SSE New War Paint... surely it's not this hard?

[cumbrianlad]

Hi. I got a new war paint into my NPC. It looks absolutely stunning... way better than vanilla war paint, for certain.

 

So why am I complaining? It took me 6 hours., that's why.

 

The procedure was tortuous. I copied a vanilla warpaint texture, just to get the size of the texture file right. I then made my desired warpaint texture and added that in. This took some time to design the texture but I wasn't worried about that... art takes time.

 

What really annoyed me was that the textures are applied to the faces in a really wierd fashion. I swear that I centred my textures perfectly, but CK applies them shifted to the left! Not only that, but it seems to apply a curvature to the parts that wrap around the forehead.

 

I spent hours going into CK, checking the war-paint on my NPC, exit CK, open paint.net, alter image, SaveAs 'pdn file', SaveAs 'dds file', open CK, check NPC, oh sh*t, exit CK, open paint.net, alter image, SaveAs 'pdn file', SaveAs 'dds file', open CK, check NPC, oh dear... this took up the 6 hours. I only wrote this sequence twice. In reality, I did it more than 20x. The problem was exacerbated by the fact that I wanted the war paint as 2 mirror images either side of the nose, so the smallest inaccuracy in positioning the paint showed up clearly when applied to the NPC.

 

Is there an easier way to add new war-paints?

 

Is there some way to see how the textures are applied to the faces?

[maxarturo]

You could:

A) use "RaceMenu"

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/29624?tab=description

To apply overlight textures.

B) Extract all actors meshes and create a "New Race", this way you can see in NifSkope what you are actually doing while you are doing it.

* Both of the above have their own obstacles to overcome since i don't know if Race Menu has SSE version and creating a new race from scratch has a lot of entries in CK.

[Hanaisse]

Warpaints are silly hard so I took some time to write up a tutorial on them, including creating .psd templates to help in creating them that define areas on the head for better placement.

 

If you're interested and don't have or don't want to create an account at TES Alliance to grab the templates let me know, I'll PM you a download link.

Edited March 23, 2020 by Hanaisse

[cumbrianlad]

Thanks for the replies, both of you.

 

In this instance I already made a new race for my character and I'm quite happy with races.

 

Hanaisse, I'll bear that in mind next time I do this. Those templates look a lot quicker and easier to work with than using CK, checking the preview (full and head) in the actor form.

 

With what you've both told me that should cut down the workload for this. If there wasn't an easier method, I wouldn't want to do it ever again!

 

Thanks