Elf Children, Yes, I'm working on that again. Options

[ghastley]

Over the weekend I started making some progress on this again. My hold-up had been creating the normal map for the revised head, but I've got the tools working at last, and producing the wrong results

I still have a bunch of work to do getting all the settings right. The normal map generator needs .obj format, and it appears that the exporter settings are critical. Unfortunately, the tutorial sends everything through MAX, and the settings for the Blender export aren't given. So far I've had the map flipped in two different ways. In one case, the kids looked like the light was coming from under their chins, and in the other, the ridges became dents, as the height got inverted. There aren't all that many things I can change. One of the combinations must be the right one!

I've made the elf head separate from the human one, even though it's really a morph, just moving the vertices. It could become part of a .tri at some point, but I can test it all in isolation from the base mesh this way, and not mess up the human kids. The human one uses a _n (tangent normals) rather than _msn (model space normals) so it should also be less work if they're separate.

I found out that the hair is saved when you do a CTRL+F4, so my issues with Sephiah (elven Sophie) getting her hair crooked was all due to saving a bad version. She's looking better now, but I still need to fix a few gaps/clipping issues with the hairstyle itself, as well as making some more. A single pony-tail for the girls, and a mohawk for the boys should be relatively easy to adapt from the adult styles.

I downloaded the Orc child mod, to see if I can figure out how to use the Orc teeth. Argonians and Khajiit are on the distant horizon, if at all.

This was where I left off - tangent normals, ears and chin more pointed, female hair off the ears.

This post has been edited by ghastley: Jul 7 2015, 03:03 PM

[mALX]

Headless children! This is awesome, Ghastley! And SO much better than those "scaled-down adult models" they made for Oblivion!

Can you make them look like different faces? (I read somewhere that all the vanilla children looked alike). Oh! Can the facial texture mods effect them? (enhance or disfigure, either way).

I'll bet the teeth were a problem! I'll never forget the "Stoker Wolf" teeth fiasco - he looked hidious, and the poor girl/guy who made him couldn't fix the teeth to save their life. Another modder finally was able to fix it somehow, but wouldn't upload it (probably just made their own NPC and attached Stoker's scripts to it - that's what I would have done had I wanted to keep the mod)

These look great, Ghastley - keep us up to date on your progress, I LOVE following your mods in progress!

[ghastley]

Can you make them look like different faces? (I read somewhere that all the vanilla children looked alike).

This is the first step in that direction. I took the human one - which is used for both male and female children - and adjusted ear and chin vertices to be a bit more pointed. I've adapted one adult hairstyle to the child had size/shape and that needs more work!

When I have it all working standalone, I'll see if I can't add it as a race morph in a single all-race head, and then try doing a few other morphs for noses, mouths and things that will allow for distinct kids of all races. The child head has none at present, which is why they all look alike. There's a mod, TK Children, that provides a replacement head with morphs, but the new head is smaller, and looks wrong. It also doesn't do elves.

The next step is getting the normal map right, then I plan:
- morphs for facial variations
- more hairstyles
- more clothing choices (e.g. adapt Dunmer outfit from Solstheim, something Orcish...)

One thing I hope to avoid is needing to morph the hair to fit the head. If I keep the scalp part of the head fixed, that should work. I should be able to make cheeks rounder/more gaunt, and vary the width of the chin, and that kind of change, without breaking the phoneme morphs for speaking. You won't get as many options in the CK as an adult would have, but there would be fewer kids anyway.