How do I get graphics like these?...

[Erchino]

While looking around for mods, I came around various Japanese mods that are quite amazing to look at. Using a combination of Modular Beautiful People, Ren's Hair, and x117 race, they have managed to make characters look very life-like. I actually do have MBP and SKS Ren's Hair, but I do not know where to find x117. Also, despite having installed MBP and SKS Ren's hair, my characters don't look nearly as good as they do in this website.

 

http://narulivion.blog46.fc2.com/blog-entry-219.html

(scroll down through and you should see some pretty amazing looking screenshots)

 

Does anybody know how I can get characters to look like these? When I create a character it doesn't look nearly as life like. I installed MBP and used CS to add SKS Ren's Hair, and I also installed various mods such as HGEC, but my characters don't look nearly as good. Am I missing something here?

[LFact]

1. Texture matters. Even vanilla NPCs will look better with HiRez age maps and skin textures.

2. In Oblivion, facial structure and features are determined by base head mesh, racial Facegen values, and Facegen values applied on individual actor. One of the reason why races with custom head meshes are so popular is they are easier to have good looking than stock races.

3. When you take screenshot, you need to find the place with 'good' lighting. The term 'good' is subjective, depends on place and mood.

[Erchino]

Well, I am currently playing Oblivion near max graphics, and the faces on that website just look incredibly clean, almost reminds me of like final fantasy cg cutscenes. I wonder if they downloaded any other mods and if so what they are. Also, where did they get those eyes and some of those clothes? Also, I downloaded the x117 race, it's like 55mb, but when I apply it the race doesn't seem to appear anywhere in my game. Anybody know a step by step?

[Nadimos]

Try hidden elves from korana. Edit: Actually i think what you can see on the screens aswell are the moonshadow elves. Just make a search for the more popular race mods. Edited January 27, 2011 by Nadimos

[Deleted2461031User]

For x117race, I got it here. You'll need Modular Beautiful People 2ch Edition for it to work, I think.

 

It won't really help with what you want though. All it really is is a few races with bigger heads. That said, the one based on headhuman.nif is differently shaped than the original, and so it might be useful for getting faces you like.

Edited January 27, 2011 by Guest

[Luminiari]

Are you referring to the texture on the actual faces (like, how the ones used by Naru are a more uniform texture, instead of all bluey and/or greeny)? If so, you can tweak that yourself in the Oblivion.ini file found in your (My)Documens/My Games/Oblivion folder. I'll hide my tl;dr in a spoiler in case that's not what you're looking for.

 

 

To make the textures look more smooth and even-toned, open the ini in notepad and look for the line that says:

 

bFaceGenTexturing=1

 

Change the 1 to 0.

 

And you're done!

 

The only drawbacks to this are:

1. The Redguards look more like, if not the same as, Imperials (they share the same face texture so essentially, you're left with two races with slightly different default facegens)*; and

2. You won't be able to lighten or darken parts of the face.

 

* You can remedy this by making new textures for the Redguards (darken the Imperial textures and save as new files), then make a small mod to change the texture paths. I can walk you through this, if you'd like.

 

[Yamcakes]

Also be aware that most pictures have extensive photoshopping to coordinate colours, and add faux lighting.

[Erchino]

Thanks for the response guys. I will start trying these various things and see how it turns out. Also thanks a lot for the x117 link!

 

Oh and yes I actually do mean the faces and the bodies. They look very clean, smooth, and the hair is nice and shiny, idk, it just looks very real. I'll report back with what I get when I try these different methods.

[kadath]

Well, I'll use as an example a couple of recent screenshot I made of my custom Vilja companion, the first and only face I made I'm actually 100% happy with:

 

Image 1

Image 2

 

Both pics are taken with a screen resolution of 1280x1024, HDR *and* AA x2, the settings I play with (HDR can be very useful at smoothing how lighting works on the characters, given the right ambient, but as I guess you know, you can have AA on together with HDR only if you force AA from you GPU control panel). No post production (aka photoshop editing) whatsoever, and I keep bFaceGenTexturing on, as while disabling it is indeed very useful for taking screenshots in certain situations, it flattens most npcs as without it they have no age maps and everyone ends up looking quite "dolly". This is exactly how my Vilja looks in game - at least when there's a good, soft ambient lighting (warm lights are usually the best for smoothing how the face looks).

Most of the merit goes to the Moonshadow elves race itself, its textures are amazing, but you can get pretty good results with vanilla races too if you use high res texture replacers (2048x2048 are enough imho, but you can even find 4096x4096 ones if your rig can handle 'em). The x117 races themselves will need such textures (as they mostly use the original Imperial ones) to look good, or you'll still end up with old midgets :tongue:

 

I use Ozmo's textures which are already built to enchance both vanilla and several custom races contained in Beautiful People (it comes with an automatic installer, but no need to worry, both the original BP and the japanese one have the same directory tree, so it works with both from the get go), but there are at least another couple of very remarkable alternatives here on nexus.

 

In the second pic you can see, together with Vilja, two other companions I customized, Ramy as a lop ears mini elf and Neeshka as a Lineage 2 dark elf. The latter is your standard BP one with Ozmo's textures (as you can see, quite good but still far from what the Moonshadow elves manage to be), while the former is an x117 based adaptation of the normal lop ears elves race: you can find both the original and the x117 version on the same japanese site (don't think it's allowed to link to it directly, but if you google "lop ears elf mini" it's the first result), and they too have pretty nice head meshes and textures. They tend to be a bit less "realistic" than Moonshadow elves in my opinion but still they are one of the best races out there overall (An example of an adult lop ears elf: pretty smooth, but quite more doll-like if you know what I mean).

 

Then there's the beast races: DesuChan's Kawa Khajiits, or the Tabaxi races with their high-res textures addons are among my favourites.

 

Finally, the hair are often a bit problematic. I've got to say the few hairstyles included in the Moonshadow Elves package are again some of the best I've seen around. The "old" Ren's or Soya hair tend to either not always reflect lighting very well (the former, especially with certain colours) or just have quite underwhelming polycount (the latter: as much as I like some of those styles, Soya hair when in bright colours are often really GHASTLY). The hair included in the lop ears elves races are pretty good too: the one I used for Ramy in that screenshot is a bit too "fake" to be honest, but as you'll see on that site, the more "traditional" ones are pretty silky and they reflect lighting pretty well in most situations.

Edited January 28, 2011 by kadath

[Erchino]

Wow your screenshots are exactly what I would like to pull off. I tried disabling the bfacegentexturing, and it actually smoothed out faces more, but I think you're right when you say faces look "dolly" so I think I'll turn it back on. I'll try doing what you've recommended and see what I get. And although I'd like to try this with the more human classes, the kawa khajits and the various other races are beginning to appeal to me. I'll see what I get and report back.