nuska

Tedious, labor-heavy time consuming technical work = not many people willing to put their time into it. Those who know how to do it are usually so advanced they're preoccupied with a thousand other things higher in priority.

Life changes, basically. Some just lose interest and move on to something else. Graduation, work, families and changing life priorities. Making good mods takes a lot of time.

Shame OCOv2 got hit and I hope no one got infected by the trojan, but as an upside it gave me an opportunity to slip in a few updates I've been sitting on.

My educated estimate: It takes 4-5 years on average to develop a large scale AAA console/PC game, Skyrim came out in 2011, the next Fallout has probably gone into preproduction around that time with a small team, rest of Bethesda Game Studios staff worked on Skyrim DLC until Dragonborn release (last year) and have now most likely moved to work fulltime on Fallout. It's probably been in full-scale production for around a year and a half now and if my hunch is right it'll release in 1,5 years. The next TES game likely goes into preproduction when the Fallout release is near. Add another 3-4 years to that and you have TES VI's rough release time.

I'm also very curious as to where ahctapknot got their hands on a copy of the tool :)

On a somewhat tangential note, that's a lot of unused texture space on your map, you'd be well off cropping the texture into a small 256x512 square encompassing just the actual hair part and rearranging the UVs to fit the new location on the texture map :) It helps keep your work optimized and efficient and doesn't waste as much performance that way.

Yup, it's intentional. The readme and description would be a mile long and nobody would bother to get to the end of it if I'd described every individual change I did from the original game - OCOv2's scope was plainly that huge :D Long story short I looked at how the races were established in Morrowind and Skyrim and adapted to that. I'm particularly a Dunmer fangirl and wanted to really bring out their cultural traits like the face paintings and scarifications.

Yeah, this is unfortunately a major pie-in-the-sky thing and would be far from being as simple as hosting a server, plugging it into Oblivion and calling it a day. This would take a team of professional software developers experienced in client and server programming who would also be familiar with the Gamebryo engine, as well as dedicated servers, and would take major changes to Oblivion's source code. Pair that up with the game being as old as it is, having a very limited userbase these days and there being no compensation for the professional devs which would be needed for this, it's just not going to happen.

I'm using Blockhead for version 2 of Oblivion Character Overhaul and it's excellent. There aren't any mods that I know of that support it at this point but it's easy to set up yourself if you have meshes and textures ready.

Without getting into the debate I do have to note that anyone using that particular symbol on anything should be fully aware of the possible interpretations and connotations that will be drawn from it. That's not rocket science. It has so much heavy weight to it that I honestly don't get why you need to add it on anything at all unless you're prepared for the inevitable controversy that will come of it. It's so tainted that no amount of explanation about spirituality from other cultures will help, especially when it's used in the context of war thematics as is the case here.

Not all older mods have ESP content that clashes with game updates so that would be REALLY tricky to screen for. I had a situation like this with a race mod though that I just plainly didn't have time to bring up to date and ended up just hiding it so it wouldn't screw things up for any new users.

Oblivion heads can be easily modified in 3ds Max, actually, I do it a lot and it's just importing, moving vertices around and exporting. There's a more coherent explanation of the steps here, not going to rewrite it all. For getting gender specific heads you no longer need to split the characters into separate races, the OBSE-powered Blockhead plugin lets you have different head models and textures for both male and female characters. You can find it with a quick Nexus search. The gist of it is that you add _m and _f for male and female heads, respectively, to the model names so when the game searches for headhuman.nif, it also checks whether there's a headhuman_m and headhuman_f file. If those are present, it replaces the characters' head models with those instead of the unisex one on the fly.

It's possible, but I'd start off with just modeling basics and software operation before jumping into any ambitious projects. It takes a while to wrap your head around all the parts of the process of making something from scratch and getting it to work ingame. If you don't commit to needing to get a finished piece done right away you'll have an easier time just playing around, seeing how things work and scrapping stuff when something breaks. Speaking out of a lot of experience.

If you don't outright know what you specifically need 3ds Max for then stick to Blender, as it handles all importing and exporting and modeling for free. There are many reasons to buy a copy / get a student license of Max but if you're new to 3D work in general it's best to get your feet wet with Blender, Max is way too costly of a single purchase if you're only starting out. For average use the only real difference is the interface and keys you operate it with. Autodesk products also have their own limitations and shortcomings that can make them poor longterm investments for some users. I've been using both Max and Maya professionally and aside from certain morphing functions and symmetrical editing tools Blender does everything Autodesk programs do. It all really depends on what you want to do. For texturing I use Zbrush to sculpt normal maps and 3Dcoat and Photoshop for diffuse and specular work.

Yup, it's easy to tell apart a game rip and an inspired design, especially to a more seasoned eye. People lie.

Haha, I'm not making promises or showing anything definitive yet, I'm just trying to figure out the best way to implement things right now. I'm also considering just handing my stuff over to another modder who doesn't actively hate CK/GECK work. But thanks for the heads-up and enthusiasm! I can say I figured out what was wrong with Bethesda's head setup like I did with Oblivion Character Overhaul and a few tricks later the difference I'm looking at is pretty staggering.

I'm sitting on a bunch of neat custom assets for much nicer looking character heads for FONV that would be plainly criminal to not do anything with, just looking for some practical general information on whether there are any pitfalls to custom race setup that I should be aware of. Is copying and modifying vanilla game races a safe and sound solution? Are any mod fixes needed like the custom race fix Oblivion required?

I'm not going to shoot down your idea, but I will say this, having dabbled with TES mods since 2007 and gone through game development studies watching people jump straight into very ambitious projects: Start out small first and learn the tools and their limitations, then assess how much you are factually able to do with them and how long it's going to take, then add half more to your general time estimate for trial and error and things breaking horrendously (it WILL happen) and the subsequent fixing. Then, if you still feel like it's reasonable, go for it. I would really highly recommend though that instead of going in with a general 'blanket' idea or end result goal solely in mind you think of the project in terms of technical tasks you need to do, and be 100% certain and familiar with the HOW before you start tackling the WHAT and asking other people to dedicate their time into it. Very few people intend to do 'average' mods, however in order to excel you need to master the basics first, that goes for anything. :smile: I didn't start out revamping entire graphical elements of the games, I began from figuring out how the textures and meshes are set up and experimented with them until I really understood how they worked, THEN set out to do the big ambitious things - and this process actually took years until I started releasing anything substantial, and even after then the first year of releasing mods turned out to be more trial and error and learning instead of totally finished things. Baby steps.

Yup, Oblivion and Skyrim nexus are practically unuseable because of the constant errors and incredibly slow loading.

There's a free plugin called Transmographier floating around (just google for it), I've been using it for all kinds of symmetrical editing and it preserves vertex order. :)

I don't really care if people share them with friends privately but all of the mods that I've taken down were so badly outdated in many regards (either in Skyrim updates or visual quality) that I didn't want to keep distributing incomplete/lacking things to new users. My skin texture work has been focused on the CNHF body replacer since the beginning of the year and I'm working on two custom races and the CharGen Extension so I plainly don't have time to spare for the ones that I took down - bigger fish to fry. None of this stuff is any secret, I've posted about this under multiple mod threads and you can easily follow what I'm up to on my blog, http://nuskamods.tumblr.com. And yes I highly recommend SG textures, they're really high quality and not too doused in makeup.

Bumping this, I'm also struggling with the same problem. I have custom feet with unique textures that need to be tinted with the rest of the body, but using the Skin Tint shader type or the FaceGen RGB Tint flag forces the body texture on the model.

If nobody specifies, then do all of them. 'All of them' isn't really useful information either considering the limitations of face modding, how much time goes into making just one complete hairstyle and how much ( = in the case of men, relatively little) can be done within a single asset batch. A mod also needs to have art direction guiding the visual choices and it needs to stay internally consistent, and 'just do everything' doesn't work in practice at all. This is why 'someone make more male mods' is not useful to work off of. It's completely vague and uninformative. I personally ignore nonspecific requests as I have no way of tapping into the general consciousness and absorbing what might be the most demanded solution without knowing what people actually want out of the possible changes. Even just a picture with "I want my dude to look like this" is more useful. What I want(and, quite honestly, a lot of male players want) is a set of lore-friendly hairs that don't make us look "pretty". As of right now, most of the hairs I have seen have been long, flowing, unrealistic, and highly effeminate. Apparently, these modders are convinced that men want to be flamboyant examples of utter fabulousness. Or, they just want to turn guys into man-candy that they can gawk at while having erotic fantasies. My point being, we want a mod that has preferably short hair, is at least semi-lore-friendly, and won't make us look like something out of a low-budget shojo anime for lonely teenage girls. ...Vanilla Skyrim generally does that though? You have rugged, very much non-effeminate hairy muscled barbarian-grade men in badass armor already. As a character modder I generally want to work on things that have a significant visual impact. "Make more of the same but a little different" just doesn't quite cut it when there are a bazillion other things to do. (It's funny though that your gripe with the 'man candy' is over a tiny subset of mods that for once actually put the shoe on the other foot with how female characters have been treated in the mod community since Morrowind.) The hair thing I get, but if you want something specific done, the best way to get it is to pick up the tools and make it yourself (or learn how to if you can't yet) instead of grumbling about others not jumping to cater to your specific needs.

There are, they just either don't explicitly show their gender (because that easily gets you harassment) or don't participate in the Nexus community vocally. They're present though. Schlongs Of Skyrim got a lot of support from the ladies. Most of the people following my mod blog are women, actually.

Requests should go in their own section.