Sunday 22 December 2013

Skyrim Modding

So I'm taking a mini break from Ash and Dirt, and doing some modding of Skyrim.

One thing I've always been dissatisfied with on the whole regarding Race mods, is the fact that they're always recoloured vanilla presets. I've decided to make new presets in the Tri's which will include hopefully most Bipedal Elven/human Lore race.
First off I decided to go Sea Elf/Maormer. I'm concentrating on the female morph first because they don't have beards to deal with and I want to see how easy/hard it is before I tri (pun intended) to do more races, IF I decide to do more. It's based off of the High Elf morph and will hopefully look different enough when I'm done.

I'm editing the tri. files in Blender.


What I'm doing is adding the preset to the existing ones. Essentially what this means is that if someone makes a new race that is called "SeaElfRace" using this tri. then they choose NONE for morph, then it will grab the correct morph from this modified tri, giving them a new morph, one that is not vanilla.
Now comes in the problem. It isn't as easy as changing ears and face shape, and then giving yourself a pat on the back for making a new race morph. NO! if only it were that simple.
There are Race tri.'s for nearly everything that goes on the face. Scars/Eyebrows/beards. They all go on the face, and all have tri. files that fit to the race. Just the small change seen above took 3 hours. Why? Because I had to make sure that the brow tri. didn't clip when changing sliders that change the brow positions. I also had to check that there wasn't any clipping with facial expressions with the brow sliders at default or their most extreme.
There was and I had to make minute adjustments. They had to be minute, as to make it so the brows also weren't too far away from the face either, making it look cartoony.
The ears are actually on purpose. The Maormer are said to have pale, chameleon-like skin, and by their description they sounded a bit amphibious, so I made their ears kind of "amphibian" like.
I'm not doing textures for them or anything because I'm concentrating on the morphs, and my goal isn't to make race mods from this, but to give others the tools to make the race mods that there always should have been.

My goal is to try and make morphs for:

Mer
Sea Elf - Maormer
Heartland High Elf/Wild Elf - Ayleid
Veloth Elf - Chimer (maybe I'll come up with a better name than Veloth Elf, perhaps Ashland Elf after Morrowinds red mountain)
Deep Elf/Dwarves - Dwemer
Snow Elf - Falmer

Men
Akaviri (Might call them something else. They're supposedly extinct, but who knows.)
Kothringi (Most went extinct, but some escaped Tamriel. We'll see if I bother with this one)

Might make an Ohmes morph as well. I've kind of done one before for Rasha in my ES fanfic, but it wouldn't hold up if you tried to put scars on it.

EDIT: Couldn't get the brows to sit on the face properly, so for now I'm only going to alter the ears, and see where it goes from there.

EDIT 2: Laptop's borked, so this is on hold till I fix it or get a new one. FIXED IT FOR NOW.

EDIT 3: Blender won't open morphs that are over 50KB which has put a halt on this. Might just use existing morphs and change the ears. This means that I'll have to put each race into a unique race morph and have them replace existing morphs, but as they're in a separate morph file, it won't overwrite anything.

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