LE Vampire Fight with (better) Claws

[wgperi]

For many time I was quite satisfied with the Derok meshes but since his models were made to be used by the beast races only, the textures used to fit since they were darker(based on the fingertips of khajiit and argonians textures) but the natural claws were awful, I confess. If you're looking for texture quality then those claws were awfully outdated. My trials in texturing were not a complete failure but very tedious and time consuming so I stopped bothering when other things also started to change the way I approach the game. Anyway, this mod has always been a contribution from many authors, the latest ones are from you both so I feel grateful to have these available as a mod user more than anything else.

[onewinged20]

Uploaded my new implementation to the VFWC page this morning. http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/69792/

 

I'm pretty ignorant of how meshes and textures and such work. I'm just a guy learning to fool around with plugins.

 

Somehow the version of this mod I'm working with doesn't include any textures, just meshes. They're pretty much just solid and use the character's skin color. I am guessing, though, that part of making new meshes look good will require textures, too, but if possible, I'd like to have a textures that look natural-ish. Or at least as natural as big beastly claws growing from a human/elf's hands can look. I'm also guessing that for the nails to really look good growing from a male or female's hands, the meshes might have to be different between male and female characters. It's been awhile since I played a male character, but I'm guessing their hands are likely a bit different in size and shape so I don't know if a "one size fits all" solution will work. Should be easy to implement on the plugin side, though.

[onewinged20]

Well, this is embarrassing. I may just have jumped the gun a bit on this new implementation. Found an unexpected result that some users may prefer, but I'm currently working on a way to fix: unfortunately, this new way of giving claws to vampires still displays the claws when wearing full gloves, and so clips through a lot of them. In my initial testing, I didn't notice it with Vampire Gloves, either because of their clawed shape making it difficult to tell, or completely/mostly enclosing the claws in the gloves. But with others (which I didn't have in my character's inventory when I first tried this), it's really obvious. Like, for example, Shrouded Gloves.

 

I'm toying around with the Creation Kit and brainstorming solutions, but I'm not sure what I can do about it. Obviously the claw slot (49) could be added to all closed gloves, but that would make compatibility a nightmare, which defeats half the point of this new implementation. The best solution I can think of is replacing non-beast vampires' entire hand mesh, but I'm guessing most if not all body replacers like CBBE and UNP also replace those, so there would have to be new versions for every body replacer. Not ideal, and a lot of work, but better for the end-user than changing armor properties in the plugin, I think.

 

From the beginning I wondered why no one had used this method before, and now I think I've found why.

 

EDIT: Yep. After looking at it some more, pretty sure the only way to properly implement my idea for this mod instead of wgperi's original is to make more work for someone else: make the claws part of the hand meshes, with their own separate file names from the originals, of course. Then can flag them in plugin as being for non-beast vampire races.

Edited September 26, 2016 by onewinged20

[wgperi]

Hello and I like where this is going, actually. From my perspective I'd guess the perfect implementation will require a more complex code, new meshes and armor addons for every pair of gloves the claws clip over, and/or a custom script to distribute claws dynamically only to those vampires not using gloves. I already see some flaws on each of these, but we gotta take the path that suits the plugin, and understand that it is hardly impossible to make it compatible with everything.

 

Thing is, the vanilla vampires are either wearing robes and no gloves, vampire armor without gloves and vamp armor with gloves. So the big trouble is on the player's end and with the mods that change vampire records.

 

I've played a bit with Mator automation tools to see if I could implement a clawificator, a patch rule to be used alongside VFWC, it will require slightly more work but I'm sure if you have modded Skyrim for some time, you know you gotta spent a lot of time working on polishing your load order with patches and whatnot, no we must not simply rely on laziness, modding is difficult to master and takes a lot of time instead of just plug and play.

 

Still your implementation is worth the change, there is a mod which is listed under recomendations in the VFWC description with all vanilla gauntlets modified to be fingerless, so I guess that is something that you ought to download and makes a lot of sense because you'll want to have your claws visible.

 

And definitely the claws will need to be adjusted to both female and male hands. I rarely use body replacers and won't be able to support every body(impossible I guess, there's a new one with every week), but I guess the change and versatility of the new version will attract people interested in this for themselves, and hopefully some of them can either help developing compatibility patches or providing their own. Again, having it universaly compatible is something that should stay beyond the prime goal, which is present something we are confortable ourselves to play with.

[onewinged20]

Ah I didn't know about the fingerless glove plugin. That sounds nifty. I wonder if I could modify it the same way I modified your plugin to only apply the fingerless version to vampire races? That would be pretty sweet. Would still have to do compatibility patches for mods that change gloves like Weapons & Armor Fixes, I think, but that wouldn't be so bad. And anyone using lots of different mods that modify vanilla armors probably knows how to do their own merge patch for compatibility.

 

I'll tinker with it in the next day or two if you don't beat me to it.

 

EDIT: As I thought, should be easy enough to set vanilla gloves to use the fingerless mesh for vampires and beast races, and use vanilla ones for everyone else. Not sure if that's something there will be a lot of demand for, but personally I prefer it over having to craft fingerless variants, especially if the claws are going to be on vampires all the time. I started on it earlier today, but got tired of looking at TES5Edit before I got very far. Until I get better claw meshes, just knowing I can do it is enough for me.

 

Was this the fingerless glove mod you were talking about? http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/57246/

That's the one I've been working from. If we can really do this, here's hoping the author will let us use his glove meshes. Pretty sure this mod doesn't cover all the full-finger gloves in the game, but it's a start. And of course, before I go much further working with it, I should probably see how the gloves look in game.

Edited September 29, 2016 by onewinged20

[wgperi]

Exactly, this is the mod I mentioned and It is compatible with any retexture you may have. If I'm correct, to make the vampires use these models instead you only need to set in the armor records which addon to use for the vampire races right? Since I'm sure that mod author created new armor addons for each piece of gauntlets, it is only needed to find them and point to them and also there's no need to ask for permission, just add that mod as a requirement in the override plugin and change it the way you want. It can be an optional plugin, it is usually better this way if some users simply don't want to use that mod and/or have their setups modified differently.

 

Pretty great all the news you bring about the mod, there is one thing I'd warn you though, there is some trouble with the way Bethesda implemented the female addons, i.e. sometimes you'll rip your hair off with the shrouded hand wraps, they have it set differently, it seems something with the 1stPerson model being used for both 1st and 3rd differently from the way the male works. That got me insane until I realized it was a different setup, also the khajiit/argonian are messed but you won't need to worry about those since both already have claws.

 

Edit: BTW, that mod is awesome if i.e. you have the iron fist perk and is a vampire. It has great synergy with the claws. Walking around in light armor or vampire clothing with only ebony gauntlets looks so badass. Daedric gauntlets already have a devious claw.

Edited October 1, 2016 by wgperi

[onewinged20]

Wgperi, when originally when I saw your post near the start of this thread about claw meshes, I sort of assumed they weren't in a format ready for use in a .esp, but then I looked at it today and saw one of the files in the Google link is a .esp, but I didn't see any .nifs. Are these meshes ready to be used in a plugin? Is there a file here I can just use to replace the .nifs in your mod? (or more specifically, in my new verion of your mod) And if there isn't anything ready, what kind of timeframe are we looking at? Do we need someone else's technical knowledge, or is it something you can/will do?

 

I ask because I'm hoping that if we can get a complete, working mod for "naturally" growing claws with these meshes, plus the extra .esp for automatically using fingerless gloves, then maybe it will be easier to generate interest bringing in outside help for more iterations (pretty nail textures, adding more gloves as required, adjusting position/size/etc of nails as necessary for body replacer mods, and so on). The more we have to show, the more comfortable I'll feel "cold calling" (messaging, really) people who do this sort of thing to ask if they're interested in investing their time into it. And of course, maybe even getting the mod on the recommended list of other mod pages. The more people who download/endorse/use the mod, the easier I think it will be to get/keep people (including me) interested in working on it, and the more work put into it, the closer it will be (hopefully) to the mod I hope it can be. Which is the whole point, because when we get down to it I'm a selfish bastard whose real motivation is some badass, no-hassle vampire claws. =)

[wgperi]

Hello, I have ran into a couple issues with my pc which took me nearly a week to get around. At this moment I don't have any .esp ready and the claws present in here are not rigged yet, they aren't tied to the skeleton and thus cannot simply replace the other ones. This process is a bit tricky, and from my experience not 100% acurate(my hours into blender, nifskope and gimp had me ripping my hair off for weeks) but fortunately there are tutorials covering the rigging and importing of assets from blender to nifskope and finally to Skyrim. If we could find someone with the tools all set it would be great, but in any way I'll have a look into the process of rigging and importing to the game and if I don't run into too much hassle it would be awesome. By the way I don't have any news of Renthal for a good half a week now, my guess is that he will bring something fairly good, hopefully awesome but still, if he sticks with the mesh I presented then we might have a model to work with for the moment.

[wgperi]

Well I have to be very sincere, working with blender, nifskope and their scripts is a huge nuisance I grew quite tired of lately, and upon trying to get them working again all the frustration of following tutorials to the letter and getting absolute no result but import, console and loading errors felt quite fresh in my memory. Unfortunately this is a good example of the sum to why I lost interest in Skyrim and in modding Skyrim. I understand there are other tools i.e. 3dmax seems to be the best way to work the way in and out of skyrim and fallout but at this moment I don't feel like getting into modeling again(and I don't think we're missing much, actually). But I have reinstalled Skyrim and I'll give a look at the mod in the TES5Edit to see if I can figure the way it is working, and maybe provide some help with that.