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Blender Renders of the new texture.
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Did more work on the texture the past few days, here's what it looks like so far ... I hope to make it a little better atleast. I don't know what it looks like ingame yet, but I'm currently working at 4096 so far. Done entirely with brushes and pictures of my own face, which I took with my 14 MP Fujifilm camera. That was miserable. Camera flash imprint on my eyes for hours...
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Anyway, also, I announced REIN Chronicles of Anarchy today..lalala..
http://www.blog.chaosindustrial.com
6 comments
When looking at the face and body mods that show up for Skyrim (and player's own avatars when showing stuff like their armor mods), I've noticed that the quality of the faces is usually far less than the quality of the bodies. Which is not surprise, as faces are 10x harder to do than bodies. Plus, the Skyrim vanilla bodies are excellent.
When I work on the faces for my own avatars--I'm always trying to get them better--I don't even think about trying to put together a particular face (my own or any other). Instead, I try only to get a face that is (1) sort of attractive, (2) sort of pleasant, and (3) sort of realistic. <lol> I guess getting the realistic aspect down is the most important part for me.
One thing that I've come to understand is that the game's lighting can REALLY change how the faces look. I *think* the shadowing is a little overdone to help with the appearance of detail and the 3D aspects of what we see, and I think this overdone shadowing usually works well. The one place where the overdone shadowing creates problems is with the faces--a very pleasant looking Redguard face done with the RaceMenu mod, for example, winds up with ridiculous looking cheekbones out in the sunlight.
Below is my best Redguard guy, Cabo. If he doesn't look like one of the usual Redguards, that's because I try for faces that don't look like they're obviously any one of the Skyrim races. The bigotry in the game makes me want NOT to be a particular race. Plus, I've gotten to liking my "backstory" explaining how the dragonborn guy happens to be coming to Skyrim in the first place. He has no known family, and he doesn't know anybody in Skyrim. I think of him as the bastard child of families that are of different races--in Cabo's case, the families were probably Redguard and either Nord or Breton. Neither of the families was comfortable with a member who was half of the other race. (Easy to imagine that in Skyrim.) So the dragonborn guy sets out on his own as soon as he's old enough. Or something like that.
Thanks again for the info on that other mod. Seeing your work using CharGen is a really good reference for the mod! :o)
Building a face in the game that would be similar to your mesh would be really hard, if even possible. So I'm wondering if you'll upload the mesh when you finish the texture work. Hope you do, as it'd be great to have a completely new face added to the game.
Good luck with the finishing details (always my bugbear).
And hubba hubba! <lol>
Each time I've thought about messing with the actual model of the head I've ultimately given up on it; Skyrim meshes are not only triangulated but they also have multiple duplicate vertices that are apparently important, and removing them would likely mess up the rigging, but it also means if I want to push verts in any direction I have to be careful of where and how much constantly. All shape you see is just provided by the original mesh and texture shaping. The default Skyrim face is kindof ambiguous, and a texture can easily change the entire way you view its feature construction from many angles. Geonox for example implies defined cheekbones, even on the round cheeked default mesh.
As far as building a face goes actually, you can just use this handy mod, Chargen Extension ( http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/36925/? ) which extends the morphs available to the player in both males and females now, with compatibility for Ethereal Elven Overhaul as well if you use that. I don't have too much trouble creating faces that match my own ingame, I've pretty much kept a round youthful look for the most part.
Thank you for your kind words!