LE True Anthropomorphic Race

[shadowxi304]

@DrakeTheDragon

yeah, im sure it would be hard to do in oblivion, and i do remember on the anthro wolves mod page that tiffa was thinking of making a wolf head for the race or something like that.

but that's just the wolf race, there's so much more to think about as well, and id love to see another anthro dragon race mod for skyrim, yummy~. >.>

[Chiron28]

If there is to be a mod of this, I would hope that they put some thought into it. The marrowind legs are ok, but they look extremely lanky and very akward. So if there were to be this mod, please do it with more scaled down porportions so It doesnt look so odd. Soon I will put up some drawings to show you what I mean.

[DrakeTheDragon]

@BeakieHelmet: "Jjiinx's" Morrowind Style Argonians wasn't done by me though, but I catered to a similar audience, of course, making their overall anatomy more like in Morrowind... well, at least with unique digitigrade feet and legs as far as it was possible when I started it.

The only time I did a custom head mesh was for my dragons, and I'm not feeling like attempting something like this again anytime soon. I know your mod, it was and is looking really impressive, and indeed cuter. There are 2 ways to change the shape of a head (counting the 2 I already mentioned as 1 for now):

- mesh-wise by creating a custom head mesh, either by reshaping an existing one like I did or by creating it all from scratch like only ThrottleKitty did, as far as I'm aware,

- by the base morph offsets for the race in the CS like Jjiinx did, and quite a number of others I know.

 

The 2nd approach definitely is even more restricted in how far you can make it different, as you're confined by the alterations achievable with the existing morphs. Still I've seen quite some impressive works done this way. This is less likely to break motions and animations, but it can of course still do that, if a morph offset gets too extreme or something.

 

The issues of the 1st approach I got into in detail already, I think, but there's one more oddity I'd like to mention from my own experience with this. For some cause the Vanilla Argonian Teeth mesh (I think the lower ones was it) in the NIF was completely different from the base mesh that was used to create the EGM and TRI morphs, and apparently it was only working together flawlessly "by accident". As soon as I moved 1 single vertex a few inches away from its position, everything exploded when it opened the mouth. The only solution I could find, and man did it take me time to finally find this, was to extract the base mesh from the EGM and create a new fitting NIF from this to base my deformations on. With this new base then everything was working fine all of a sudden, just as I expected it to be right from the start! Now tell me this was a solution everybody would immediately consider first!

 

I wouldn't be the least surprised, if something like this was causing the issue with your mouth as you described as well.

 

As for my mod breaking BBB, that's definitely because I required my own custom skeleton for the custom animateable bodyparts (arm blades, tail blades, wings, etc.) to work at all, and as such it replaced the BBB skeleton, leaving the BBB meshes without bones to stick to and they were flying off into infinity. I think since Growlf's Universal Skeleton though this could already be a non-issue now, as it includes BBB bones as well as my bones last time I checked. However, I hate this "there's only 1 skeleton file for all races"-restriction that much, that any next release (whenever this will be) will be using OBSE to swap player skeletons on the fly and I'll never have to touch the skeletons used by all others even remotely ever again. This comes also with the advantage of a complete set of custom animations only for my race, no other race will be affected or conflicting, but this involves me creating a bunch of custom animations first, of course... and I'm not an animator.

 

@shadowxi304: Unfortunately though this won't be coming from me, at least not anytime soon. There's no free time at all left anymore to even continue my Oblivion modding projects, so I didn't bother buying Skyrim, yet, either.

 

@Chiron28: I'm pretty sure a lot of people will remember the issues with the extremely frog-like legs and movements in Morrowind, which were so hated back then, and dreaded was their return to Oblivion everytime I explained the goal of my mods to the matter. I admit in AB and SAF the main cause for me doing that much less digitigrade compared to Morrowind was because the meshes were created by jdayT and I myself didn't know my ways around Blender, yet, but after I got more experience with and used to it I still sticked to this more-civilized, less-digitigrade appearance, just because Morrowind's design was too extreme for most and I agreed.

 

I think noone's going to recreate the original shape of the beast legs in Morrowind for any of the races discussed here, likely for the same cause, but instead they'll all stay true to their original designs, which will be far more pleasing to the majority, looking at all those images and sketches so far. And if any of the original beast races is redone in a more digitigrade design, I guess it won't be taken as ridiculously far as the Morrowind one either.

 

It's impressive what you can achieve with meshes alone already, sticking to the humanoid skeleton and animations still:

jdayT's Argonian Feet

I actually tried a design pretty close to Morrowind's myself first, but it was looking really awkward when moving:

1st attempt ever ...just ended up as... an epic fail

So I reduced the proportions quite a bunch and ended up with the currently used meshes:

state of the art Anthro-Dragon feet

This is all still only meshes, no altered skeleton or animations at all.

The same principle used on wolf feet

Yeah, I was using this trick a lot!

This one's actually the least digitigrade design I was ever using, yet it's still looking pretty decent, no?:

Plantigrade skeleton, digitigrade feet

But it wasn't enough digitigrade'ness to me, so I finally went the real way, with a custom skeleton, proportions and animations:

Release candidate Anthro-Dragon feet

I even reshaped those proportions into several yet-even-more-digitigrade appearances,

like close to Sergals to support a race request

(@BeakieHelmet: Could you please reassure Drake that General Rain won't rip his head off for him mimicking her pose from the reference image provided?)

or even to mimic a Reindeer at Christmas Eve!

(that last one's likely as far away from the real anatomy I'm after as it can get, but meh)

 

You see, there's a lot one can achieve, one way or another, and from very few to very much digitigrade anatomy everything can be made looking good.

And this is just what I could come up with in my Oblivion projects. Can't wait to see what the far more talented modelers from here will come up with in Skyrim next!

 

(Sorry for that many images showing my dragons and stuff. I kept them in linked form already not to spam the thread with big images. It's pretty much off-topic, neither related to Skyrim nor any of the races discussed here, but I hope it can give some ideas of the different ways to make things "digitigrade" at least. Sadly there's not much I can contribute other than ideas and personal experiences, but without free time this is not going to change anytime soon... as much as I'd love to mod for Skyrim right now... oh well.)

[razorpony]

Now that I've been through the tutorials and can edit Skyrim nifs in Blender, I've spent a day or so working on some new Khajiit feet based on my KATS mod for Oblivion. These are new, redesigned meshes with better seamless UV maps. I still need to work on rigging but the mesh is pretty much done for the female_1 body.

 

http://i174.photobucket.com/albums/w101/Razorpony/Crebain/Skyrim/SkyrimKhajiit2.jpg

 

This is an earlier screen I took. The seam that splits the toes is now much less visible and the pads on the bottom of the feet have been reworked as well. Based on what I've seen looking at SkyEdit (an early modding tool that functions like a poor mans CK) it looks like body meshes in Skyrim can in fact be selected on a per-race basis. This should make customizing new races much simpler and require no scripting.

 

RP

 

RP

[BeakieHelmet]

That... looks pretty good. I'd make the shins longer and the thighs shorter but...

 

it looks pretty good so far.

[razorpony]

Like Drake said I'm trying to get these working with little or no changes to the skeleton. I compressed the entire leg a bit overall so the knee is higher than where it would be on the vanilla body. I still don't know what that will look like when animations are run. It may work, it may look awful. WHo knows, maybe an animator will jump on board with this but until then I gotta work within my limitations.

And thanks for the comment. :D

 

RP

[DrakeTheDragon]

This is looking yet more impressive than it was for Oblivion already! Great work!

 

That's right, you can only go so far off the humanoid skeleton with the meshes before they start looking really weird when deformed by animations. The knee is a troublesome zone with this. I had to revert a lot of my changes in trying to make things more digitigrade, as the offset became too big without me realising before the knees got actually bent in a play test, in most of the custom races I created or worked with. If it's too far in front of the knee joint, it will get horribly stretched apart like a rubber band. If it's too far behind the knee joint, it will clip horribly when bending. Too far up or down and the legs will warp around where the knee joint is and not bend anymore. This was causing a lot of headaches to me already in the past, and I never could make it go as far off as I had in mind, sadly. So better keep an eye on this while it's still easy to fix these things.

 

The shins can be changed all the way one wants, as long as the feet are modified to counteract this, but the thighs can't be changed much as it'd cause the issues around the knee joints I described. This can only be achieved through skeletal changes to the bones themselves, and this then will require most, if not all, animations to be redone and switched on a per-race basis as well.

 

Great news that body meshes are finally unique per race!

That thing with the "_0" and "_1" suffix for interpolation between scrawny and fat bodies I already got, too.

Only thing I'm still wondering about is how equippable items work with this.

Is there a way to make them unique per race as well, or are they still "one size fits all" and change your body while you wear them?

Being the latter it would still require rather complex scripting to swap items' meshes per race, so this'd be some really valuable knowledge to me.

[razorpony]

Drake I've been looking at things in Skyedit and there is a dropbox that lets you select the race that items are for, whether they are bodies or clothing. So you could make a digitigrade body and assign it to beastfolk, then make dedicated armors and assign those meshes as well. You can see in this screenshot I took while looking at a Daedric Helm the box called "Applicable Races". Just add or remove a race from the list and you're good to go. Should be incredibly easy compared to Oblivion.

 

http://i174.photobucket.com/albums/w101/Razorpony/Crebain/Skyrim/Skyedit.jpg

[DrakeTheDragon]

Drake I've been looking at things in Skyedit and there is a dropbox that lets you select the race that items are for, whether they are bodies or clothing. So you could make a digitigrade body and assign it to beastfolk, then make dedicated armors and assign those meshes as well. You can see in this screenshot I took while looking at a Daedric Helm the box called "Applicable Races". Just add or remove a race from the list and you're good to go. Should be incredibly easy compared to Oblivion.

Wow, that's an impressive advance! So scrap the "complex scripting" nonsense I was talking of. Seems this time around the engine supports really unique anatomy per race on its own already. That is great news indeed! Thanks for sharing!

 

It will not make it like, when you equip an iron armor on Bretons, it will be human shape, when you equip it on Argonians, it's all of a sudden digitigrade, but this time we can very well make it so there's one version fitting each race for every item in the game at one point or another, and plantigrade pants just can't be worn by digitigrade races. Totally something people could get themselves used to I think.

[Danidragon]

Wow......now all we need is someone that starts doing the Argonians.......