nuska

Low shadow detail looks like a probable culprit to me, actually. I figure it might also affect specular rendering.

Good reminder to renew my subscription. Thank you for running show with such dedication!

Yup this has been done multiple times.

Yeah that's just a sloppy skinning job on the mesh.

This is freaking impressive work. I'm stoked to see someone with proper eye for colour and mood doing environment work for the game. 8) I feel you on the lack of time to take on huge projects like new zones, but I would so love to see this level of quality applied to Elsweyr.

That's the CK flipping out from EEO having custom-filepathed tint maps. The CK hates anything that isn't in exact vanilla file locations and 256x256 scaled. If you're making followers or other NPCs, EEO's articles have a tutorial for working around this issue. For stuff like player presets it doesn't affect anything ingame, but as NPC faces are baked out of the CK it needs a few tricks.

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/28102 http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/28645 http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/28879 http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/24273 These will probably go a long way for you.

I'm not a tremendous expert on Zbrush either and everything I know is better explained through Zbrushcentral tutorials, so nothing particularly useful no. :C In general terms though I focus on major forms and sculpt rough until the big picture looks pleasing, add layers, push things around and use DynaMesh a lot. Pushing it until it looks great and readable in around subdiv 2, and only then going into details, with focus on communicating material and weight through the size and depth of folds etc. Reference a lot. Study from life and adapt observations to the sculpt.

Sculpting up a set of Morrowind-themed light armor. I've started similar things before but I'm actually pleased with where the design is going now, think I'll take this one through. http://24.media.tumblr.com/6874c3daed1e8f4d1aebf166074724cc/tumblr_mf56okbzyz1r3e7wgo1_1280.jpg

I'm interested in this. So far there doesn't seem to be any way of enabling body texture switching ingame. Please do report your findings over here as well. :)

I want to overhaul all of the playable races as I did with Ethereal Elven Overhaul. New morph sets and normal maps and more unique features + tons more polish for all of them. I will never in this universe have the time to do it. EEO alone took me a month and a half of intensive work and all of my free time went into it, and that was three races that share nose and lip morphs. :confused: And I'm still slowly trudging along with its first update.. Maybe in a few years I'll just send Beth my resume. That'd scratch the itch.

Presentation. When you release a mod out in the public, you'll probably want people to pick it up and play it and even come back to drop in their opinion on it. Good grammar and proper punctuation as well as clearly written specifics on the mod's functions will help give your work the look of someone who knows what they've just released. I instantly skip over mods that have vague, poorly written descriptions and insufficient screenshots - if I don't get a clear idea of what it does, why should I download it? Also recognise the subjectivity of tastes - almost anything titled with 'Better Something' rarely is really an improvement for every user, especially with visual mods. And even a bigger one that's particularly important in the development process - don't fear breaking something. In fact, DO break things. Take them apart and see what makes them tick, then put them back together. Some of my most valuable learning experiences have been doing something in good faith that I was doing it right, ending up having it break horribly, scramble fixes together under pressure with 2000 downloaders with broken files and finally get it out working. It's a little scary but nothing hammers it in better for the next time you do it.

100mb upload limit makes it impossible to distribute more expansive graphical mods. Very limiting. Can't upload multiple ESM/ESP files which can be prohibitive, and no method of alternate or optional files or modular addons or even a step installer that would allow you to customise what to install. That kind of thing only works for mods with a very narrow scope of effect. The user base is also horrible.

Yup, that kind of thing is much easier for them to do on Beth's side as they have professional programmers and artists who are highly familiar with the engine and the content creation pipeline. For modders to reverse-engineer that with the associated models, textures, animations and scripts would be an enormous effort that I won't fault anyone for not wanting to do. There's a reason games generally don't ship with that kind of features ever.

Yup, the gap between my mods' unique downloads and total downloads is growing so big that the problem persists, if not worsen. And I predict it'll still get worse shortly as the new Skyrim DLC is getting a trailer.

Yup, you need to have a HeadParts form list entry for your custom race, such as 'HeadPartsMyCustomRace' or preferably 'HeadPartsMyCustomRaceAndVampire'. You need to then create the HeadParts containing the hair mesh and hairline (hairlines are considered extra parts that you add to the main HeadPart) and assign them to the previously created formlist for your race.

The distortion has little to do with DDS formatting and more with character facial mesh deformation. As vertices are moved according to head morphs, the UV also gets stretched out and that often results in pulled textures around the eyes, cheeks and down the center of the forehead. Avoid putting a lot of war paint detail in those spots. There are other workarounds but that involves advanced on-mesh texture painting inside a 3D application, and even that isn't foolproof when you go into racial head morphing.

--> http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/forum/422-skyrim-mod-requests/

Aaaand double post again.

Look into TRI files (there's a Blender importer/exporter on the Nexus) and The Conformulator. TRIs are Skyrim's morph data files and work pretty flexibly, all the racial head shapes and noses and lips and such are pulled from those. The Conformulator is a tool that can be used to generate TRIs for models, which you can then use to build morph sets and apply those in the CK - though as the children already have lip sync files and expressions, it's worth pulling those out of Meshes.BSA and examining them and cross-referencing to how the full-fledged races are handled. You could probably load up the lipsync TRI, empty out all but the Basis morph and then recreate the facial feature morphs as they're done for the adult races, then hook that new TRI file up through the CK. It'll take a fair bit of trial and error but it should be the best solution to your problem.

oh my gosh not again! sorry about the double posts. my mouse is breaking and registers a single click as two.

Not to mention delightful things like custom races breaking without a player-made workaround script, which was then invalidated by Dawnguard, which took a few months of more modder work to work around again, requiring more new compatibility patches and updates and versioning.. The work is far from over when the mod is released. I learned that the hard way and have two big race mods pending large updates. I don't know where to pull the time for that from. Both my major mods are now clocking in at over 100 hours of work each and they keep growing.

Double post :( Feel free to delete, mods!

Making mods is a lot of hard work, far more than you'd think - try making one of your own and you'll probably change your tune a lot. Modders will make what they feel comfortable making with the provided tools, and most of all, what they find fun and rewarding to make. If none of that scratches a particular itch you have, you're free to grab the CK or Blender and fill that void yourself. That's how my Skyrim modding started - frustration with a lack of what I wanted. Sure, it took me many months to learn by trial and error, develop, troubleshoot, polish and release my work, but that's the nature of the beast. And from those experiences I can't fault anyone for not wanting to embark on massive projects like world overhauls or major landscape expansions. Some of the stuff people are putting out boggles my mind with how much effort it's taken to do, and I spent all of my free time for a month and a half making elves. Demanding modders to work more and harder isn't helping the fact. We're people with jobs, studies, families and lives and it's a very time consuming hobby to have to begin with. I know my poor s/o probably hates the sight of pointy ears now.

I highly prefer to let my work speak for itself and allow the users to make the end judgement on whether it's good. A lot of my modding stems from an 'I made this thing and it was fun' mindset. I think the users also get a feel of how much love goes into all of my work, and they pick up on that sort of thing. Show, don't tell. I'm generally not convinced by attempts to 'sell' a piece of mod work. I'm convinced by clear definitions of what it does and how, and how other people who play like I do think of it.