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"Proper" khajit and argonian bodyshapes/animations


MarkInMKUK

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Agreed. Following Drake's policy of support for body replacers would, I think, increase the value of the Khajiit mod considerably, especially since a lot of people who play one of the races also play the other one. Since you can have only one body replacer in effect at a time, that would go a long way to making our mod "play nicely" with the best Argonian remake.
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Since you can have only one body replacer in effect at a time, that would go a long way to making our mod "play nicely" with the best Argonian remake.

 

Er ... that ain't necessarily so...

 

Drake's mod handles that too - you can have a different body for each race covered. And given that Reneer has a mod to change skeletons too ... I think that statement is pretty much wrong.

 

With Drake's scripted feet set up, I have one body (HGEC E-cup) for my female Humans and female Khajiit, and another (HGEC AA cup) for my female Argonians - but I could have installed any body mesh. I may well choose the BAB body for Khajiit females, and not yet decided for males, as slim and wiry suits my own interpretation of female felines. You have to install a matching clothing pack as well, but that didn't take much effort :thumbsup:

 

Actually, thinking about it, apart from data storage space, there may be no reason why you couldn't give EVERY race its own body type - Muscular for Orcs and Nords, average for Imperials, slender for Bretons and elves, etc.

 

Help! Anyone got a replacement can to put these worms back into?...

Edited by MarkInMKUK
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Summary Statement:

 

Currently we have:

 

Argonians: (Thanks to Drake the Dragon)

 

Body Textures:

Male fullbody textures for Robert's Male Body v3.x, v4, v5 and Breeze's Defined Male Body.

Female fullbody textures for TFF, Exnem/HGEC, BAB and Robert's Female (all constructed from ShadyTradesman's IABT)

Plus support for the vanilla bodies.

 

Scripted self-fitting feet.

Scripted body-type replacement and Scripted clothing-shape replacement for upper and lower body, but only one or two trial meshes for footwear.

Spiked tails for those who prefer them.

Morrowind-style heads for those who prefer those shapes.

 

Khajiits:

 

Body textures:

Assorted nice texture replacements covering mostly Exnems/HGEC and variantsm or Roberts male/female only.

 

(Thanks to JazzJR) Non-scripted wearable feet in at least one style, for one body type, plus (if we can find them) feet from another modder.

No Scripted body-type replacement.

No scripted clothing-shape replacement, no meshes for footwear.

 

Not yet discussed:

 

Body Type Support Full range as already covered by Drake's Argonian mods as a basis?

Varied skeletons for Argonians and Khajiit based upon Reneer's Varied NPC Mod which allows npc's to each have a custom skeleton. Would "tweaked" skeletons for the Argonians and Khajiits help with their "more realistic" appearance, or just lead to problems with clothing and the like?

Support for other Khajiit-type races - how simple/complex does it have to be to add a second race to use the same body and feet, but it's own texture?

 

Modder Requirements:

 

Mesh adjuster to make whichever feet are judged to be the best fit with more body types.

Mesh designer to create footwear styles to suit for both Khajiit and Argonian feet.

Texture Tweaker to take stock clothing and armor types and make workable footwear using the above meshes. Also to adjust at least one decent texture for male and one for female to suit all body types.

Scripter to make it all work.

Install script writer to make it all install as painlessly as possible.

PERMISSION to make use of other people's mods where we are intending to combine them.

Someone(s) to kick my ass if I forgot anything important.

Edited by MarkInMKUK
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OK, I'll stand corrected on the single body replacement thing. I honestly was not aware that you could have different bodies for different races all at the same time. Like I said ... my expertise doesn't extend in to modeling so I know next to nothing about how that works. I just know I had to uninstall HGEC in order to install Robert's female body. :)

 

Body type support: Absolutely I would support a full range of support for body mods. To not do so would severely limit the utility of a mod of this sort.

 

Varied skeletons: I think this is a bag of worms, to be honest. It's better to just have a single stock skeleton, in my judgment. The only important difference between the Khajiit and human skeleton is going to be the relative lengths of the upper and lower leg and the increased length of the foot, with the foot angled so the actor is standing on the ball of the foot. I suppose this could be created using something like Reneer's mod, but once defined there's no reason to allow any adjustment, which is ultimately going to cause clipping issues with apparel.

 

Varied Khajiit races: This, I think, is mandatory for a mod of this sort. It shouldn't be that difficult, either. Just copy all the stock Khajiit resources, replace the texture with the one you want, and, voila!, you have a new Khajiit race. They would, of course, all be playable, but just as important, I'd like the mod to assign different ones to specific NPCs to give some variability (that isn't random from game to game) to the Khajiit characters we meet in-game. That could be done easily enough, I think, as well.

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The "different body for each race" is something clever Drake put in - that guy's a genius.

 

The thing with Khajiit subraces is - they probably deserve mesh tweaks as well - a tiger-based one should be heavier-set than a cheetah-ish one, for instance. However, first get ONE decent texture available to all :smile:

Edited by MarkInMKUK
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I'm not really looking at "race" in Khajiits as being separate "species", worthy of their own unique body conformations, but, rather, more in the way of human "races", where all the races totally overlap with that regard. In other words, the different Khajiit "races" are merely color variants of a single species. I think getting too detailed with trying to give each color variant its own body conformation is going to be unnecessarily complex, will delay the project, and, ultimately, won't even be noticed by the vast majority of players. In other words, a lot of work tweaking the meshes for very little actual return.
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I'm not really looking at "race" in Khajiits as being separate "species", worthy of their own unique body conformations, but, rather, more in the way of human "races", where all the races totally overlap with that regard. In other words, the different Khajiit "races" are merely color variants of a single species. I think getting too detailed with trying to give each color variant its own body conformation is going to be unnecessarily complex, will delay the project, and, ultimately, won't even be noticed by the vast majority of players. In other words, a lot of work tweaking the meshes for very little actual return.

 

Possibly true. I guess something like TNR for the Khajiit characters could assign the subspecies textures. I suspect Drake's basic scripting is more capable than my brain is ... every time i think of a new angle, it seems that it's probably doable using that script as a basis. For random khajiit characters, assigning a texture based on their location might give an idea of "regional variation".

Edited by MarkInMKUK
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Unfortunately, TNR clashes badly with large scale overhauls like OOO and only Wrye Bash can rescue your system if you want to use both of those. Something which dynamically replaces defined textures (by assigning each individual Khajiit a race) on start-up, rather than hard-coding them into the data files would be better. I don't even know if that's possible, although that would be the absolute ideal solution, since you could then make the race assignment completely configurable by the user of the mod.

 

Regional variation is, I think, a non-issue in Oblivion. Really, how long does it take to walk (and I'm not talking about running or fast-travelling) from Anvil to Leyawiin? I'm actually surprised that there isn't more NPC mobility around the realm than there is. After all, there are cities in the world which are larger than all of Cyrodiil and Cyrodiil's "cities" aren't even respectable neighborhoods for most medium-sized U.S. cities. That said, at least with regard to randomly-generated Khajiit NPCs I can see some special cases. Khajiit which are based upon snow leopard textures, for instance, might find themselves more comfortable in Bruma than in Leyawiin, simply because they may have denser coats. The converse might be true for Khajiit characters based upon a lion pattern. That's a matter of personal preference, though, and it's easier for a lion to keep warm in cold weather than it is for a snow leopard to keep cool in hot weather, further complicating the preference issue.

 

I may take a look at Drake's scripting. I haven't downloaded his mod, yet, so I really don't know what it entails, although I'm sure it will be well beyond my ability to understand it.

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Drake's mod is well worth a look I'm sure. My scripting ability is still at the "I can't find it anyplace in the CS" stage, so can be considered non-existant for all intents and purposes. The reason I mention TNR is that it's designed to set up ALL NPCs in the vanilla / SI game, so has to assign facial settings and textures to all of them. The situation is. obviously, a little different for random characters, but for them possibly some degree of regionality may make sense. Adding them dynamically to the ini file may make sense, although if you start a new game you'll tend to get familiar-looking bandits after a hwhile.

 

BTW - in medieval England, people were considered "well travelled" if they had even made it beyond the next village. That tends to allow local gene pools to be VERY inbred and so localised colour variations in Khajiit might be more obvious than you think.

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In Oblivion you don't have the degree of insular confinement to tiny villages that was the case in Medieval times. In fact, many NPCs in the game routinely travel between the cities, and it's not even class-dependent. Like I said, all of Cyrodiil can fit into many of the cities in the world. IC, itself, isn't even a respectable "part" of any medium-sized city, and there are some Medieval cities which were, themselves, almost as large as all of Cyrodiil. Oblivion is a very tiny playing field. I've fired rifles that can send a bullet all the way from Bruma to snipe someone in IC. :) Turn your LOD way up and have a look around. How small Cyrodiil is can be almost funny.

 

So, no, inbred gene pools in Cyrodiil simply don't make any sense at all -- at least not from the purely biological perspective. To have a such a thing the population would have be much denser and MUCH more insular. Other than the fact that there IS no breeding population of anything in Oblivion, I just don't see the mechanism for such pockets of genetic stability because in the context of how small Cyrodiil is adult children aren't going to be hanging around with their parents. There just aren't enough places to live and they would "range" (the proper behavioral term for animals which venture far beyond their birth places when they reach adulthood).

 

We already have familiar-looking bandits. When I was first playing this game I was constantly getting "Oh, it's this guy again :rolleyes: " thoughts. It's not as bad as in Borderlands, but there really is very little variation when you get down to it. I don't pay a lot of attention to faces with unnamed NPCs, though -- it's mostly the sameness with regard to their clothing that makes it look like the game is populated by clones to me. It might be that the game actually generates random features for random NPCs. I've simply not noticed this if it does. It's tolerable, though. My main peeve about that was that neither Argonians or Khajiit were given the same degree of attention with regard to variability that humans and elves were.

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