LE Making progress with a playable severed head

[DrNewcenstein]

So I've been working on a mod that requires NPCs to collect severed heads, and the biggest obstacle has been getting the head to be a separate, playable item that you can pick up.

 

I've made progress, at last, and have a head that acts as a shield replacer (so you can stick them on shield racks). It took a lot of poking around with NIFSkope, but so far I've been testing it for a few days and it works. The only problems are:

 

1) I did so much tweaking and experimenting with getting it to work that now I have to do it again to document the process

2) There's a texture issue where the head comes out very dark (which is fine if I wanted to collect Dunmer heads, which I don't lol). Looks fine in the CK but not in-game.

3) It's just the head - no eyes, hair, headwear, hair, and no bloody gore chunk attached to the base of it. This would require someone who knows how to merge meshes and apply textures to them in Blender or has Max, or maybe, I dunno, someone to update the Blender nifscripts to work with Skyrim meshes without having to delete a bunch of data blocks. It's only been what, 2 and a half years?

4) It's a generic race-specific head, which means it doesn't have the features/morphs of any specific character. This is actually something that could be fixed, where named NPCs have their own unique severed head you could collect.

 

That said, it's not quite ready for distribution, but I did want to mention it. I know a few people have asked about such a mod/resource.

 

Once I've got the process documented, I'll post that part so others can work with it.

[neomonkeus]

 

....., or maybe, I dunno, someone to update the Blender nifscripts to work with Skyrim meshes without having to delete a bunch of data blocks. It's only been what, 2 and a half years?

 

Let me put some context to the above statement. The code that we develop, have developed and continue to develop is open source, which means that anyone can, could have and still can take it and do the aforementioned updates. Just wondering who you thing will, if nobody has done so before now? I am not defending the length of time it is taken to do development on the Blender Nif Plugin development, we're painfully aware its crawling. But when there is only myself and another dev and there can weeks where we don't have any time to change even a single line of code. Just wondering who but you're expecting to just do it?

 

I encourage you to check out the links in my sig, see what the full bigger picture, why we couldn't just dive into development when Skyrim came out, Blender stability and re-architecting the plugin to support everyone. Also you can check out the latest progress.

Edited August 3, 2014 by neomonkeus