still need to put them in the nif to play with them. And I got "facial hair" working in RM--apparently it likes to have a "no hair" option? 

I think there are a handful of mods with equippable "hoods with hairs" that have the same issue, i.e. the hair included in the hood doesn't pick up on the character's hair color when equipping it but if you open RaceMenu and change the hair color, it does.

 

There was some kind of script or workaround that forced the game to refresh the hair color when equipping the item/reloading a save with the item equipped and thus caused the hood hair to pick up on it too, so if we find any mod that does that you may be able to reverse-engineer that fix on to your wings (but replacing "Hair tint" with "skin tint", obviously).

 

Otherwise, yeah, the best way is to point people how to write down their character's skin tone RGB code and apply it to the wings nif.

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5 hours ago, Bad Dog said:

Jesus, my eyes. But yes, something like that. I can repurpose the original argonian schlong for that. But I think @GDelscribe is likely to want balls. The Talis might get their own equipment. 

 

In other news, wings do not pick up body color on game load but do pick it up when you color the body in RaceMenu, which is totally odd. So you can try colors out in RM but still need to put them in the nif to play with them. And I got "facial hair" working in RM--apparently it likes to have a "no hair" option? 

I actually have a collection of junk designs for these guys!  If theyre not in the op Ill post them there today when I get home

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Sorry for double post but, here's some junk designs to play with, I updated the op with them as well but here they are in a non cluttered space

 

Ulri ---

 

 

Male:

Flaccid:5ae2365842ee1_MaleUlriFlaccid.png.5eb5e975d4c0d5490d533ad8de9fba9f.png

Erect:5ae23657a96bb_MaleUlriErect.png.745816c29d1652ddff10e8f833e56cfc.png

 

 

Female:

 

(They're not actually balls or ovaries but glands similar to the prostate which provide ample lubrication)

5ae2364b38b39_FemaleUlri.png.d2702649ca027e1e8c4b8801d75a58a8.png

 

 

And talis, which are modelled more off bats.

 

Male:

Flaccid:

5ae2365469844_MaleTalisFlaccid.png.5fef65610d30905f1655357f0609f35d.png

 

 

Erect:

5ae2365361f0d_MaleTalisErect.png.6d9ed253f6785f9525e434f5da600390.png

 

Female:

5ae2364a60d17_FemaleTalis.png.c37bf06ba4639591a9b648f55a1af374.png

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We have scars!

 

Spoiler

scar1.jpg scar2.jpg scar3.jpg

 

and what a hassle that was, but worth it. In the end I found Anton's tools which inject meshes and skins into nif files. Using that I was able to take a mesh from my tri file and create a nif file with verts in the right order. Then the weighting was somehow off, so I used his skin tool to fix that.

 

Upside is now I have tools that will let me update a mesh or bone weighting without going through the Blender 2.49 route and without going through Outfit Studio--both of which work but are cumbersome. 

 

No point in doing more scars until I have the final final head morphs tho, so that's next. 

 

How do people feel about vampire fangs on these birds? It's bound to look goofy. But I'll do it if it matters to people.

 

And by the way, howabout some love for my wings? I think they're fabulous, if I do say so.

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I wouldnt mind a mouth full of teeth (on the bottom anyway), if you look at penguins anyway theyve got nightmare mouths so I dunno if its too unbelievable ahaha.

 

Functionally the main difference between Talis faces and Ulri faces is ulri are regular birds and have beaks as youve got, so do talis but the bottom jaw is more canine thats the only functional difference between them head wise, oh and Talis have ears which gives room for vampire fangs for them more than the normal bird mouths.

 

And the wings look great yeah!

 

The scars also look pretty awesome and this is coming out great

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 Yeesh I take off for a week and come back to fully done bird bodies and wings, holy crap way to go Baddog! You can definitely notice the improvement between first and second versions of the wings you posted.

 

I think the argonian slit would be awesome with a little more distinct shape/texture to it. As for vampire fangs, think just fangs would look kinda stupid, but a beak full of dino teeth could be kinda scary/hot. Scars have never been my particular thing but it's awesome you got them working, definitely adds personality options!

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27 minutes ago, KestrelSky said:

scary/hot.

When two things would usually be mutually exclusive, but they are not. Also the reason we have Xenomorph rule 34 and stuff like that, lol :classic_tongue:.

 

I've said it already and I'll say it again: not interested in birds myself but those look pretty good, and so do the wings. I also agree re the schlongs, a modified Slit addon is probably the best and easiest option for that.

 

Still want to see how females turn out, though.

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The Talis, apparently, want teeth so I'll probably do a mouth option with teeth. The great thing about doing this in blender with shapekeys is I can just add verts to my current mesh for the teeth and the shapekeys will do sensible things, so I don't have to re-create all the morphs from scratch.

 

Maybe vampires can get short fangs that protrude just beyond the edge of the upper beak.

 

I'm going to do a few specific birds to prove I have a range of options--bearded vulture, eagle, gull, ulri, probably a naked-headed vulture because that's a whole different head texture (complexion option). A bluebird and parrot for cuteness. And a Talis. Then tails and I'll release an alpha without schlongs. For schlongs, adapting the sheath-with-balls and slit for the birds is easy, so I'll do those. Those, uh, things @GDelscribe showed up above might take a bit longer. Probably do the ladies before any of those.

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On 2/5/2018 at 5:39 AM, Bad Dog said:

The great thing about doing this in blender with shapekeys is I can just add verts to my current mesh for the teeth and the shapekeys will do sensible things, so I don't have to re-create all the morphs from scratch.

Woah, hold on there. I just got back to this and I think it may be interesting.

 

Are you saying if you add new vertices to a mesh with .tri morphs loaded as shapekeys, those vertices will also be properly placed in the existing shapekeys too? And thus even if you alter the original vertex count and order by adding new ones, you can still export the new .tri too and have it work just fine with the edited mesh? 'Cause this would really come in handy for plenty of stuff.

 

If it works when subdivinding the mesh, I think that may just be the key to fix the horribly low-poly vanilla Argonian scars not matching the shark race heads. Could you elaborate on that?

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Yup yup, all of that. I've got one master that has all the morphs, expression and chargen. Add verts to the master and they interpolate the verts around them. Edit as you like. 

 

To export tris, make a copy, delete the shapekeys you don't need for that file, export.

 

To export the mesh, parent it to a skeleton. Export the obj. Then run Anton's script and export a weights file. Then run his MeshInjector to put the mesh into the nif you started with, replacing the original. Then run SkinInjector to load up bone weights. 

 

For every new mesh I have to fiddle it a bunch, but once I have it working it's pretty quick to go through the cycle.

 

I'm thinking I can do female heads as a morph on the male heads. That should give me all the morphs for free. 

 

Lammergier WIP:

 

Spoiler

Lammergeier.jpg

 

Not entirely happy yet. I just can't do hair. I like the crests where every feather is modeled, but I can't get this kind of ruff to look good. This one in particular looks like serious bed head. I might call it good, do some tails and presets, and post it so people can play. 

 

 

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Does anybody have good advice about face tints? They're driving me crazy. I have a set I basically like and they show up fine in racemenu, but in CK they fail randomly. I've got them at 256x256, 8.8.8 dds format and some work okay, others color random parts of the head.)

 

So I tried setting up the presets I like in racemenu and saving as .npc files--some of which work, some crash CK, some load but with the tints coloring random parts of the face.

 

Also, I have an eagle head complexion (bare around the nostrils) and a raven complexion (feathered partway down the beak). Racemenu lets me select the eagle (which is not the default) and it shows up on my character, but if I save, exit, and reload it's gone back to the default complexion. 

 

Also I figured out how to create a slider for wings. Downside is that the only way I can figure to get the wings to appear is to ingest a potion (just applying the magic effect isn't doing it), and that doesn't take effect until you exit racemenu (dunno why) so you get the wings you want but you can't see them until you get out of RM, so you're guessing at which wings you're choosing. Some sliders show a message in the lower right corner showing what you chose, but I haven't figured out how to tie into that mechanism yet.

 

Also too I can't get colors applied to wings. Since they are a Hit Effect they don't pick up body colors and I don't see how to use NiOverride to apply a color to them either. It's not a disaster, since wings often don't match the body, but I'd like to provide more control. And if you open racemenu on an existing character with wings, the wings pick up the body color. So maybe I can reapply the body color and it will tint the wings, after they are equipped. Or maybe RM is magic.

 

I'm doing everything in one race right now. Eventually I suppose there should be several: ulri/raven, talis, eagle, songbird (covers cardinals, blue jays, lilac-breasted rollers, etc.), parrots, and gryffons. Maybe vultures, but I need a bare-head texture for them. That would get me out of dealing with complexions. 

 

I'm close to releasing an alpha. I'd really like to get the tint problem fixed first though, and have a few nice presets.

 

Edit: Problem with tints was saving them with mipmaps.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Just FYI, not much progress on this for the past two weeks because I've been traveling. Also had a few meshes that were reliably crashing CK. Found that problem, so I'm unstuck. I have workarounds for the above problems (sometimes the workaround is "suck it up and deal") so I'm hoping I can get something out by the end of the weekend.

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