I listen to German industrial-trance-opera, read everything from John Milton to Ken Akamatsu... if you read my other blog from time to time, you'll see that I oftentimes "relax" by plotting exterior and terminal ballistics.
One of the more mainstream things I do is mod. What's less normal is what I mod, and why. The 'Special' companions pack I mention from time to time is a perfect example. I've put dozens of hours into it, the texture directory that goes with it alone is over six hundred megabytes, and if I were ever to upload it, it would be a showcase of my modding talents. Custom skin textures, body meshes, armor and clothing, specially modified hairs, behavior packages, dialog... it's all in there.
Now, I say this all not to taunt you, but to point out just how odd I can be sometimes, putting so much work into something no one's likely to ever see directly.
I took that one step further this morning. In my Oblivion screenshots, you've seen I use Nequam's glowing eyes. I've lamented the fact that I have no similar options in Fallout 3.
Well, now I do.
Tonight, I got bored (oh, how many of my greatest modding achievements have begun with that line...), and decided to rectify that. I dredged up my talk about .dds compression for glow maps from my conversation with Dimon99 months ago from the black hole I call a memory, did a little reading around, and decided to go for it.
On a last second whim, rather than unpacking and editing all the required meshes from the Fallout 3 bsa files myself, I decided to search the Nexus real quick for a modders' resource.
Sure enough, Kikai was kind enough to upload one about this time last year. Yes, it's that Kikai.
This allowed me to be a lazy bastard, and not do the mesh conversion work myself. As I'm not a huge 3d modeling buff, this worked out lovely. All I had to do was a bit of texture path resetting, and add the new eye meshes to the custom race...
You see here the initial effort. Not bad... but not great. The glow is weak, and Kikai's 'proof of concept' glow map didn't match up to my custom eye texture properly.
I've been working over the eye textures recently anyway, creating much higher quality ones to replace the existing ones in my companions pack - which look spiffy to the casual user, but are not nearly as nice as could be. I'm a perfectionist, what can I say?
So, I popped the new texture open, and created a glow map for it from scratch.
This is the result:
Notice the lack of spillover from the iris, the clean cut of the cat-eye pupil, even the little brighter and weaker spots of glow around the edge. Sometimes, I do impress myself.
And one of the new glow-y eyes in a dark room for full effect.
Much better.
While red was my first attempt, I can do glows in any color, and plan to add green and white to the list here shortly.
The problem is, I don't know that I'm going to actually upload it.
Don't get me wrong, there are no legal issues. Kikai has clearly stated that the modified meshes' use in other mods is perfectly fine provided credit is given - something that I make it a point to do anyway.
The problem is I'm not sure how it'll go over. I know most of you don't have the thing for 7', gun toting, eye-glowing, red headed demonesses that I do. Consequently, I hesitate to force the change on everyone by incorporating it into the 'normal' Maeva in the companions pack.
I'm tempted, I must confess, in my new spirit of doing what the hell I want and people can just not download if they don't like it... to take the fangs, horns, and tail that I use on my special Maeva (since they're freely reusable resources as well) and create a new sort of alternate guards plugin. One that is all lovely, scary demonesses. Doubt it'll get much lovin', but I find I do my best work when I mod for me, and not for you.
Selfish as that is.
Also been thinking considerably, and I'm going to take the new Redecorated mod even further, by creating my own custom set of lights for the Vault. Get rid of that terrible fluorescent shit and put in two sets of lights; one 'daylight' type for "high" lighting, and one lower set akin to torch or strong candle light, for normal lighting.
It's how I run my actual lights, and I find it not only enhances the mood, but doesn't give me a headache. Hyper-photo-sensitivity is a pain in the ass, let me tell you.
This will, unfortunately, necessitate that I also remove the terminal option to change imagespaces in the vault. Sorry about that... but does anyone actually use it? I think I did twice, and that was shortly after I started using the mod - for screenshot purposes.
Also decided that I am going to redo the laboratory, replace the jail with something. I just haven't decided what, yet.
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