It Glows!

I sat up playing Civ4 until nearly 0700 Saturday, I didn't end up getting back up until nearly 1800. So it is that I sit awake now.

Seems to be fuckall going on in the late night/early morning -- nothing on TV, XM continues to be made of suck and fail since the Sirius takeover; nothing interesting on any forums or boards.

Decided to spend some time modding; which I haven't gotten to do much lately due to life being annoying. Should probably be creating weapons and scripting their leveled list adders in FNV... but that crap is so boring. Ended up monkeying with Skyrim, instead.

Readers will no doubt be aware that one of the more memorable features of everyone's favorite demoness (aside from being friggin' huge) is that her eyes glow; and not with that boring, "brighter than the sun" single color glow-y spot that you can see from space, either. Regular readers may also recall that when I initially tried carrying this effect over to Skyrim, I failed miserably.

Well, I've learned a fair bit more about working with models since then, and figured I could give it another go. Better than watching The Matrix for a forty-third time on Cinemax, anyway.

Made the alterations to the mesh; made the alterations in the relevant entries in the SuCK; loaded the game... and no change.

Fuck.

...Then I remembered I forgot to export her facegen files again; since while I didn't edit the character, the eyes and eye textures are nonetheless listed in the facegen mesh. Once I did that...





...Ye Gods; it looked like some shit from /tesg/. Still, they glow; so now it's just a matter of finding the right settings... and modifying the eye texture to be the right color to emulate the Fallout setup; and looking up which emissive color I used to get the right bleed-through effect; and creating a whole new glowmap that looks less like shit...

While I was "under the hood" anyway, I also decided to see to a couple other issues. It's fairly well known that while an otherwise outstanding body, UNP/B/C/et al have an issue wherein the default head is too big for the body -- not quite cartoonish in proportion, but not anatomically correct for a human being, either. I've known for several months how to fix it; but never bothered because doing it right would involve setting up a custom skeleton for each race... and I'm y'know, lazy and all. Figured I may as well tonight, though; since I was messing with a bunch of other stuff, anyway.

The results? Well, I'll let the images speak for themselves:



















In all, I glowy-ed the eyes, shrank her head to human-esque proportion, made her arms and hips slightly larger (had done the legs, too; but they ended up looking messed up so I reverted them to normal), mostly fixed the issue with her underlying "hairline" mesh clipping through the main hair (you can still see a teeny spot in that second-to-last image; up at the top rear of her head -- so I apparently still need to mess with it a bit), and increased the scale of the main hair as a whole 10% to help offset it being too short and having screwed up alphas.

I wasn't sure how many tries it would take to get the eyes right; but looking through my screenshot archive from FNV, I think I nailed it as close as the games' different interpretation of meshes and lighting will allow.

While I wouldn't call it a masterwork, I'm nonetheless pretty pleased with how Maeva came out. Scaling up her hair seems to have worked nicely, too... but man that is a low quality texture. Then again, the ported hair mesh uses the same texture it had in FO3; which was the same texture it had in Oblivion... so not unexpected.

Now if I could just get those damned neck-seams to disappear...


Edit, noon-thirty PST:

Played some; got my savegames lined out (I think -- I swear to whoever's listening, I'm going to stop using any script-heavy Skyrim mods... they all seem to be game-fuckers); took some more screenshots under dimmer lighting conditions.




Here we have the wild demon; getting sloshed while listening to some live entertainment.




Back in the main game, we spent some time in the volcanic hotsprings; met a majestic endangered species... and hit it in the face with sharp objects until it died.






We ended up out east of Karthwasten after dark; finishing off some miscellaneous quests. This seemed a perfect opportunity to see how the new glowy eyes did in the dark.

As you can see, they're noticeable; but don't overpower local sources or cause the equivalent of a washout in your vision.

It's probably not something you guys can tell from the screenshots, but I messed with Maeva's hair some more, too. Increased the scale another ten percent; got the underlying "hairline" mesh to stop clipping through; and increased the volume of her hair in general.

Unnamed Post Series: Weapons

Seriously, it's been so long; and my to-post list is so backed up and convoluted that I got nothing as far as concise titles go.

I've been quiet the past couple months; but far from idle. Personal issues have just conspired to leave me in no mood to post for the most part. But, no one gives a flying fuck; so I'll get to the game stuff.

While I don't have the modeling skill to unfuck the sight alignment (seriously, do the modeling people at Bethsoft get paid? 'Cause they screwed up the sights on so many NV weapons that I think some days it was the 3d Studio Max equivalent of open mic night over there...), I've nonetheless kept tinkering with my .44 single action revolver -- including creating totally new normals from scratch. This is the latest draft:





















The base texture I'm mostly happy with (it still needs a touch-up or two around the front of the cylinder flutes); but the normals continue to be annoying. Gamebryo is really, really touchy with normalmaps. I can get it looking good under low light; or bright light -- not both. It's either too shiny in the sun, or not shiny at all indoors. I continue to tinker, but am not expecting to get it perfect at this point.


Still working on the 1911, as well:



























As you can see, the normal has issues; on the side under full sunlight. I've tried cleaning it up on numerous occasions, and it just will not cooperate. On the bottom where the texture wraps also annoys the hell out of me -- the line where the wrap meets makes it look like a fucking airsoft gun. Haven't had much luck getting the seam to disappear; but I'll confess I haven't worked at it real hard.


I've all but abandoned the Ranger Sequoia retexture. The base texture is absolute shit, no one's done a decent high-res replacement, and I don't have the dds skillz to do one up from scratch.

To satisfy my need for an overpowered revolver, I ended up picking up the Rhino. A quick glance over the comments thread will tell you the mod as downloadable is mostly fucked. Sadly, the Rhino has fallen victim to the same status as so many others -- the author uploaded a partially working version; patched it with something that works less well, and then disappeared from the Nexus. Version 2 has mis-aligned parts that result in the revolver not displaying or aiming correctly in game; version three fixed the alignment... but now it crashes the game of more than half the people who use it. Probably most annoying, is that the recolor texture packs for V2 don't work for V3; so even if you don't crashy crashy, you're stuck with that gaudy industrial orange thing.

Well, I've never let a little thing like a b0rked plugin or needing a texture recolor stop me...







Ignoring the uploaded plugin, I took the meshes and textures and reused them in my personal plugin, on a new weapon. I based it on the Ranger Sequoia; with the capacity cut to three rounds. I decided to asspull that the massive barrel was not a useless weight or empty housing, but was instead an integral (non-removable) suppressor. What? You can too suppress a 45-70. It's a reflex-type suppressor, okay? That big barrel housing provides plenty of space for expansion chambers.

Didn't bother with the red-dot or night vision models at all; nor any of the "pieces" from the assembly quest.

I can't speak for the other recolors from V2, but when I decided to recreate the green scheme it turned out to be almost obscenely simple: take the basic orange textures, apply a hue or color balance filter (depending on your editing utility); change the orange and red channels to green, scale the saturation back until you hit the shade of green you think is nondescript enough; save with DXT1 compression. Viola. Just monkeying with the color balance got the resulting texture so close to the original author's recolor that I suspect that's how he did it. I left the safety red; but recolored the Rhino logo to green to match the rest of the gun.

The Weapon Mod Menu allows for adding and removing the scope at any time, which lets you configure the weapon for in close or medium range, as needed.

I also did away with the custom scope reticle, and instead used the three-post design from the vanilla hunting rifle's scope:



Recolored the front sight red, and the rear sights green; amped up the glow by around 50% so that it would glow noticeably.







In all, I haven't had any trouble with it. It uses the normal Ranger Sequoia reload animation perfectly. The speedloader doesn't disappear like it's supposed to (half the revolvers in the game have that problem, though; so it's hardly unique to this weapon), but the author skillfully worked the speedloader into the cylinder; so that you have to look really close to even tell it's there -- it isn't at all like the vanilla 44 with its glaring loader clipping through the rear of the frame.

There's sometimes a bit of lag when the weapon is equipped (it's fairly high-poly; with a high-res texture), but I've yet to have it crash in open sighted or scoped variants -- whether equipped via menu or hot key. I'm tempted to try to recreate a couple of the other color schemes, but in practice I like the green so much that I'm not sure I'd ever use them.

And More Screenshots!

First off, in the AI post I mentioned the ridiculous range the girls had engaged a White Leg at in the last run through Honest Hearts; but like the scatterbrain I am, I forgot to post the screens to go with it. I rectify that now:






If you look closely you can just barely see the corpse in the center of the first shot. Obviously, I couldn't pace it off; and I've never found a rangefinder in NV that actually works... but that's got to be some kind of record. Definitely the longest shot I've ever seen an NPC take.




And as soon as the fight was over, Mystery-chan and Natasha returned to watching Two-Dogs-Fucking or whatever his name is like a hawk. They really didn't like that guy.

You can also see Maeva watching me out of the corner of her eye; just like she does in Skyrim.


Next up, I also mentioned recently messing with my visual settings in an attempt to replicate the improvement I got in Skyrim.










Seems to be a bit of an improvement; but it's not a clearly noticeable thing, either. Performance is down a bit; but not much. The only place I've had a real problem with slowdowns was in Vault 11; when the robots mob you in the sacrificial chamber. But, there's so much VFX flying around then that it caused my FPS to tank even before most times.


Also:



The Powder Gangers never knew what hit 'em.


Lighting in FNV continues to be the biggest hurdle to nice screenshots. It's just... so... bad. Even with Fellout installed, the lighting is just shit. It's either washed out like a bad indie flick, or oversaturated orange. I mean; I suppose technically it's better than the green tint that FO3 has, but still.

One of the things I like about my estate is that I set it up with custom lighting -- when you kick the overheads on, the light is white and clean and with only a couple exceptions produces good lighting for screenshots without lots of glare.


Lastly, I wanted to show off screenshots of the new and improved NosCo 1911-A1; with its spiffy new normals that showed off the slide engraving and all... but it isn't cooperating.

Stupid thing looks like it's been drug two hundred miles behind a jeep. So... I'm having to rework the base texture and then hopefully generate a less shitty normalmap from that. Trouble is, as I have said before I am absolutely not a digital artist; so I'm having to resort to evening the texture's many scratches out with a combination of partial-transparency darkening and the blur tool. It's about half done, and barring any catastrophic fuckups will be ready to show off in another day or two. Would be sooner... but I've got one of those sinus-induced eyestrain headaches tonight that make it hard to focus on what I'm looking at; which is not conducive to good texturing. Nor to typing without having to constantly correct mistakes, as it turns out.

Anyway, the NosCo SBH is being more agreeable, so I thought I'd show it off:










As you can see, I still need to do some smoothing on the... well, smooth parts -- the sides of the hammer, stocks, trigger and trigger guard, and the grip frame above the trigger... but man, do those engravings look nice. One unexpected result was that because of how the normalmaps generated, the engravings came out as relief engravings, rather than standard. I have to confess a bit of a weakness for relief engraving; since it not only looks nice, but requires more technical skill to lay out properly and pull off than traditional engraving.

I also have to say I was surprised at how quick and easy it was to pick up creating normals. I had always assumed it would be a lot more involved than it is. I still think texturing in general would be easier with a tablet, though -- I never have been able to draw with a mouse.