Viconia needed exactly the right kind of face.
I found one:
This beauty comes directly from the terrifying if unpronounceable Dhaunayne Aundae. Beautiful and horrifying, she comes from Pandorable, who is one of the best face sculptors out there. I believe I used both the preset and the mesh that comes with the follower, with only minor tweaks for Viconia.
If you see Viconia with pale, pale yellow hair– that is what normal elf hair set all the way to white looks like. That had to be modded as well. In the below shots, Viconia is wearing a white or silver wig.
Here’s what Viconia looked like when I thought I had what I wanted for her sculpt:
Reference Image:
The nose and upper lip are just about right. I made some very minor changes there.
The eyebrow is not accurate to the drawing, but I was rather limited due to the tilt of her eyes– most brows clipped. I also needed to choose an eyebrow that would change to match her hair color. I used Brows.
Viconia’s iconic yellow eyes are actually one of the standard default High Elf eyes, with one of my texture replacers. I suspect it’s Eyes of Beauty, though I could well be wrong. If I am wrong, it’s either Improved Eyes or Lind’s Elven Eyes.
After this I started to work on Viconia’s skin color, which was a very frustrating part of this process. Even the darkest of the Dark Elf skin sliders did not get anywhere near the color I needed. So, I started off with a skin texture that has deeper undertones– SG Female Textures, and started to work. Essentially, I made a number of desaturated layers to the skin and put it all together, leaving me with this:
This is a test of the tone of her skin- you can see that I haven’t yet dealt with the tint mask to make face and body a consistent color. This skin was actually too dark and I had to lighten it. You can see my work on the scars on this one.
I used the Color Exchange tool in GIMP to get the same color on the face and body and hand skins. which would otherwise have been a real challenge.
We had a few false starts:
As you can see, tinting Viconia’s skin green and setting her complexion slider to red did not work out, nor did trying something similar with blue. In the end I went with an almost completely-desaturated skin. You can also see, in the two pictures with long hair, the yellow tones that remain in the ought-to-be white hair.
The second picture in the above set really gives a good look at Viconia’s normal map.
Eventually we got to this place:
Here’s where I discovered an entertaining problem with Viconia: It is almost impossible to take pictures of her, as she blots out all light. The first picture is the more accurate one; the second one is lightened up quite a bit in post-processing.
So you will see Viconia’s skin color vary quite a bit, as I lightened it and darkened it as I went along.
Again, the hair is a wig.
So, once I got to that point, it was time to really work on Viconia’s scars, because she had a ton of them, from the various tortures she went through in the Drow lands, and combat and so on.
Most of these scars were taken from assets from Slavetats (Loverslab, NSFW site) and a few from BI Phenotypes. I made my own normal maps for the scars as I went along. So, we have brands and cuts and gouges and burns and arrow-strikes going on. The word that’s branded on her arm was made from a Daedric font of some kind.
But, there’s a fine line between ‘scarred but beautiful’ and ‘oh no’, so I didn’t put nearly as many scars on her as I would have liked.
Some of the below photos are lightened to show the details.
As I went on, I kept fiddling with Viconia’s skin color, trying to make her as dark as possible whilst still visible. So there will be some differences seen.
I also started fooling around with overlays and freckles and makeup tints and such, to give her more color variation after I had… well… taken all that away via the desaturated skin.
Face tattoo is Dragon Age Dalish Vallaslin Face Tattoo’s for Racemenu.
Freckles are Freckle Mania.
Important question: Why does Viconia have fangs?
Because her progenitor Dhaunayne has fangs and I didn’t catch it in time to try swapping out the mouth parts, that’s why. My suspicion is that there might be some adaptation to the facial sculpt necessary, so I left them in place. She seems to like having them.
And I found out later that they fit into her story, so there’s that.
Next: Final tweaks.
Recent Comments