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How does everyone get such good looking characters while mine always look so half-assed?

ISOWarrior

By ISOWarrior
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ISOWarrior Contributor

ISOWarrior

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From all the screenshots I see, everyone else's characters and followers look so much better than mine. I spend hours in RaceMenu trying to make good faces without any sharp edges or blockiness, yet there are still visible sharp edges on the face, as seen on the screenshots attached( especially visible on the 1st one). I have WSCO Oriental, CBBE Bodyslide, Climates of Tamriel, Imaginator and ICBINE 3 installed( because my laptop will fry if I use an ENB). Also, whenever I finally become content with the faces I make, close RaceMenu and walk somewhere without light or outside, where the light shines from above, I get ugly shadows on he cheekbones and chin. Also, the characters look a lot better up close than they do from afar. Is it me who is doing something wrong with RaceMenu, or is it the lack of right mods? If the latter, is there any way to improve the looks of my game( and, by extension, the characters) on my ancient ATI Radeon Mobility HD 4650 graphics card without frying it in process? Either way, I am open to suggestions.
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ISOWarrior Contributor

ISOWarrior

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Have you tried No More Blocky Faces?

ÃÂ

http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/30/?

ÃÂ

How about these Realistic Body Textures?

ÃÂ

http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/36425/?

No More Blocky Faces seems like something to try out, although I don't think it will solve other problems at once. As for the textures, judging by the description it's for UNP and 7B while I am using CBBE because of the customization options and ease of outfit conversion, so don't think that suits me. EDIT: Nvm found the CBBE version.

Are you using the Sculpt Tab on RM or just fiddling with the sliders?

Both. Edited by ISOWarrior
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TeofaTsavo Rising Star

TeofaTsavo

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I have often found that when you dial up a facial feature too high it can distort other parts of the mesh and is often unseen till you change the light source. One thing I find helpful is to turn the Racemenu light off and zoom out after close up changes. The light is way too bright and washes the shadows out.

 

Your eyes are huge. Big enough to distort the cheeks and due to uv mapping your drawn in texture shadows will migrate to and create undesirable effects. I see this in DAZ as well. Morphing meshes are great but.. there is a limit, extremes in one area effect others as mesh gets compressed/ stretched to compensate and the textures just follow. You see this a lot on water balloon breast settings, the textures become ridiculous looking at some point. You will REALLY see this on some UNP mapped textures put on a CBBE body.

 

Dont always assume you need a new card. This is one of my chars... I have a potato.. ATI HD 4200 integral. lol ( fixed income stinks) She is passable, I think. Matter of choosing what works and what doesn't. This is UNP, WOS textures/normal maps and TKTK facelight.. a few other things. Stuff like Pureskin makes my comp cough blood and fall over. Hello Santa textures look terrible on this old comp as well. When I ran CBBE I also found that the Caliente stock textures were adequate and potato friendly. I looked up WSCO, it looks iffy to me just from the confusion in both the description and the comments, and the creator has apparently left the building. Big HD textures applied to every NPC in game are an issue for a struggling graphics card/software.

 

I'll admit, I prefer a stylized game char over trying to bridge the uncanny valley, in games as well as DAZ. Not much interested in producing portrait screens over usable chars that are decent at normal view distance. Your goal may be different. I much prefer the simple attractiveness of ZZJays chars over the various "cover girl" creations, for example.

 

And don't feel bad. If you look at Vanilla elven faces, Beth created that hard angular cheek on every preset that had enlarged eyes.

 

One last tip. Find a racemenu preset you like and work from there. Far easier than starting from a vanilla preset. Credit the original as inspiration if you share it. This girl was originally the Aranya preset from StephanieRawx (Nord). TBH the only Vanilla preset I will use as a base is Breton female 1.

 

 

 

Edited by TeofaTsavo
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ymf331 Community Regular

ymf331

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yea the eyes are a little big but really it looks like you just need a different skin texture. as for the suggestions part, with 1 gig of vram i just downloaded every good-looking texture pack i wanted and resized it down to 1k-512 (not skin it'll bug out). once i got it running at 80 fps then i was able to throw enb into the mix. it's not really fit for screen-archery but it winds up looking something like this with good performance with a gtx 550 ti. the character in the picture's a high elf using fair skin texture.

 

http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/219941941852166585/4C9AB4E79B9965069E5C15CAC11784EE535A0D1C/

Edited by ymf331
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ISOWarrior Contributor

ISOWarrior

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Maybe try the Ningheim race? I personally use them.

 

http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/35474/?

 

EDIT:

 

This one looks good.

 

http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/35267/?

 

These look good, I tried the SG pack on some of my followers, and it looked good in most cases( although in some cases it made the faces of the followers I was making look fatter), but I didn't wholly install it in the end because I didn't want it to conflict with WSCO( didn't want to uninstall it because I didn't want the males to return tovanilla textures. Any way I can keep both.

 

The custom race looks nice, but I am worried about the technical difficulties it will have if I try to create a follower based on it. Since I can't include it into the whole package, I can't make the follower fully standalone, and there have been reports of ESPs merged with Merge Plugins( something I do a lot to keep the plugin count minimal, because I have more than 255 mods installed) that contained followers referencing custom races were not working properly.

 

I have often found that when you dial up a facial feature too high it can distort other parts of the mesh and is often unseen till you change the light source. One thing I find helpful is to turn the Racemenu light off and zoom out after close up changes. The light is way too bright and washes the shadows out.

 

Your eyes are huge. Big enough to distort the cheeks and due to uv mapping your drawn in texture shadows will migrate to and create undesirable effects. I see this in DAZ as well. Morphing meshes are great but.. there is a limit, extremes in one area effect others as mesh gets compressed/ stretched to compensate and the textures just follow. You see this a lot on water balloon breast settings, the textures become ridiculous looking at some point. You will REALLY see this on some UNP mapped textures put on a CBBE body.

 

Dont always assume you need a new card. This is one of my chars... I have a potato.. ATI HD 4200 integral. lol ( fixed income stinks) She is passable, I think. Matter of choosing what works and what doesn't. This is UNP, WOS textures/normal maps and TKTK facelight.. a few other things. Stuff like Pureskin makes my comp cough blood and fall over. Hello Santa textures look terrible on this old comp as well. When I ran CBBE I also found that the Caliente stock textures were adequate and potato friendly. I looked up WSCO, it looks iffy to me just from the confusion in both the description and the comments, and the creator has apparently left the building. Big HD textures applied to every NPC in game are an issue for a struggling graphics card/software.

 

I'll admit, I prefer a stylized game char over trying to bridge the uncanny valley, in games as well as DAZ. Not much interested in producing portrait screens over usable chars that are decent at normal view distance. Your goal may be different. I much prefer the simple attractiveness of ZZJays chars over the various "cover girl" creations, for example.

 

And don't feel bad. If you look at Vanilla elven faces, Beth created that hard angular cheek on every preset that had enlarged eyes.

 

One last tip. Find a racemenu preset you like and work from there. Far easier than starting from a vanilla preset. Credit the original as inspiration if you share it. This girl was originally the Aranya preset from StephanieRawx (Nord). TBH the only Vanilla preset I will use as a base is Breton female 1.

 

 

attachicon.gifScreenShot1746.jpg

 

I can try making her eyes smaller once I get my laptop back( hopefully today), but I am not sure that will help, because that char used to have smaller eyes in earlier edits( I didn't say 1 thing because I thought it wasn't relevant, this char is actually a remake of the char I had in another game, so consistency with the look I have in mind for her is also a question, and the shadows were still there. How small should her eyes be? I originally thought it may be the Imperial issue, but then I looked and saw that my Nord and Breton characters have this as well. Her cheeks were more angular, however, but I smoothed them in Sculpt Mode.

 

Also, the question wasn't as much about angular cheekbones as much as it was about the vertices that stick out if I try to make them.

Another question is how do Iact when I am trying to create a video game character lookalike? The current follower I am making is based on a SWTOR character, and aside from the overall challenge of translating the character's face into this game while keeping it semi-realistic( because most SWTOR characters look very, very cartoony) . I wonder, how do I keep my retain likeness while not making it look ugly in the shadows? Where is the line between likeness and normality that I should walk?

 

I want my characters to be pretty, but I also want diversity in appearance, so I can't just reuse the same settings for several characters. For actual playing I use only 1 character, my first one, currently lvl206, she's an inhuman powerhouse and I like it. Don't want to start over despite several pesky bugs in that save. Other characters are just faces I make for nif export and further conversions to followers/ trainers/ bosses/ NPCs/ marriage partners/ whatever I think fits them, maybe occasionally also some mod testing when I am making something new. Not really into having many alts, 1 is enough for me, besides I don't find Skyrim to have as much choice variety as, say, Mass Effect or Dragon Age: Origins, so different playthroughs don't interest me here. The appearance of all my other characters is what matters.

 

Also, I'd rather the textures applied to all NPCs in the game. The vanilla NPCs are mostly fugly af. I remember how I once tried to make a new face for Elisif using Skyrim NPC editor( that was before I knew how to import nif files) because I thought her actual look didn't correspond with her title. I tried to find a cute female face in the vanilla game to use as a base, but I was instead shocked how many females I thought were okay looking were actually horrible at close up, even the ones considered to be good looking by the fandom like Astrid. Eventually I just gave up and installed a facial overhaul made by another user for Elisif. Also, I thought Onmund was actually cute until I saw his face without the hood, and the fact that his jaw was sticking out into the front. So, please, less ugly NPCs for me( except for the cases where their ugliness makes sense and is a plot point). Some might enjoy being the only pretty person in the entire game, but I'e had enough of this while playing The Sims 2 with it's awful looking townies.

 

yea the eyes are a little big but really it looks like you just need a different skin texture. as for the suggestions part, with 1 gig of vram i just downloaded every good-looking texture pack i wanted and resized it down to 1k-512 (not skin it'll bug out). once i got it running at 80 fps then i was able to throw enb into the mix. it's not really fit for screen-archery but it winds up looking something like this with good performance with a gtx 550 ti. the character in the picture's a high elf using fair skin texture.

 

http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/219941941852166585/4C9AB4E79B9965069E5C15CAC11784EE535A0D1C/

Performance isn't the most important thing, I am accustomed to buggy, slow games. As long as the story and graphics are okay, I can put up with the bugs and 20 FPS. Also, apart from WSCO, I mostly try to use lightweight mods. I use Bethesda's Official Hi-Res Texture pack, Pure Waters and Grass on Steroids among other replacers since they don't take up as much resources as some other replacers might, what truly makes my game heavy are scripted mods. Follower mods, quest mods, gameplay improvements. And yes, I use them all in one playthrough. I don't use any mod organizers because I am used to manual installation after manually installing mods in many games and I don't want to waste disk space on a program that does something I can do myself.

 

Another problem is that I am not sure I can measure the FPS correctly. The game's performance seems to drop every time I load Fraps( Maybe has something to do with the Windowed mode I am playing in? Anyway, I am not switching back to fullscreen, hiding the window from my family who are trying to lurk on me from behind is more important to me than FPS).

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ymf331 Community Regular

ymf331

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yea but you can have cake and eat it. a lot of people have spent a lot of time figuring out how to make skyrim look good on a potato. it's fully possible to use any textures you want without bugs or lag. i don't really see any reason not to at least use sweetfx, either. that and good lighting would help with your character's face quiiiite a bit.

 

what i'm saying is that you can overhaul everything and see an -increase- in performance compared to vanilla. for one there are optimized high-res textures that perform better than vanilla and look the same, to use as a base. one method would be to use skyrim texture enhancement. then you can grab a good water overhaul, noble skyrim, unbelievable grasses two, enhanced vanilla trees, peltapalooza, rugnarok, all the amidianborn and rustic textures you want. use ordinater to resize them to 1k and then do 512 normals. throw in enhanced lighting for enb and relighting skyrim with icbine and your game looks great.

 

oh yeah, mod managers... i used to do everything manually, but now that mod organizer exists i can strongly recommend it. it puts nothing in your data folder, gives you quick access to mod contents, overwritten files, archive extraction... i'm not gonna' say that it's compulsory, but i wouldn't go back.

Edited by ymf331
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ISOWarrior Contributor

ISOWarrior

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yea but you can have cake and eat it. a lot of people have spent a lot of time figuring out how to make skyrim look good on a potato. it's fully possible to use any textures you want without bugs or lag. i don't really see any reason not to at least use sweetfx, either. that and good lighting would help with your character's face quiiiite a bit.

 

what i'm saying is that you can overhaul everything and see an -increase- in performance compared to vanilla. for one there are optimized high-res textures that perform better than vanilla and look the same, to use as a base. one method would be to use skyrim texture enhancement. then you can grab a good water overhaul, noble skyrim, unbelievable grasses two, enhanced vanilla trees, peltapalooza, rugnarok, all the amidianborn and rustic textures you want. use ordinater to resize them to 1k and then do 512 normals. throw in enhanced lighting for enb and relighting skyrim with icbine and your game looks great.

 

oh yeah, mod managers... i used to do everything manually, but now that mod organizer exists i can strongly recommend it. it puts nothing in your data folder, gives you quick access to mod contents, overwritten files, archive extraction... i'm not gonna' say that it's compulsory, but i wouldn't go back.

I said, I am already using ICBINE 3, which is a SweetFX preset, and Climates of Tamriel. Not sure if any lighting mods work with CoT.

Ordinater? What is this? I am googling and a perk overhaul comes up.

Still, I already have lots of files in the Data folder, and I am not planning on reinstalling Skyrim( Searching for all these mods once again... Just ugh). Another thing that worries me is whether it wants my game connected to Steam or not. I've never connected my Skyrim to Steam. I hate running games via Steam. It just runs on the background and takes up precious resources, and there seems to be no way of running the game without Steam running on the background( at least that's the way it is with my Steam games). Don't want that for my Skyrim. Yes, Steam also backs up my saves, but it is something I also do myself. And I am not an achievement hunter, so not gonna register my game just for the sake of achievements. Can I use the organizer without Steam on an already modded Skyrim?

Edited by ISOWarrior
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