Peccadillo Posted September 12, 2012 Share Posted September 12, 2012 I'm glad to see that this is nearing completion. It's looked fantastic for quite some time and the more pictures I see, the more I excited I am. I don't know what else you have to work on, but I'd love to help and will be sending you a personal message soon. Like Adaadami, I just wanted to peek in here and express my gratitude. Well done! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nuska Posted September 12, 2012 Author Share Posted September 12, 2012 Well, after I get the remaining 10-something beards done, this goes into polishing stages and NPC restyling. Polishing in and on itself involves:-implementing higher resolution tintmasks-cleaning up normal maps-going through all the individual assets in the CK and perfecting tintmask colours-preparing vampires so they use roughly identical assets and colours to the main races-putting together complexions-adding skin tones and hair colours-refining noses and lips to tackle stray uneven vertices.-generally making sure everything works I'm putting out a beta build for testing to a sample size of around 10 people when polishing is at a reasonable stage. :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Peccadillo Posted September 12, 2012 Share Posted September 12, 2012 I never thought that so much would be necessary to overhaul a race! And these are the last changes? Well, kudos to you and I hope to participate in the beta build, but, if not, I'll enjoy the mod when it's released. Good luck! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nuska Posted September 12, 2012 Author Share Posted September 12, 2012 (edited) That's only the polish stage. :D So far, the entire mod creation process has been: -remodeling racial head morphs for both genders and 3 races-exporting and processing said morphs, importing to Zbrush for sculpting-sculpting new facial features in high poly in Zbrush for each headshape, baking onto game model to produce normal maps-fixing normals afterwards in photoshop, adding extra hires skin detail-painting warpaints and tint masks from scratch-remodeling most nose and lip morphs for both genders to fit new facial features-enabling new facial features in CK, disabling inhuman looking noses-adding all the new tintmasks and paints in the CK manually for each race and gender, assigning tint colours-rerouting texture and mesh paths to new normal maps and morphs-building new chargen presets with new appearance features-remodeling all 60+ beard morphs for the 3 male races, totaling at roughly 180 individual morphs - this is still in progress and the most tedious thing I've ever willingly done-remodeling scar mask morphs TLDR there is an absolute TON of "invisible" work that goes into making this, but it's all critical for producing consistent quality results with no clipping or floating bits. It's not immediately evident in the end result, but when you take up comparisons to the original models you see an absolutely massive difference. That's why it's not immediately done either - every step of the way requires testing, tweaking, testing again and tweaking more until it looks JUST right. Almost isn't good enough. :) I can also perfectly see why no one before me has taken up a project like this. It's stupidly complicated in some parts and just consumes a lot of time with repetitive tasks like morph processing. It's not very glamorous. 80% of the work in terms of time consumption has been just pulling vertices around in Blender. I lost count a few weeks ago but I must've clocked in around 70 hours on this already at an average of 3-4 hours per working session several times a week and a number of all-day-all-nighter weekends. My boyfriend probably hates the sight of elves now as he must subconsciously equate them with neglect. http://i.imgur.com/N90U6.jpghttp://i.imgur.com/ueGEB.jpghttp://i.imgur.com/gX6yX.jpg Edited September 12, 2012 by nuska Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nuska Posted September 12, 2012 Author Share Posted September 12, 2012 http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ma8z2aASWL1r3e7wgo1_1280.jpg Old lady skins for player presets - this won't be solely about pretty young faces :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nuska Posted September 12, 2012 Author Share Posted September 12, 2012 http://i.imgur.com/eBvFv.jpg And a bigger sampling. I configured my game to match vanilla textures quite closely to see how well the mod fares even without totally prettified skin. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JanusForbeare Posted September 12, 2012 Share Posted September 12, 2012 Very nice! Is the one in the top-left corner a Bosmer? Kind of looks like a Redguardmer. :) Don't get me wrong... I like it! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nuska Posted September 12, 2012 Author Share Posted September 12, 2012 Yes, I've added a few extra skin tone options for each race. :) I personally love dark skin and thought it a shame the elves were restricted to pale tones only. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JanusForbeare Posted September 12, 2012 Share Posted September 12, 2012 It really came out well. The dark-turquoise Dunmer skin is another new skin tone that looks absolutely beautiful. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nuska Posted September 12, 2012 Author Share Posted September 12, 2012 Ahh, I toned it down a little to be less saturated, now it's more grey but has hints of the vibrance left :) It just doesn't stick out as much.Skin tones are really tricky to get just right since they show up so differently between texture sets and ENB configs. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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