Understanding Overlays - where to learn?

[BobWyglz1]

Hey all.

 

Overlays. They seem to be so fragile. Even some graphic drivers have issues with them, in Skyrim/Fallout 4 anyway.

 

I searched on here but there's not much that comes up with the words I'm searching on. "Multiple overlays" "compositing" etc. Sorry if I missed the world's best explanation, please link me!

 

How can we control them individually, or is that possible ? If something is flagged as a strike, ti's got a lifetime assigned, right ? Plus decals have a count and range too in the engine itself. What if I'm making a permanent-damage mod ? You got stabbed. So FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE, you will have that mark. By 100 minutes into the game, you're going to have dozens, maybe hundreds of overlays. :-)

 

No the engine wasn't designed for that. So how can we accommodate it ? Or how can we fake it ?

 

Is there anyway in-game to spawn a shell ? I don't think so, but we can call a mod like script extender that will do a lot of heavy lifting if we ask it to. What about taking a texture, overlaying an overlay on an overlay on an overlay, then baking that into the new texture, so that it's permanent, overwriging say basefemalehands_d/s/n ? Possible at all ?

 

What about, I want realistic medieval European peasant experience; not these loverlabs's idea of texturing where every skin is perfect, hair is clean and combed, and the have eye liner and lip gloss FFS!

 

No! I want pox, festering pustules, lice scalp, bug bites, rat bites, bedbug rash dots, various bruising purple-to-yellow, scars, missing or malformed limbs fingers faces.

 

There's Dirt and Blood overlay, what if I want to mix Dirt + Blood overlays with, Enhanced Blood Texture Overlays, with Skin Features Overlays, Wound overlays - and on and on.

 

But it doesn't work that way, does it?

 

Obviously a decade-old game we're not going to get realtime texture editing with bumpmaps and normals for a persistent world for thousands of actors, not just the Player. But even just the Player.

 

If I knew the "at birth" or "after puberty" ones, is there an easy way a non-technical person could composite overlay the base texture with the various .dds files, automatically? Sheogorath knows if I said "my mod is great and you'll love it, oh, but you have to be proficient in blender and gimp before you can use it!" I'm guessing only other modders would d/l it much less try it.

 

So help me out here. What's possible and what's not? I don't mind if you parrot the tutorial stuff, that you're willing to try and help me is what's important.

 

Thanks!