Skyrim Special Edition

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Artsick

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Artsick

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About this mod

51 new eyes to use on your characters from practical to magical!

Requirements
Permissions and credits
As of ENB b. 435 onwards, the lighting bug fix should now be obsolete. These eyes will still be the only fix for the bug if you don't use ENB.

Important! 

This mod uses techniques that are much more thorough than your typical eye mod. It layers meshes to get around visual bugs that other mods would usually suffer from. As a result, these eyes cannot be overwritten by RaceMenu's Sculpt Import UNLESS the import mesh has at least two eye meshes (excluding heterochromia). Please keep this in mind before reporting mismatched eye problems.


DESCRIPTION

Starsight is a standalone eye mod that I've made using techniques I've experimented with over the past year. It features 51 different eye colours to choose from for both sexes, and all human/elf races. 14 are regular eye colours (which may be turned into a replacer someday), and 37 are eye colours of different levels of 'magic.' All textures are 1K.
This mod is a proof-of-concept in some ways too. All of the eyes make use of two meshes stacked on top of each other to allow certain visual effects to be achieved. One of the major benefits of this method is it allows the eyes to be rendered properly (similar to hair/hairline meshes for those who have worked with them before). For clarity, I've made diagrams (below) that should hopefully explain what's going on under the hood.

There are four types of eyes in this mod:
Regular - Photorealistic eyes that you'd typically spot in an eye mod.
Glow - Self-explanatory.
Pulse - Same as glow except they brighten and dim over time.
Sparkle - Glittery eyes that brighten and darken a little. There's only two.
Colour - An experimental set of eyes. These six eyes will change colour over time. They do not appear different to each other in RaceMenu.



FUTURE PLANS

FOMOD for cubemap options, glow vs pulse, etc.
More eyes making use of different types of animations
Replacer version for vanilla


KNOWN BUGS

Becoming a vampire while using these eyes will result in visual clipping. Vampires remain unsupported for now. See the corresponding issue in the bugs section for a fix.
Some files do not use texture sets due to their unreliability to assign textures other than the diffuse. 
Colour-changing eyes are experimental and mostly for screenshots
  •  z-fighting is inevitable at this stage
  •  do not change colour in RaceMenu (unavoidable)
  •  has lighting bugs and moved AO strip


CREDITS

Thank you to these amazing people!
Eye mod by ddsworkshop
El's Face Stuff by Ellise
Brushes by Obsidian Dawn
Improved Eye Reflections and Cube Map by fadingsignal
Gearhogs Character Overhaul by Gearhog


Please enjoy!
I hope this inspires some of you to try out some new things and go crazy.




FOR MODDERS

Below are visual explanations of the some of the methods used in the creation of this mod. It should give some clarity and hopefully help some people understand more about some of the things you can do in NifSkope. It's intended for experienced modders. If you'd like to know more about the visual effects themselves, see the meshes.



REGULAR EYES

These are the eyes used for the 14 regular variations. This became a conceptual setup for a mod to replace vanilla eyes sometime down the track. These have all the fixes of any other eye mesh out there, plus one extra fix for lighting which is achieved using the method below. Both meshes use the same set of textures which means no texture editing, and no extra vram usage.





GLOW/PULSE EYES

This one fights the limitations of shader types. One mesh can't have two shader types so I've split them into glow and environment map compartments. The lighting issue mentioned earlier is fixed in the process. Both layers have to use their own textures because of the overlay.





COLOUR EYES

These are experimental still. They flicker a bit because of z-fighting, which is an issue the other eyes don't seem to run into. The overlay is just the iris because of the colour changing and so the lighting problem remains there as the base mesh can't have blending disabled. The AO strip has been moved inside the skull, and that part of the texture removed to get rid of alpha stacking problems.