Category: Misc Characters

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At the same time that I was making Kaius, I was also working on his companion, Viconia DeVir, a character from Baldur’s Gate. In that game, she’s a neutral evil drow elf cleric and appears to have a somewhat unpleasant personality. In the crossover fic I’m taking her from, if anything she is even more difficult.

Depicting her is going to be a challenge: She’s a black-skinned, white-haired drow elf. She’s scarred everywhere and has obviously known combat. And– She’s supposed to be jaw-droppingly beautiful. Not just beautiful to Kaius, but so beautiful heads turn and all conversation goes silent. Hmm.

So I asked for a little bit more guidance, and this is what I got:

I did not find either of these images particularly inspiring. Nor did they seem to give any hint as to her personality thus far.

Then the author sent over a drawing his wife had done of Viconia:

Look at that– isn’t it lovely? There’s a lady with lots of personality, right down to that homicidal little gleam in the eye. But there’s also that apprehension and sense of wonder. Perfect.

 

This is the first version of Viconia:

If you’re thinking ‘Oh god what is that thing’– just remember. Female elves. Not pretty without lots of help.

Here’s a female elf after a few face-changing mods and skin mods:

Still not the best. I decided to get the body taken care of and get back to that.

The first thing I started to work with was her normal maps.

As I’ve covered, the normal map is the layer of textures that shows all the crevices and bumps of the body surface that are too finely detailed to be shown in the mesh. Viconia’s normal map is important, because she is very combat-capable, but she is not heavily muscled or ripped. I didn’t think the last two would suit, given the references to her stunning and universally-appreciated beauty.

So I got the idea for this from blogger and mod author Marmotte, whose Kissimax has a wonderfully built body. I put two or three different mods together Female Muscle Mod was definitely one of them to make this:

After all of this I realized I could have just used Fitness Body and tinkered with its options, but c’est la guerre.

We now have some muscles with good veining on the legs and arms, but the smooth skin which goes along with a reasonable body fat percentage. Viconia’s in excellent condition.

I’m not sure what that skin mod this is in the above shots, but I believe it to be Fair Skin Complexion, which is generally what I use for tests because it is very consistent. These were just the trial pics for the normal map, though you can see a preview of Viconia’s eventual face and hair color.

I believe these were the standard UNP body. I didn’t like some things about it, particularly the slope of the chest muscles above the breast.

So I went back and asked the author: What do we think her body will look like? Is she slim, or muscular and husky? The suggestion I got was that she’s supposed to look like those old Boris Vallejo paintings. I can find that preset: Goddess–UUNP Bodyslide Preset. Note there is a CBBE one out there which is nowhere near as quality.

The top photo is the UNP body; the bottom photo is the Goddess bodyslide. I think the most apparent thing her is the muscle development in the thighs and calves.

Top is UNP, bottom is the Goddess preset.

Top is UNP, bottom is Goddess preset.

There appears to be some difference in the slope of the breast and the underlying pectoral muscle. And the buttocks appear much more defined. I dunno. It seems like a subtle difference, but I did like it better.

Viconia’s at weight .4, since her facial features are taken from a mesh and a preset set at that weight, and it’s just easier to not  mess with that. My original intention was to have her weight set someplace between .2 and .5, so that she would indeed look somewhat muscular, so I felt that .4 would do.

Next up: Face and skin.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A few weeks ago, I was chatting with one of the Elder Scrolls fanfiction writers I’ve been following, Tyranidlord.

I thought it might be interesting to see if I could accurately render his two main characters, both of whom are rather interesting physically. Each of them is going to present a challenge, but we’ll start with Kaius.

Kaius is, at least at first, supposed to be just another one of those tough bastards that the Imperial Legion is known for.

So, of course, I requested some pictures of Kaius:

As we can see, Kaius is a reclusive sort of fellow and evidently very patient, if he’s putting up with Sofia. The man is a saint. I’d have gone up to Helgen just to see if I could track down that special gag the Imperials put on Ulfric…. But I digress–

From the images, I could see that Kaius is a medium to dark-skinned Imperial and that he has dark eyes and hair.

But, it appears that Kaius nothing too fancy– just a modification of the first Imperial preset. So I tinkered with a few sliders and did a touch of sculpting to smooth out the vertices around the chin and cheek area. It’s not perfect, but it will do:

The hair in this shot is one of the Redguard hairs from Beyond Skyrim-Bruma. I’ve cropped out the slider settings in Racemenu since for some reason they were showing incorrect information. The face/body skin mismatch here is due to me working simultaneously on some of the textures.

I am using a mod called Unique Character V 1.1 (WARNING NSFW link) which was apparently on Nexus long ago but no more. I find it more useful than Ishara’s Custom Body or Custom Races for my purposes- but the net effect is the same: As a PC, Kaius will have meshes and textures which are exclusive to him now. This makes testing very convenient for, say, trialing a look for a custom NPC.

I had gotten a description of one of Kaius’ facial scars, and I figured he might have a couple more. I used assets from EveryBody’s Different’s texture resource packs for the male facial scars, and to make his horizontal under-eye scar, went back to the .png source images from BI Phenotypes.

This was my first test as shown in nifskope, on the generic male head mesh.

And here is Kaius’ face with the scars in place:

Next, I started thinking about body meshes and maps.

Kaius uses Schlongs of Skyrim as his base body mesh, not because he needs to be..er…equipped, but because I’m used to working with it and have a fair number of texture sets worked out for it already. Once I’m finished, it should be no issue to swap in a static mesh model from Vitruvia or something similar. I believe all of these bodies are based on the old FavoredSoul meshes. [EDIT– Static mesh Vitruvia is indeed what I did for NPC-Kaius.]

Kaius’ skin is mostly based on Veteran Skin by ZwabberdieBo who also makes my current ENB, Caffeine. While I have not used Veteran Skin much yet, that is because it is meant for a more mature and muscular build and I haven’t yet assembled the two characters I had in mind for it. But, it ought to be perfect for Kaius.

So let’s review– as we know, bodies in-game change appearance based on the four maps they all possess: the diffuse map, the normal map, the subsurface map, and the specular map. The first two maps will make the biggest difference in terms of changing what a character will look like. The weight slider will also have some effect.

Here is a good example of the differences you can get in body structure based on varying the diffuse and normal maps, as well as the weight slider:

Cyrelian is mostly Vitruvia– both its diffuse and normal maps. This is a relatively subtle and not very muscular map. Cyrelian’s normal map is not custom at all. His diffuse map has some other elements added to it, lots of Frecklemania, but it is mostly Vitruvia/scarred/hairy. I believe I added a small amount of chest hair to Cyrelian and emphasized the scars. His weight is 30.

Here you can see the differences in body maps clearly– Cyrelian’s normal map shows that he has relatively little muscular definition across chest and abdomen, though it’s clear from his arms and shoulders that he isn’t a complete layabout. His freckles and part of his chest hair are painted on top of his diffuse map. In this picture, his facial markings are a Racemenu warpaint overlay.

Ahtar’s skin textures and normal map have extensive editing to add in his scarring. His chest hair is also painted on the diffuse map. I believe that his weight is set at 85 in this picture. His diffuse and normal textures are made from Better Males.

The younger version of Ahtar is almost entirely made from Better Males and his weight is set somewhere around 40. He’s got a bit of a neck mismatch but I think it may be raining — that’s the newest ENB.

Marcus is mostly Fair Men/Real Men with other elements added. Marcus’ normal map is a meld but is mostly Milkdrinker. While I originally wanted to use one of the slimmer body meshes for Marcus, I didn’t like how it turned out for him, so he’s also based on the original Schlongs of Skyrim mesh at weight 0.

And Marcus’ old maps–

As you can see, Marcus’ old body had less muscular definition and a slightly different look to the arms and legs. There are significant differences on both the normal and specular maps.

So getting back to Kaius–I tried a couple of different skins out:

 

This is what he looks like with Vitruvia. Obviously this will not be suitable for him.

Here’s a couple of other trial skins I rejected, most of which I believe are based on Better Males– these are too smooth and too sleek for a man whose life has been an endurance-test of combat. Do you really get gym-toned abs by fighting off vampires and dremora? I really didn’t think so.

So then I thought to try Veteran Skin, a skin which is heavily muscled and not in the least bit pretty:

That’s better, isn’t it? I didn’t think it would be suitable to have him all the way up at the higher weights, given his origin as an Imperial Ranger, and the fact that he always seems to be dashing off to deal with some horrific crisis. I don’t imagine he starves, but I also doubt he gets much of a chance to sit around at the pub eating cheese and drinking cider. So he is at weight 40.

Kaius is built from Veteran Skin, with some bits and pieces from Vitruvia in both his diffuse and normal maps. He has also had some details added to his diffuse map from a mod no longer available, Complete Male Overhaul; and from New Male Texture for SoS– the body hair only.

I am currently using the default subsurface and specular maps which come with Veteran Skin.

Underpants courtesy of El Men’s Underwear the lore-friendly Retexture.