Unique Beast Races [WIP]

[Osteoporozis]

After reading about 27 pages of this thread my only regret is not having been a part of it.

Keep it up guys, be it furry chatter or mod progress. I'm waiting on this and the Morrowind/Skyrim conversion both before I start playing again... until then, daggerfall!

[shawno]

Been playing a fresh character with this mod so that it doesn't accidently glitch one of my more advanced ones. About 20 hours into this character, I just noticed that I don't have the Digitigrade Legs bonus under Active Effects anymore. I think it's because I'm playing a vampire right now. I went back and checked a saves shortly before and after I became a vampire and it seems to confirm that. Wanted to let you know, I might test it to see if it works okay with becoming a werewolf too.

[TaiArts]

About the "Save bloater", some people might not worry to much about it. I don't at least.
I was just asking myself how the paws for the khajiits will look like at the end (an aproximate of the final result)... just curiosity.

 

And I agree with the bonus damage of the argonian not being the same of the khajiits--- Not like they are not as "ofensive" as the khajiits, but because lizards don't exactly use their claws to attack, not like a feline at least. I didn't remember the bonus damage of the khajiits being 10... I thought it was 20.

 

Anyways, keep the good work :)

 

Oh! and last question here... The female and male argonians won't be of the same size, will they?

[Senviro]

Answering your questions/concerns in the order they come:

Not sure about the script, as I do nothing with the CK.

 

I just redid the topology for the khajiit feet and rearranged the bones, and this is the shape Derok and I have agreed on for the moment.

 

http://i121.photobucket.com/albums/o237/ZeladisXoi/22fnpdu.jpg

(New model. Need to texture it again.)

 

As for the claw damage, I neither know nor care about CK tweaks - as said before. I use spears anyway. Claws vs iron = fail fight; and immersion killer if the claws win most of the time. I got my game modded for Dark Souls difficulty. (Bad situations = death.)

 

Finally, no, they're not the same size. The argonian male is taller than the argonian female. In keeping with common genotypes, the female is slightly shorter, has less upper body strength, wider hips and more lower body strength. And naturally, the male has the reverse.

[bilotheretard]

I've just jumped on this thread from Derok's message so I'm not fully following but it looking really impressive so far boys! I never would have imagined you'd have got this far when you first contacted me, before you knew how to use blender. Just goes to show you can do anything if you put your mind to it.

 

I've been busy with homework and a bit of an acting career but I never fully abandoned this mod like I promised and I haven't played Skyrim since I started it(think I got as far as high hrothgar). I just recently renewed my enthusiasm by checking out other mods, and was ready to start the mod again before Derok contacted me(not that I've gotten my homework under any control) but this is really a relief that someone so capable has taken an interest, and I'm more than happy to take a backseat role, this is my final year to pass haha. I can reopen the mod and add you, or you can start another page and I'll take mine down if you'd like. I don't mind I'm was only doing this so I can play it not for glory or anything hah.

 

It's good to see you Senviro.

 

If I change the skeletons to be digitigrade, this won't magically make animations better and more realistic, but consequently I have to change EVERY animation for the new skeletons. Me, and Senviro, don't have any animation skills. Also animations are really a lot, to not talk about animations included with mods. UBR will keep most definitely the vanilla skeletons, this means compatibility for every mod that change skeletons. Really, animations look already surprisingly good.

allthegoodnamesrtaken Wait a second... Do you mean that Beast Races have no need of lockpicks because they can use their claws? Well, I don't know if it makes sense, claws are too wide to enter in a keyhole...

EDIT: For some reason, this came to my mind (skip to 4:30)

Awesome game! :smile:

I don't think you have to do that do you. There's tons of skeleton mods that modify the proportions of body parts. All we need is to relocate the ankle and toe bones for much longer feet. I was in contact with a Bethesda artist(vsions) about it and he said that was a good plan, as they themselves used that as a quick fix method for the digitigrade vampire lord during gamejam. I needed to contact the authors of one of those mods to clarify how it actually works, because both the beastskeleton nif and the actual body mesh has the bones and I don't know if just one of them are important or ヾ(´･ ･｀｡)ノ”

 

Have you skinned it? How do the animations look? Where I last left off I was stuck with polishing the skin weights as the toes distorted during certain angles. The tail was pretty good just needed some tweaks around the joint area to make it more smooth. I can give you the latest files I worked on, including the tweaked skeleton and roughly skinned mesh(not uv-mapped though) which isn't on the nexus page. But hey did you actually use my blend file at all? Or did you contact Senviro and work behind my back heh xD

[bilotheretard]

Just read about the script. It's a good idea for the alpha version, but it shouldn't be necessary on release, as Skyrim already lets different races use different meshes unlike Oblivion. This was the whole origin of the mod and the esp(which was made through hex editing and fallout tools before the creation kit even came out!) already includes seperate "beast versions" of all open toed footwear. But obviously now they need to be seperated for both races and cover every single footwear.

 

So definietly no scripting needed for cuirasses. However, I do personally support a Morrowind-style "beast races may not wear boots" script but I doubt the most of the public does, your call, it's nice easy and lazy though. Either way we can still make beast race specific footwear.

[Derok]

First of all, don't worry if you hadn't time to work on the mod. After all, modders are not gods or something. Just normal people and normal players.

 

I actually tried to make it digitigrade and tested it on a vanilla body. The result? No visible changes. Everything was exactly the same. But then I tried to open the console and type "resurrect" on an Argonian npc. He appeared in the default pose, loaded from the skeleton, with arms open. His legs were successfully distorted to be digitigrade. What this means? Animations are just an array of bone coordinates. So, the only way to make beast races digitigrade in such way would be to change EVERY and I say EVERY animation. You said that there's some mods that change body proportions trought the skeleton. This is because animations are not applied to all bones. Just standard ones, like legs, arms, head etc... and not the quiver bone, for example.

I don't want to be offensive about Bethesda artists, but look at what they did with claws for example. They litterally just stretched a bunch of vertices! And they weren't even able to do it well, mheh...

So, I created some new claws from scratch for meh Argonian character. How much time it took me? Try to guess... More or less, one day of casual modelling.

 

Ok. I don't really understand how to paint weights, so everything I did was to use the bone weight copy script from the vanilla body to the ubr body (given by Senviro). And it worked.

Yes, I'm not kidding. I can tell you the result is surprisingly good. I can explain you in the detail how it looks, but I think it's better if I repack everything and I post an updated alpha here (the old one is un the first page of the thread), so everyone will be free to test the last version of UBR.

About the tail, I'm not sure if merging it with body is a good thing. It would probably look weird... And almost surely we'll need to tweak animations.

 

The script... Well, as I said in the description, I'm not too sure about it.

The idea was that just some footwear are wearable by beast races (falmer, footwraps...). The rest of them are not compatible with beast races. But with the use of the forge, you can create some kind of leggings wearable by beast races. I know, I can just make boots look different for beast races trough body addons, but I don't like that they magically change shape when weared by beast races. It's already weird when you equip an armor from someone of the opposite sex.

Edited April 24, 2013 by Derok

[Furrywolf]

The poly count looks nice! It's the feet/toes that's bothering me! The shape is to fat and round :P

[Drohung]

Am I the only one who noticed that decals refuse to apply to the feet, wether they're from a mod or not? It's an issue I'd like to figure out resolving, if we could.

 

And the Khajiit foot looks quite nice.

 

Also, if I get my modeling programs working (By the Hist, Python, why you fail so!?), I will probably model some armor unique to this mod!

[Derok]

Yes just fixed decals, there was a block to add with NifSkope.

If you can't use blender... I don't know... Google a solution, reinstall everything. Keep in mind that you need to use Blender 2.49b becuase newer version doesn't have the plugin to import and export .nif.