Mass Effect 3 [REQUEST] Buff FemShep Body Neck Seam Fix?

[HeartlessWanderer]

So there's a pretty cool, fairly subtle mod for Female Commander Shepard on Nexus that I quite like. It's called the Buff Female Shepard Body Mod, and its basic effect is to make FemShep's body appear more physically fit, in keeping with the idea that she's a marine who's gone through intense training. Arguably this makes certain shared animations between herself and MaleShep more awkward (her arms look a touch weird during one particular shot at the Defense Committee meeting), but it also makes other scenes look more sensible (most notably whenever she's doing something physical with James Vega... fistfighting and pull-ups, I mean). The mod also has a casual outfit replacement mod to accompany it, which replaces FemShep's armored combat fatigues with a tank top that includes both clean and "dirtied" textures for the opening sequence.

 

The mod hasn't been updated in over two years, and it still has an issue: the neck seam is very visible whenever Shepard is in either her underwear mesh or the tank top outfit. I'd like to request a fix for this, since it appears the original creator may not be available or inclined to work on it. I think this can be fixed without modding the actual buff bodies meshes, though. I suspect this a model mesh issue and not a texture one, so I'd be inclined to think tweaking FemShep's neck mesh to better fit with the buff bodies mod would be simpler and less intrusive on the modder's work. The reason I think this is a mesh issue rather than a texture one has to do with how lighting hits the neck seam and how in one of the Buff Body Mod page's images, the back of Shepard's neck appears to slightly separate from the back of her torso, just a tiny bit.

 

Altering Shepard's neck mesh would probably affect other female NPCs the same way the buff body mod does, but since you don't really ever see them with unobscured neck seams to begin with, this may not be a problem. Of greater concern is how one of the player options widens or narrows the neck, but I don't think this actually affects where the neck connects to the body model. It may be easy to work around that niggle if the neck can actually be edited.

 

I could just be talking out of my bum on this one, but it would really be a cool thing if someone could do this. I lack the expertise to do so myself, but as mods go, I would think it'd be one of the simpler and less time-consuming mods to implement, and it could be used as a starting point for any other mods that attempt to increase FemShep's musculature to any degree, since it's unlikely her shoulders and back would change much even if, say, someone wanted to amp up how much ab she has showing.

 

 

Edited June 8, 2016 by HeartlessWanderer

[HeartlessWanderer]

Agh, never mind. I've been looking into other casual outfit mods and it seems the neck-seam problem is present in all cases where Shepards neck gets to connect to her bare shoulders. It's an issue with MaleShepard as well. Just an oddity in the way Shepard's model works, I suppose. BioWare really needs to quit cutting corners on models and animations. >_>;;