A quest ABOUT modding?

[Glitchipedia]

In the Mod Requests forum, I brought up a problem I'm having with editing head meshes for my very first mod, which would add childlike NPCs. It has recently come to my attention that this is not only one of the most difficult things to attempt, but also one of the most expensive—the one free utility I found crashes when I try to use it.

 

So it got me thinking. What if I made a quest where the objective was to fix the mesh?

 

--------------------

Premise:

 

Willis ra Teremolve and his wife, Icira, are in a desperate situation. Their daughter, Kaeli, has contracted a rare disease of the eyes and throat, and even Willis' player, yours truly, can't seem to figure out how to cure her. My whole role in the quest is basically just to break the fourth wall and explain the player's task: cure Kaeli by fixing her head mesh, specifically her EyeMorphs and the scale of her neck. When this task is completed, the player is then to upload the repaired head as a modders' resource, or just send it to me directly (the real me, not the quest NPC); either way, I will then send them an updated ESP that will allow them to finish the quest and collect a substantial reward.

 

Following this, I will take the quest down and eventually reintroduce the characters in a different mod.

--------------------

 

So, thoughts? Does this sound novel, or just lazy? Too meta? Good idea with room to improve? I'm open to any and all suggestions/criticism.

[Razormane]

You're making a forum roleplay quest, not in-game quest. If you wan't to make it fully done without "send me the edited mesh etc", then you need to learn alot about mesh editing/building and scripting.

*How far you went with head mesh?

Edited February 26, 2013 by Razormane

[Glitchipedia]

I was only able to blow up the mesh to 1.3 scale, which screwed up the EyeMorphs, and now the neck refuses to be scaled back down to fit the 0.7 scale body. The utility I downloaded to fix it doesn't work, and all the other utilities I could find are too expensive. So unless there's one I've missed, I'll need someone to take care of this for me. And I figure if I'm going to ask for someone's help, I might as well wrap my request in a pretty package.

[DrakeTheDragon]

I don't know, but did you have a look at this resource already?

http://oblivion.nexusmods.com/mods/18566

 

Despite its name it covers just about everything you'll ever need to know, if you're going about reshaping existing head meshes without making the results 'explode' when animated, i.e. without breaking the relation to the existing EGM (shape morphs) and TRI (facial animation morphs) files. It also comes with all tools you will need for the task already in the download, apart from this "010Editor" thing which will cost something, if you'll need to use it for longer than the trial period, but most of the tasks can also be done without, using Scanti's invaluable tools only.

 

This resource and ThrottleKitty's guide was all I needed to create my dragon head mesh by reshaping the Vanilla Argonian head mesh, without breaking the relation to the EGM and TRI files, which I must admit was quite a chore still nevertheless.

 

What you're describing though sounds to require remarkably less modifications done to the mesh and its internal parts than my little adventure did back then, and especially little-to-no post-export work by editors or tools. So I'm quite convinced it can be done, following the instructions and advices in TK's guide to the letter.

 

Though I must admit, it took me two whole months to get that thing working, and this was when I was still able to mod full-time even. I'm not exactly looking forward to ever do it again so soon until the NifTools team finally integrated EGM "and" TRI im- and export into Blender in a way that can be utilized for creating custom head meshes or modifying existing ones... luckily though my total lack of free time these days won't allow for it either anyways.

 

edit: Oh, screw it. Now I posted the whole thing at once through the BB code editing mode, and it came out even worsely deconstructed than if I had edited it afterwards. Guess I'll just stop posting altogether until this situation gets fixed.

Edited February 26, 2013 by DrakeTheDragon

[Glitchipedia]

I did look at that already. I couldn't make heads or tails of the instructions included in that resource.

Edited February 26, 2013 by Glitchipedia

[RGMage2]

What you are wanting to do here is really not very difficult at all. Technically it's not much different than what I did with the Na'vi head mesh in my Navatar mod. The key to keeping your morphs is importing and exporting correctly with blender (which is free). You could have a look at the tutorial (in my Sig) I released for editing the head06 head mesh, it also includes edit ready blend files for both head06 and the vanilla head mesh.

 

If it were me doing this I wouldn't go into it with the idea of simply scaling the mesh. It might be better to shape the mesh to a more childlike shape, like more rounded and childlike features. The only hard part of this might be learning your way around blender.

[Glitchipedia]

....more rounded and childlike features? Dear Lord, what am I getting myself into?

[RGMage2]

In the military they call it mission creep. It’s fairly common in modding, where you start out with a simple idea and it grows and grows until you end up with something unmanageable. You want to do “A” but if you do “A” you have to do “B”, and if you do “B” you have to do “C” and so on and so forth.

 

Speaking of which, something I didn’t think of earlier, if you make the head bigger, then it will probably clip through most of the hair meshes. You might have to edit the hair meshes and reconformulate them. Also, if you release this, people will want it voiced with a child’s voice, as they will say the default adult voices are immersion breaking. I don’t mean to be a wet blanket here, but this may be a more complex project than it at first appears.

[Glitchipedia]

Hair meshes shouldn't be a problem. If I actually manage to create a satisfactory head, I may release the head and hair meshes as a modders' resource. If I release any quest mods involving childlike races, the children may have to go entirely voiceless, as I know no one with enough free time to come in and record all of the necessary dialogue. Plenty of people with the right voice and acting talent, just not the time.

 

Oh, and just so everyone knows, I have no plans at this time to create Orc, Khajiit or Argonian children. The human/elf head is hard enough to reshape; I wouldn't know how to start trying to create an accurate Khajiit cub or Argonian hatchling, and Akatosh alone knows what Orc children look like.