Progress on my childlike races mod

[Glitchipedia]

So I've made some progress on my childlike races, but they've still got a load of bugs to work out, due in no small part to my limited (i.e. nonexistent) meshing skills.

 

Here's one of my two prototypes, Kaeli ra Teremolve, daughter of my player character, Willis ra Teremolve.

 

 

http://bmgf.bulbagarden.net/members/27212/albums/5668/89207.png

The hands seen are from the HGEC body replacer by RAIAR; the robe is from the HGEC A-Cup Clothing and Armor Replacer by ultimote. The pose is from Personality Idles by Dereko.

 

 

Presently, human and elf children:

-Are 0.7 times the size of adult characters.

-Have their own head mesh scaled to 1.3 times the original size (the neck size is unchanged). Planning on scripting all vanilla headwear to change size when equipped to a child.

-Are dependent upon popcorn17's Undies Underneath mod to give them their own bodies (planning to change to independent scripting); said bodies are unplayable and cannot be removed by the player. Just want to make sure that's understood.

---Boys use the upper body, hands and texture of the "Sleek" style from Room207's CrossDressing Body Replacer (to reduce their muscle size) and the lower body and feet of the "Average" style from Robert's Male Body Replacer V52, using underwear style 1a. This causes some clipping/gap issues at the waist; haven't figured out how to fix it.

---Girls use an HGEC-compatible texture, ultimote's HGEC A-cup Sack Cloth Shirt and the HGEC Normal panties found in Undies Underneath (don't know if it's the same in the standard HGEC underwear version). Also planning to script all vanilla upper body clothing/armor to change to a flat-chested version when equipped to a female child; for now, they use clothing specifically named as being theirs.

-Are marked "essential" and cannot be killed.

-Can breathe underwater, since their short stature impedes their ability to surface.

 

I have not attempted Orc, Khajiit or Argonian children yet, and have no plans to create Dremora children.

 

Known bugs:

-The major bugs I've run into have to do with the head. All the morphs work perfectly, but the neck doesn't align quite right and appears to have lost its weighting, remaining rigid as the head turns and looking creepily disembodied. Furthermore, when initiating dialogue with characters using this head, the camera zooms straight through the floor. Everything I've tried to fix these bugs has resulted in the head turning invisible.

-As mentioned above, male children also have some clipping/gap issues at the waist resulting from the mixture of two different body replacers. I have not yet figured out how to address this issue without screwing something else up.

-Their scale causes them to clip severely with chairs and beds. There's probably a way to fix this, but I don't know what it is.

-There is also a minor issue where weapons and shields will shrink with the body, though in all honesty, if you can accept "one size fits all" clothing, magical size-changing weapons aren't too much of a stretch.

-A game engine limitation leaves the first-person camera at the same height for all races, so child player characters will find themselves inexplicably gaining a foot and a half in height when switching to this mode. This may end up as a criterion qualifying children for "non-playable race" status, but they're still viable companion material.

 

The mesh problems are literally the only real bumps in the road. Once they're taken care of, the remaining pieces of the puzzle shouldn't be too big of an issue, since most of them can be taken care of in the Construction Set itself (with OBSE, natch). By the end, I'd like this mod to have:

-A number of fully-AI'd child NPCs scattered around Cyrodiil.

-At least one quest involving a child or multiple children.

-Full voice acting (I've already cast an actress for the role).

-Possibly even an adoption agency! (Probably going in an add-on pack)

 

So, any meshing advice (or even some direct assistance) would be very much appreciated.

Edited August 14, 2013 by Glitchipedia

[Harvald]

looks fine.

 

Do you know the japanese lop ear Elf mini race? its a little similar but yours are more realistic.

 

http://blog-imgs-44.fc2.com/k/u/m/kumakumakokuma/SS4909.jpg

[Glitchipedia]

The problem with the x117 races (lop-ears elf mini included) is that they're dependent upon multiple Beautiful People mods, which are nowadays devilishly difficult to find, hard for people like me to download and, from my understanding, riddled with bugs/incompatibilities. My aim is to create child races that can stand on their own and don't require so many other things that people may or may not want/be able to use. I do, however, appreciate your effort to direct me to a more complete mod than my own.

[Harvald]

hey, there is am omod that properly works.

 

Download here http://dfiles.eu/files/10ixawqsm.

 

But it was not my intention to criticise yor work. In my opinion it looks fine. I'd like to have a little bigger head in body/head ratio and a little bigger eyes, But you are definitly on the right way.

 

Sorry for my bad english.

 

Harvald

Edited August 22, 2013 by Harvald

[DarkSpyda04]

Aren't the x117 children a bit too anime-ish? What if I don't want to have anime characters in my mod? When you play Skyrim and look at children, they're a lot more realistic. I was hoping for something like that. Something that adds more immersion to the world.

 

You can't do eet because you have no meshing skills, right? You have no 3D modeling skills that means? I could so badly imagine wanting to model a face for you but that's me trying to make more work for myself than I realize. I have plenty of experience in 3Ds Max but I have no experience in Blender, I've never imported a custom object, I don't know how to make differences between male and female meshes when you select the option in the Oblivion character editor, and I'm not even sure if I'd have to completely redo all of the animations. It seems to be a lot more work than you'd think, or maybe it's just because I'm so new to lot of these things. If I were to help out, I'd have to make this my active project and that in itself would take a lot of thinking.

 

It's easy to dive into something and say "sure this mod sounds cool. I'll help :P" but it's another thing to realize when you're biting off more bark than you can chew. I honestly have no idea how in 2013 there are no mods for realistic children NPC's; maybe everyone just moved onto Skyrim? It's kind of sad. Everyone abandons Oblivion and moves onto the next big game. Either way I don't think I can contribute to the possibility.

 

And call me curious but what age group are you shooting for? A child's appearance changes as he/she ages so it makes sense to know what particular age group to shoot for and stick with that age group.

Edited August 22, 2013 by DarkSpyda04

[nuska]

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.

Edited August 22, 2013 by nuska

[DarkSpyda04]

@nuska

 

Thank you. I was trying to import body parts as .NIF files and it was telling me "File does not exist". I was confused because it allowed me to import other .NIF files like castle walls. So all I had to do was open the .NIF file in NifSkope and export to .OBJ and import that .OBJ into 3Ds Max.

[Glitchipedia]

To answer your question about the age range, I'm not entirely sure myself. My prototype girl (Kaeli, the Breton pictured above) looks to be in the 8-10 range, but my prototype boy (Orlin, a Dunmer) looks closer to 11-12. Of course it might vary from race to race—a Breton boy could well look to be the same age as Kaeli.

 

I don't think there will be a need to separate heads by gender.

[DarkSpyda04]

@nuska

 

You mentioned being able to set male-specific and female-specific faces instead of unisex ones. The big question I have is can we as of 8/23/13 have race-specific body parts so that all races don't share a single set? Can I have say an Orc with big arms with that race and an Imperial with small little arms instead of them both having the same-sized arms? The only alternative that I can think of seems to be applying alternate body parts as clothing but of course when you take the clothing off for whatever reason is what I'm concerned with. It almost makes the mod seem fake.

 

I'm reading the description for the Blockhead plugin and it says:

Ability to override the body textures and models of NPCs on a per-NPC or per-race basis.

Does this say what I think it says?

 

@Glitchipedia

 

I've figured it out. You need to model the body to relative proportions at the size of a full-grown adult (6ft) (Recommend using a 1.0 scale reference model from Oblivion). The reason you'd need to model the body of a child to the scale of an Oblivion adult's body is so that the model can use the same, unmodified skeleton that the adult uses since we can scale down the skeleton in the construction set when we're creating a custom race. From the same custom race editor we can set the face mesh data. To set the rest of the body dependent on race, we use shademe's "Blockhead". For hair and clothes we might or might not need to build around the model you created. And there we go. A flawless child in Oblivion that works for both the player and NPC's. It's flawless in theory, anyway (Lord knows how many problems one might run into).

 

Then only problem I can think of animations. Instead of sitting ON a chair, you'll sit THROUGH the chair and this is because you shrunk down the size of the skeleton (already tested it out). Oh and they'd also be slower, too. The skeleton is funny like that. Increase size of skeleton, increase speed. Vice versa. Truthfully I'd recommend testing the hypothesis with a blocky test model, first. Just a few blocks to represent limbs should do it. If it works, go big.

 

http://www.rearfacingdownunder.com/growthchartcarseat1.jpg

 

Now the only question (And it is a big one) is whether or not to model these parts as originals or to modify existing content. Each has different implications due to the UV's associated. Take Alecu's "Digital Girl" head mesh, for instance. That head was modeled from scratch and although the result was smoother than any other head including Diablo Elf 6 (which is actually very low-poly), the UV's were unique and thus did not match any other face texture. Instead you have to create an entirely unique texture just for that head. Now say Diablo Elf 6, that texture can be swapped with ANY other face texture because the head was a modification of an existing one and therefore shares the same UV's. How do I know this? Logic applied to my understanding of 3D modeling, and because I compared and contrasted a vanilla Oblivion head, the Diablo Elf head, and the Digital Girl head.

 

So if you create an original model from scratch, no existing texture will match that model and you'll have to create a new one. However, you also have complete control over the model and you can increase the poly count for a smoother look without worrying about severe deformations.

 

On the other hand if you choose to edit an existing model to get the desired result, you may find less control over the process, the final result won't look nearly as smooth, but you will be able to apply an existing texture to the model.

 

Alternatively you could also reconstruct a vanilla Oblivion head+body and try to match the UV's and save as a base to work off of so that textures match AND you have complete control over the model. This would be extraordinarily easy with a retopology tool.

Edited August 24, 2013 by DarkSpyda04

[Glitchipedia]

I'm aware of the scale the body has to be—the meshes I'm using for the male body just come from two different body replacers, resulting in gaps and clipping. I don't know how to make them appear seamless—i.e. reshape them—without throwing off the rigging or the weighting or something.

 

Going by your chart, my child prototypes have roughly the proportions of six-year-olds. They're supposed to be portrayed as older than that, but the twelve-year-old example on the chart doesn't look sufficiently childlike to me.

 

I've been using Oblivion's vanilla head as a base, which has led to all sorts of problems. As I stated in my opening post, all my attempts to fix the head glitches have resulted in the head turning invisible, and I can't figure out why—I'm following this tutorial's instructions pretty much to the letter, except for using Edit Mode in place of Sculpt Mode. Basically the only real change I make is rescaling the head to the appropriate size and then restoring the neck to the original size, as I've found the Construction Set's FaceGen functions are capable of producing a convincingly childlike face.