Brainstorming Neck Seam Fix

[jamochawoke]

Ok... As I was looking through the list of body mods wondering what kind of clothes and things I'd like to incorporate into my immersion mod I kept noticing, of course, the neck seam that ALWAYS shows up, no matter how hard the mesh creator worked getting them to line up. And of course Bethesda's is just as bad.

 

So I was wondering, instead of having the neck seam where it is, redo the head and upper body meshes so that the seam runs along the collarbone and upper shoulders.

 

What finally got me to thinking this was watching an NPC do an animation... the Shivering Isles broom sweeping animation. When they do this animation they bend their head forward and guess what? The neck seam BREAKS the mesh as the head is literally pulled off of the body mesh and leaves a large black void where the neck should be due to the way the head is bone weighted. This is using a vanilla animation with a vanilla body mesh.

 

That's just... that's just SO sloppy. So I was wondering if those meshes couldn't be altered in a way where the bone weighting wouldn't matter and this idea came to mind.

 

Good idea? Bad idea?

[AnimalRiot]

The biggest problem with relocating the neck seam is that you will have to remodel the head mesh and with that comes a lot more problems. Problems with the facegen mesh morphs, lipsync, animations, uvw mapping, and with that redo the facegen texture morphs and age mapping.

 

Then you will have to remodel all the clothes and armor meshes to accomodate the new seam. Then redo all the headgear mesh morphs to be compatible with the new head mesh.

 

I rather think the neck area is the optimal location of the model to have a seam, if it can't be helped. It has the least surface area on the model so it has the most minimal visual impact on things like seams.

 

In my opinion, it's just a game engine limitation we'll have to deal with.