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Windsifter/Change Race Concepts


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What are you wanting to achieve? Right now this is one "hair", but hairs can be made up of multiple hair records which are in separate nifs.

 

Advantage of doing it this way is that the parts can be used individually or in combination. Hairs each get their own nif and their  own tri. These nifs can only have one mesh. So putting everything into one piece means combining them in blender, exporting to a nif, then building tris that work only for the combination.

 

Edit: Incidentally, the side crest is supposed to have the same red tips as the top. Dunno whatup with that.

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@Bad Dog Did you tag all the extra parts as "Is Extra Part" in their data? Are you sure you added them to the Extra Parts list in the main Hair record? Do they have the proper slots/partitions assigned in the NIF? I have never come across a bug like that, but those are the only possible causes I can think of.

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Turns out extra parts have to be flagged as "misc" not as "hair".

 

Here's some pics. The side crest still isn't picking up  textures properly. Note the gold color is reflected a bit in the top crest. I think I can get the feathers to pick up hair color. 

 

Spoiler

Jus' talkin'.jpg

Raven in combat 1 .jpg Raven in combat 3.jpg Hoopoe in combat 2.jpg

 

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Okay, bird lovers. Update and photoshoot.

 

I've got all the parts of the head working. Head shape is adjustable through the morph system. Beak shape is adjustable and there are also 4 base beak shapes available through the "nose" slider. Beak color can be set independently as a face tint. There are three crests, some of which can be used in combination, as well as ears and one type of horns. Expressions are shown in face, mouth, crest, and ears.

 

Lots of room for tweaking still. I want more face tints to pattern the head in different ways. I want one or two different complexions so as to do eagles' characteristic nostrils and the talis beak shape in the normal map. I might do a toothed mouth, I suppose. 

 

There are only a few slots available for head parts: hair, brows, facial hair, beard. I'll probably end up putting ears and horns in one of the other slots. I might use the beard slot for a bearded vulture look, but I don't think I'll need facial hair or brows. That will make mix & match through racemenu more flexible. 

 

I need to do a feathered body and scaly hands and feet. Hands can be the same as all the races use, but feet will have to be made special, probably using argonian feet without the webbing. Needs a feathered tail and a wing texture and maybe also mesh. There is a feathered wing mod that builds on the dragon wings and I might start with that but likely will want to do my own. I might steal the lion tail and make a griffon race.

 

This is all set up as a single race at this point. Down the road I can create other races, but they'll all use the same assets. 

 

Here are the birds:

 

Spoiler

Head01.pngHead11.jpgHead03.pngBird08.pngHead07.pngHead06.pngHead02.pngBirds10.jpg

 

Head05.png

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Question for the hive mind:

 

I've been thinking about scars and wanting to get them working on the birds. Because this, as well as just because:

 

Spoiler

70d45e39497e206ec886e30127e288d1.jpg

 

Scars are implemented as head parts that match the shape of the part of the head they cover, just set out by a tiny bit. They're all transparent except the actual scar, and have diffuse and normal maps. Since they are head parts they have tri files so they move with facial expressions and morphs. 

 

I have the head in blender with the morphs as shape keys. I can delete all verts except in the area of the scar without losing the morphs. Expression and chargen morphs live in different tri files but I wrote a quick script to copy the morphs into one mesh so I can do my manipulation there and then split them out again. 

 

The thing that's killing me is I can't figure out how to get the vert order right. I would think that importing a tri into a mesh and then exporting an obj with the "preserve vert order" option would do it, but it doesn't--the vert order doesn't match. This is driving me crazy--I can't figure the mechanism that is causing this to fail. I can load a nif in Outfit Studio, export an obj, load that in blender, make morphs, and export a tri file and that works. So exporting the tri has to be preserving vert order. I can change the mesh in blender, export an obj, and use that to adjust the verts in OS, so it is properly preserving vert order. But exporting the obj, loading in OS, and saving as nif doesn't create a nif that works with the tris.

 

I do have an ingenious blender script that reorders the verts of one mesh to match the order of another (wowza!) using the UV map as a guide, but it's not working here. (Maybe because the UV is in a few parts. I did try to weld the UV together, since it doesn't have to match the head, but without success.)

 

Any smart folks got ideas of things to try? There are tools which will split a tri into a bunch of obj files. Maybe one of them will let me load up an obj that can be saved in a nif successfully?

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3 hours ago, Bad Dog said:

[...]

Is the scar head part data properly set up? Have you tried exporting the nif and comparing the vertex order with the one in the tri? Is the polycount the same between tri and nif?

 

Otherwise, if you don't manage to get scars to work, you could set up scarred face textures in the Complexion slider. May be a bit messy and will lack the 3D effect of actual mesh scars, but you can skip the scar creation process and also tweak the skin surrounding the scar so it doesn't look pasted-on.

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This is still driving me crazy. I created the head parts originally by making the mesh in blender from scratch, then exporting tris and exporting to a nif using the old 2.49 method. I'm trying to export the scars by taking the mesh in blender, exporting tris and exporting the nif through the same method. I *cannot* imagine what is different enough to screw things up.

 

But, frankly, doing scars through the complexions makes so much sense I don't know why Bethesda didn't do that from the beginning. Complexions have a full set of textures, so their own normal maps, so they're every bit as good as the current mechanism (the scar mesh is made to lie right on the head). That's probably what I'll do.

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On ‎4‎/‎10‎/‎2018 at 9:52 AM, Bad Dog said:

This is still driving me crazy. I created the head parts originally by making the mesh in blender from scratch, then exporting tris and exporting to a nif using the old 2.49 method. I'm trying to export the scars by taking the mesh in blender, exporting tris and exporting the nif through the same method. I *cannot* imagine what is different enough to screw things up.

 

But, frankly, doing scars through the complexions makes so much sense I don't know why Bethesda didn't do that from the beginning. Complexions have a full set of textures, so their own normal maps, so they're every bit as good as the current mechanism (the scar mesh is made to lie right on the head). That's probably what I'll do.

I'd assume it was to allow for combinations of the two without loading up on the complexion options. 

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Also, because your face/body tint tints the scar area. Might be okay for humans, but with birds' wide range of colors it's gonna look pretty bad.

 

I think the only solution is going to be to dive into that python script and get it working, which is gonna be a bit of a bear. But will probably take less time than I've already invested in scars.

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1 hour ago, Bad Dog said:

I call him "Liberty." Scary when he's not smiling, scarier when he is.

Yeah, well... I'm afraid I'm gonna have to "nope" here. That face is positively terrifying, lol.

 

Also, I just realized: if there are eagle-like options for the race, we'll finally be able to recreate Kazerad's Eagle-kini in Skyrim once it's released. Yay for that. (For reference, Kazerad is the author of Prequel, a popular Oblivion/Elder Scrolls based webcomic. Apparently he tried to run a certain "PSA" ad thingy with an eagle OC on a certain furry porn content website, and while it eventually didn't happen he still linked it in the Prequel comments section to discuss the whole thing. Proof. And thus, Eagle-kini was born).

 

Back on track, and while we're at it... @Bad Dog, are you planning to create a female version of the race too, or is it going to be male-only? I assume the female head would have to be created from scratch and thus will take a lot of work, but it would be nice to have a complete race with both male and female characters available.

 

Also, any chance you could create some kind of mane/hair-like ruff thing (maybe like the one in that pic above)? Crests are fine and all, but the head you made still looks mostly "bald" with those and real eagles/raptors do have that "fluff mane" look sometimes (like this or this).

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Yup to both. Females when I have the males working. The head won't need to be from scratch, it will just be morphed to look more, well, female. Dunno how one does that with a bird head but I'll have a go.

 

Mane/ruff things will happen, not only could these heads have more of that but vultures generally have a fairly large one. I'll see what I can do with that.

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2 hours ago, Bad Dog said:

Yup to both. Females when I have the males working. The head won't need to be from scratch, it will just be morphed to look more, well, female. Dunno how one does that with a bird head but I'll have a go.

 

Mane/ruff things will happen, not only could these heads have more of that but vultures generally have a fairly large one. I'll see what I can do with that.

I mean... generally the difference would be feather color/pattern for male vs female (males generally have vibrant colors)... however that doesn't really work when we already can pick whatever color we want thanks to Race Menu. I suppose you can make female facial features "softer"?

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Softer, rounder, eyes a little larger, brow ridge less pronounced. I might modify the male head to be a little blockier so there's more differentiation. As Blaze so rudely pointed out above :tongue: some of the morphs could use refinement and I'm planning a final pass over everything.

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Photoshoot!

 

Spoiler

Body with hands.jpgHands.jpgFeet.jpgRobin.jpg

Got bodies, hands, and feet. Not sure where I'm gonna go with the hands and feet. Shape is fine, I think, but the color is a bit startling in contrast with the rest. But bird feet are bare. I could desaturate them some, but then they'll pick up more of the body color--fine if it's brown or black, not so good if it's a bright color. At the least I'll shape the transition some. 

 

Feet work digitigrade and plantigrade. Maybe I'll post how they look plantigrade. It's not fabulous but it is bird feet.

 

I can't get bright feather colors I like. The above red is too much cherry or something. But that's in part just me looking at it too much.

 

Played some with different patterns on the head. On a bird, the transitions are sharp. Hard to do that here and have it look right.

 

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Don't rush me. I only just started looking at wings. 

 

Plan is to get everything working, males and females, including tails and privy members, and then do a final (not final) pass through all the parts. Find a range of colors that look good. Do a few wing shapes (raptor and gull at least) in a few colors. Get the face patterns looking right. Tune the beak shapes and morphs so they're useful. Then do a set of presets and/or a range of bird races bringing together combinations that look good together. These will include Ulri (raven) Talis, griffon, and anything else from the OP that looks fun. Griffon will have wings and lion tail and hind paws from the YA sabrelion race. Tails for the birds will probably be fairly short and stiff, because linking them to the tail bones isn't going to do much for anybody. 

 

I will post an alpha when I feel like all the basics are in place and it's worth having someone else look at it. 

 

Edit: Forgot to say, also a few more hair/crest options. A crested crane/peacock crown especially for the ladies (I know they're on males on the real birds, shut up) and a vulture-type mane at least.

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17 hours ago, Bad Dog said:

Don't rush me. I only just started looking at wings. 

 

Plan is to get everything working, males and females, including tails and privy members, and then do a final (not final) pass through all the parts. Find a range of colors that look good. Do a few wing shapes (raptor and gull at least) in a few colors. Get the face patterns looking right. Tune the beak shapes and morphs so they're useful. Then do a set of presets and/or a range of bird races bringing together combinations that look good together. These will include Ulri (raven) Talis, griffon, and anything else from the OP that looks fun. Griffon will have wings and lion tail and hind paws from the YA sabrelion race. Tails for the birds will probably be fairly short and stiff, because linking them to the tail bones isn't going to do much for anybody. 

 

I will post an alpha when I feel like all the basics are in place and it's worth having someone else look at it. 

 

Edit: Forgot to say, also a few more hair/crest options. A crested crane/peacock crown especially for the ladies (I know they're on males on the real birds, shut up) and a vulture-type mane at least.

If all options could be Unisex it would be even better honestly, so I totally support crowns on the ladies for sure, I love it so far and youre doing great.

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20 hours ago, GDelscribe said:

If all options could be Unisex it would be even better

I agree. No good reason to restrict them.

 

I'm thinking I'll do a bearded vulture beard and maybe do the ruff as a "beard" head part too, so it can be used with the various crests and horns. 

 

I'm constraining myself to just using standard slots for the markings and head parts--so beak shapes are under the "nose" slider, for example. Sometimes that's fine, others it's a bit contrived. There's clearly a way to add sliders to racemenu but I don't know what it is and I'm inclined not to go that route.

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Following on Blaze's suggestion above, I tried a neck ruff on the eagle:

 

Eagle.jpg

 

(What happened to our spoiler tags?)

 

I'm pretty okay with this. Matching the color exactly is a bit tricky and it has to be matched exactly or it looks terrible. Trouble is the ruff is a hair color and the head is head color + face tint.

 

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. 

 

Here's the same ruff on a different body:

 

Robin2 full.jpg Robin2.jpg

 

The trick to bird colors apparently is to be super-saturated. The color then bleeds onto hands and feet, but I think that's just the way it is. I'm going to see if I can figure out why the feet pick up less than the hands--so far as I know the two nifs are exactly the same in terms of shading properties. 

 

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. 

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