eqlipse

Derp. The last upload contained an outdated esp, which was pointing to the wrong head tri's, as well as having incorrectly loaded presets, etc. Correction to this problem: http://www.mediafire.com/download/pjokbbwzxtepe3z/ABOR_alpha_003.rar

I've got an alpha build up for this. REMINDER: the male part of this mod is completely unfinished, and thus looks shitfaced.

To-do list: Male half of the mod. This will be a lot of work, since the mesh is currently Vanilla. I know, I know, there are already mods out there for nude male bodies; I might borrow a bit from them, but I was going for a different feel and appearance for the males in my mod. Sort of a whipcord, lean and lethal build, rather than bulky, muscled, or smooth-and-muscled. The textures are also going to need a LOT more work for this part of the project. tail (model and textures... I've worked on the textures a little bit already, but I want to do more, and the positioning for the tail is slightly different in game than it is when I've got it loaded in the paint program). There is a male and female tale, so the textures will probably vary a bit between them, but I'm mostly concerned with the mesh. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it, but I wanted something different from the Vanilla mesh, and a wee bit more unique (Like a tapered end instead, perhaps? Or tufts of fur along the length?) Hair. I'm not sure if I'm going to do this or not... it looks like it will be a pain in the ass. But I wanted the race to come packaged with its own unique hairstyles, since not every one uses hair mods and I want something which works a bit better with the ears (rather than have the ears magically stab through the hair, I'd like the hair to flow around the ears).

Small update. I banished the seems from the female model for the feet, hands, neck, and ears: I've also finished work on the head tris (chargen and racial morphs) for the female model, with heavy inspiration for the chargen eye morphs from the Ashen Race's slanted oriental morphs (no I didn't copy them, but I liked them enough to make something quite similar). There's only one thing left that I was considering working on for the female model, and that's some custom hairs, but I don't feel like doing that right now... ... because I took a look at the character model for the males. Seriously, Bethesda? You were so lazy with the character that there was literally NOTHING under the loincloth? FFS, that loincloth has more polys than it would have cost you to make a proper hip box, even with genitals! >_< Yeah, there are no hips; there is nothing but empty space between the lower abdominal area and the top of the thighs. ... so I'm probably going to create an entirely new UV map and completely custom textures for the male model. Blech.

After further inspection, it seems that it's not forcing the Breton morph on the face, but just the normal map. The shape of the head is exactly as it should be, but it's rendering features that are not on the normal maps it's pointed toward, or on the mesh/tri being used. I got the face tri's working properly; turns out it's MUCH easier to fiddle with the racial tri's than to create a new mesh once you know how to, since the import/export for nif files is still buggy and outdated (in particular, it tends to remove verts when exporting to blender, though not faces or edges; regardless, this screws up the vert order and then how it works with tri morphs), but tri import/export protocol works just fine. Anyways, creation kit shows the face with the Breton normal maps, seemingly ignoring my normal maps (the excessive frownlines on a vanilla Breton really annoy me). It makes no sense to me why it would start doing this, especially since it did not used to: the diffuse, specular, and subsurface are all being displayed properly on the creation kit. It also does not display any error messages, or any indication that it is not using the normal maps it was pointed toward. I've tried using other normal maps, including a blank white image, just to make certain there was nothing wrong with my normals, but it does the same thing every time. Other things I've tried: using a different head mesh, different race morph tris, selecting different options under the "general" tab for the race (setting the race morph to none, or something else), double-checking the texture pointers on the different head meshes used (making sure the nif file's textures pointed to the desired textures). Can anyone help me with this? EDIT: Never mind, the issue seems to have resolved itself after I shutdown my system for the night and started it back up again. While I'm still not certain what was causing it in the first place, the involvement of a full system shut down and restart implies that some cached data was being stubborn and refusing to clear itself from the buffers. Regardless, the face is rendering properly now.

I've got a question about the head morphs. For whatever reason, it's started to default the morph to the Breton race, even though there is absolutely nothing that I can see which would point the head toward using it. I've tried a variety of different things, from clearing the pointer on the headpart data (making it so that the race's headpart data has an empty field for the race morph), clearing the pointer in the race window (within the "general data" tab, setting the race morph to blank), and even setting the race morphs to some specific race other than breton (nord, imperial, etc.). Now, it didn't used to do this; previously, it had no racial morph, and just used the basic head (which is what I preferred it to use, and set things up around). And I've had it using tri data for a while now. So, what in the world could cause it to suddenly force itself to use the Breton race morph, even when it says that it's using something else?

*EDIT: Nevermind, I found out how to get the tri files to work properly... and it mostly involved ignoring the how-to guides telling me to use conformulator, inspecting the tris myself in Blender, and then messing around with them.

Remember when I re-did the UV's for the ears? While having the UV's overlay is fine for the texture map, well... that's not so good for the normal map. It means that both ears receive the same lighting map, so the ear on the right is being lit as though it was on the left. If the left ear is in darkness, then the right ear will be, too, even if it's facing a lamp; if the left ear is well-lit, facing some kind of light source, the right ear will also be well-lit as though struck by the same light source, even though it's on the shaded side of the character. So, now I'm off to redo the UV's again. -_- EDIT: I forgot to post the results Here they are:

Normal mapping is done for the ears and female head. Having some issues trying to create tris for the cat ears (a "catears.tri" for it), though I'm not sure if that's really necessary... I know nothing about tris, or how to use them! Also, there's a small issue with this odd brown-black semi-circle around where the back of where the ears would have been. I'm not sure what's causing it, though it's certainly not the textures. I had previously thought that the normal map might be the culprit, but I've since ruled that out (it's almost on top of the UV seam). Any suggestions?

Worked on normal mapping today. Short story, and a lesson... If there's one thing that pisses me off about artists, it's that many of them don't seem to understand the coordinate plane. For centuries, the xyz coordinate plane used by engineers, mathematicians, and scientists has had x=horizontal(-x=left, +x=right), y=depth (+y=toward you, -y=away from you), and z=height (+z=up, -z=down). However, artists, and art modeling programs, all seem to have their own versions of the y and z axis, which can make porting models between one program and another a pain. Especially when it comes to normal mapping. Explanation: using STANDARD universal XYZ coordinates, having the head "facing toward you" would mean the face is pointing in the +y direction, and the top of the head is pointing toward the +z direction, while the left and right ears are pointing in the -x and +x directions, respectively. In both Modo and Blender, that's how I have it oriented. But apparently, Zbrush reads those same coordinates differently, a fact you will not likely realize until you either draw the tool on the canvas, or try to tell zbrush to render a normal map: the face is pointing in what would be the +z direction on the other two programs, and the top of the head is pointing in the +y direction. Since normals are linked to the direction in which the faces are pointing (with the red-green-blue corresponding to x-y-z), how different programs interpret the "XYZ" coordinates suddenly becomes extremely important, and a matter of much head-pounding. \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ Moral of the story: ////////////////////////// Specific to Skyrim, and how it reads normal maps... you want the colors to be coming FROM the following directions: Red = -x (left) Blue = +y (front) Green = +z (top) To properly generate normal maps using Zbrush, make sure that the object is pre-oriented in Blender (or Modo) with the "top" pointing in the +y direction, and the "front" pointing in the +z direction. To properly generate normal maps using XNormal, without changing the orientation of the object before porting it to zbrush and creating the hi-res mesh, then set the coordinates for the normal map to "X+ Z+ Y+" (reverse the y and z). Edit: I use the second option, because I don't like having to re-orient my meshes every time I want to port them over to Zbrush for detailing.