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

[Grits]

Yay, I’m glad you’re working on this again!

Another child mod that I’ve looked at (but I haven’t tried) RS Children Overhaul doesn’t have elf races either, but they do have different faces and hairstyles for different named kids. I don’t have a clue how any of this works, I’m only mentioning it in case it might help in some way.

Your elven hairstyles and race-specific clothing styles sound great. This is exciting to follow!

[ghastley]

Yay, I’m glad you’re working on this again!

Another child mod that I’ve looked at (but I haven’t tried) RS Children Overhaul doesn’t have elf races either, but they do have different faces and hairstyles for different named kids. I don’t have a clue how any of this works, I’m only mentioning it in case it might help in some way.

Your elven hairstyles and race-specific clothing styles sound great. This is exciting to follow!

That mod is doing the exact opposite of what I'm trying to do. I want to leave the Breton/Nord/Redguard kids unchanged, and add elven ones.

In general, armor/clothing will work on kids, but it replaces the child body with an adult one when you do that. This is because the skeleton is the same for all of them. It looks like RS Children has a mix of child-enabled regular armor, and new ones in kid styles. The latter may be useful, but I really want specifically elven styles, too.

The inverted lighting issue is back, even though I've got the normal map looking correct. Somewhere between the mesh and the maps, I have something flipped, but I can't find it.