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

[ghastley]

The nice thing about long holiday weekends is that you can actually make progress.

Male Dark Elf Kid in appropriate outfit.

I finally got the head normal map working, and figured out what to do with the skin textures. The CK doesn't seem to save FaceGen data correctly for kids, but it's fixable afterward.

The clothing is the low-weight version of the adult male clothes, with a small edit to close a gap at the wrist. It will fit the girl, too, but I'm trying to add a skirt for her.

This post has been edited by ghastley: Jul 7 2015, 03:05 PM