nikkitavox - Tumblr blog

[nikkitavox]

Here's the armor progress for Arissa's custom armor. Inspired by the Mercenary Armor from Immersive Armors, however I took it a step further. It turns out IA creates their meshes by combining the full mesh of each outfit and simply using alpha mapping to turn whatever they don't want to invisible. I've found this created an issue with there needing to be several texture maps and the mesh being over 1mb in size.  I edited each item down and remapped the UVs to clean it up. I've been hand painting her outfit since yesterday. Here's the progress so far, where you can also see where I've sketched in certain details :)

[nikkitavox]

It has been a while! Sorry! Here's a scripted stealth attack I've been working on for Arissa. J'zargo was the guinea pig as it was on a fresh install, but still. :) One of the cool things to expect with the next Arissa update.

[nikkitavox]

lol omg my sides right now MY SIIIIDES

Oh god here come the Dragon Age social justice thought police - should I try to explain to them the concepts of “pretend”, “imaginary”, “not real life”, “video game”, “fun”, etc. or should I go to bed?

[nikkitavox]

hi mom

i saw you followed meeeeee

[nikkitavox]

b-b-b-bam! nice stuff! :D

arissa!

[nikkitavox]

It's getting there! Seems to be working well and morphing properly :)  I guess it's time to compile it in to a separate race mod, now.

[nikkitavox]

Here we go :) One of the new eye-morphs complete...

[nikkitavox]

So, I decided to hunker down and start from scratch. Upon previewing it in game, I do notice some conflicts with the other meshes, and it seems I will need to have to redo the texture for the eyes... however, there it is. An epicanthic fold/monolid. 

[nikkitavox]

So, I took a bit of a detour while working on Arissa. I was trying to fix a tri file issue that causes a part of her eye texture to look a bit stretched (makes for ugly close up screenshots). Instead, ended up creating a texture/morph with an epicanthic and single eyelid. Vanilla Skyrim wasn't exactly favourable to their attempts at creating it.

Could be the beginning of an Akaviri race mod..? ;)

[nikkitavox]

Fix for DOF/ENB transparency and blurry issues with semi-transparent textures

I ran in to this issue when I was fixing up Arissa's hairdo. If anyone else has this issue, where the hair outside of the head becomes blurred with DOF or transparent with ENB, the problem seems to lay within the NiAlphaProperty of the mesh. For whatever reason, it doesn't seem to mesh (lol) well with the NiAlphaProperty flags set to 4845 which allows you to have a semi-transparent alpha/object rather than the harsh black/white of Flags 4844. So, here's what I did:

1. Duplicate the hair mesh, call it whatever, set the flags under NiAlphaProperty to 4844

2. Duplicate the texture, downsize it to something unimportant like 256 x 256, but black out the transluscent details so they don't show in the downsized texture

3. Add the duplicate hair mesh as an extra head part in the Creation Kit It seems to have fixed the problem, and now I get the best of both worlds.

[nikkitavox]

The hair is a work in progress :)  I've never really showed off my Dovahkiin, so I thought I'd take the time to show him. This is Ragnar. Actually, I just made him for the sake of testing out changes made with Arissa, but they make such a cute couple. So I decided he should stay. Right now they're good buddies, adventuring around Skyrim, and so on. I'm pretty sure he's got a bit of a thing for her, but as it stands right now he's in the Friend- er- Dovah-zone. 

[nikkitavox]

Slightly uneven at present. The texture map for the "femalebrow" nif in Skyrim is mirrored, so both eyebrows are basically the same in Vanilla Skyrim... however I reweighted the mesh, unwrapped the UV, and reimported it back in to Creation Kit as a new head part so that I could have asymmetrical eyebrows. This is the result of that :)

Now I just need to get the eyebrows done and normal mapped.

[nikkitavox]

GIANT EYE ROLL

Add makeup? "OMG NOT LORE FRIENDLY" Remove makeup? "OMG TOO UGLY 4 MY GAEM"

Kind of a roundabout way of saying "I don't find female adventurers to be realistic unless she's having sex with me"

God damn, eat my ass already. Just for that I'm adding "friend zone" to the regard system.

Also, yes, I pretty much only use this for posting Skyrim stuff :(

[nikkitavox]

Modding breakthrough...

After working our asses off trying to find a way for an NPC to automatically recognize and react to another NPC's specific dialogue without requiring elaborate scene set ups, we finally figured it out. It's a bit of a roundabout way of doing things, but it works none-the-less and I could not be happier. :) Time for setting up some NPC chattering.

[nikkitavox]

For the last few weeks I've been working on custom textures for Arissa. Using the Mature Skin textures and normals as a foundation, I've built on to it adding some age appropriate characteristics. Eyes are custom, based on the "Eyes of Beauty" template.  1. Upper lip peach fuzz. Seriously. Many women have it, the older you get, the more it comes out.  

2. Beginnings of wrinkles (eye corners, undereyes, and forehead)

3. Uneven/weathered skin, sunspots, freckles!!

4. Muscular tone but small/nimble to represent constant sword wielding and constantly being on the move, potentially going days without proper food intake

5. Eyebrows remain flawless because that's the important things!

6. It's not quite visible as it is subtle but the normal map for her face also has larger pores. In certain lighting it is visible.

Coming soon: Body peach fuzz, arm hair, etc. I somehow doubt Arissa has the time to sit through a meticulous body hair removal routine. I mean, her eyebrows take long enough. ;D

[nikkitavox]

Tried to make a sexy dude, ended up with Nicolas Cage

:T

[nikkitavox]

I just had the best idea... Mod that's a story quest based on a Harlequin novel. There's a younger warrior and the older warrior. One younger one looks like Sam Heughan from Outlander. The older looks like Richard Armitage. And they are both TOTALLY in to the player-character, whatever gender or race. HNNNNNNNGGGGGGGGGGGGGG. But one of them is an Imperial in the Legion and the other is a Nord with the Stormcloaks. Eventually it culminates in to a fight for your love. AND YOU HAVE TO CHOOSE.

my dream mod THO:

a bara companion who’s insanely handsome and not a young thing but more like ulfric’s age, full voices with great voice acting and preferably scottish, quests, and a affection scale thing, AND a romance quest

ok I want a romance kind of like bioware in skyrim I admit

but the…