How is the sperm effect implemented in SpermSplashEx

[Uriel]

Probably a bad solution, but it kinda works.

How: i made a duplicate of Foot:Legs branch, renamed the duplicate and a material to "tattoo", then inserted NiAlphaProperty with 4845 flags. Then you change the duplicate's texture to your tattoo(don't forget the normal map, should contain no directional data, or it will look weird. Basically, we have a universal normal map here).

 

Now the tricky part(at least for me): we don't actually need duplicate geometry records! So we look on NiTriStrips of our duplicate, search for "Extra Data List", "Data" and "Skin Instance" and change their refs to the corresponding refs from Foot:Legs branch.Then we see three duplicates popped up at the bottom of the record list and delete em. That was our duplicate geometry.

 

In result our .nif went from 251497b to 251844b(it's only ~347b of weight), but it can display an additional texture now.

 

Now we need to find out if it impacts the performance, and then move to NifSE part(if we find this appropriate).

Since the .nif modification is required, that's not a very good solution. NifSE might be able to do all this itself though.

 

Attachment with a working leg tattoo on HGEC medium "femalelowerbody.nif" included. Backup your femalelowerbody before trying.

[Symon]

At the moment, as long as you can get NifSE to identify the body part(s) reliable, write in the copies, it should be viable. (Seems a big task to me, as body part names seem about as consistent as material properties.)

 

Not worked much with NifSE. If I remember correctly, development seemed to have slowed drastically on it, which is a shame.

[Uriel]

Not worked much with NifSE. If I remember correctly' date=' development seemed to have slowed drastically on it, which is a shame.[/quote']

No one actually uses NifSE, except maybe DR6, but it's also abandoned now. That might be a reason i believe.

Still, if i will not be able to find something better, i'll go that way.

 

BTW, how do you compress those textures? That's rediculous how it is 21mb in size while 4096x4096. Plus an empty normalmap around the same size. What the hell with those texture compression algorithms?

[Symon]

4096x4096 is HUGE! I'd expect it to be that big. (Most peoples monitors don't run that high so that standard is a bit of an overkill except for closeups.)

 

Try reducing the resolution of your tattoos. You may be able to get away with (much) smaller, especially the normal map. The normal map does not have to be the same resolution, especially if, IIRC you said it was flat. The engine will compensate for different sizes. Sometimes it doesn't look quite so good, but experiment.

 

The textures that make me laugh are 2048x2048, monochromatic red with a flat normal map. I scale them down to 64x64 with no visual loss.

[Uriel]

I resized that one to 2048x2048, and it looks like crap now.

Might be it's that GIMP's saving issue i heard about.