KouLeifoh

I uploaded a preview of the custom Khajiit textures to my Google Drive mirror for the SAM Light Texture Add-on. They're functional, but far from perfect. The normal maps are based on the current v1.1 release. I plan on redoing it after v2.0 is done. With SAM Light, it focuses more on genital functionality rather than quality. While v2.0 of my texture add-on will use 4k textures, the genital portion will only be 512x512. Before HPH took up most of my time, I was working on an update to my SAM Morphs for RaceMenu mod which added a genital UV morph slider to change the genital UV from SAM Light to the original SAM and allow a separate texture for the genitals. I also want to add another morph tab that will include custom morphs from the player. This can be where things like custom body shapes and genital morphs are added without having to update the mod itself.

While a high poly penis mesh would be nice, quality textures do most of the work. I've always felt the genital shape options for SAM were a bit lackluster since they relied heavily on skeleton scaling. @kosmos84 I feel bad that you've spent time working on my high poly SAM genital mesh in the current release despite it having issues. I redid the mesh awhile back and fixed the issues but have yet to release it (the timestamp on it is dated 12/7/2019 🙃). With the ideas discussed here, releasing the updated mesh along with some new morphs for it would be an ideal alternative to just porting the UBE penis mesh to SAM. It's been a long time since I've done any Skyrim modding. All of my projects here got put on hold due to IRL things.

Just by a quick look at mods for other games, there is an abundant focus on female mods (especially nudity), and clout chasing is unfortunately a driving factor. There are definately talented mod authors out there capable of making such a mod for males. Whether or not they are willing and able is a different matter. I intentionally took a step back from this area since it wasn't something I was particularly interested in despite the passive aggressive comments directed at me.

With the recent advent of ADXP|MCO, SCAR, and poise mods, a stamina system is necessary for gameplay balance. ADXP|MCO + SCAR allow enemies to chain infinite combos while poise mods potentially trigger constant staggers. None of the mods I've tried that offered a stamina system really worked in the way I wanted. I'm currently working on a Dodge Attack Stamina (DAS) framework mod that's written entirely as an SKSE plugin for SE/AE. It consists of a dodge framework, dodge stamina system, and attack stamina system. Since I'm not versed enough in the myriad of mods out there that offer similar features, I'm asking the folks here for some feedback on the features. Dodge Framework Sprintkey dodge + hotkey dodge are implemented and currently supports dodge animations from DMCO (8-way dodge) and TK Dodge (4-way dodge). I like DMCO's double tap feature and implemented it for TK dodge animations (single tap for step dodge, double tap for dodge roll). The ultimate goal is to create my own Nemesis patch for animations, but that's a low priority. Dodge Stamina Stamina cost for dodge is based on the player's body weight and player's equipment weight. This allows light/cloth armor to use less stamina for dodging as a way to balance poise mods that favor heavy armor. DMCO is an amazing dodge mod, but I just do not like its implementation of the stamina cost (as of v0.96). TK Dodge simply has a fixed stamina cost. Attack Stamina Stamina cost is based on weapon weight for melee/bow/crossbow attacks and magicka cost for magic attacks. Affects player and NPCs. For melee attacks, the stamina cost is applied per weapon swing event. For example, a dual wield attack animation consists of 3 weapon swings (right, left, right) on a single button press. The stamina cost is applied for each weapon swing using the weight of the weapon that was used in each swing. For bow/crossbow, stamina cost is applied during bow draw and again during arrow release. Crossbow works in reverse (bolt release, bolt reload). For magic attacks, the cost is applied after a spell cast. Currently, concentration spells have a single cost. I haven't figured out how to hook into the spell cast function to apply cost per second. The multipliers for dodge stamina and attack stamina can be individually configured by the player. All the features listed are fully implemented and functional.

This (unfinished) armor port has been sitting in the backburner since 2017 🙃

That's my Alexios character preset. The hair mesh was ported from ACO for personal use and the HPH head mesh was sculpted in 3DS Max to match Alexios' actual head mesh from the game. I don't remember what I was working on before life happened, but the skin textures are more than halfway done. I remade them all in 4k as a base and completely redid the skin pores.

It's been awhile. The heatwave makes it difficult to do anything productive. 🙃

Testing custom eye meshes with tinted eyelashes to match hair color while also fixing the annoying transparent eyes bug with ENB under certain lighting.

@HiroHaro ESL flagged mods are loaded differently from other mods in xEdit. The code I used in my script to detect load order will fail.

@David Richard Correct. The same applies to all mods that rely on RaceMenu. @Billkwando It seems you're adamant on doing everything except the one thing I suggested: update the NPC records. As you have stated, that was created for the low poly head. It's telling the game that you're using the low poly head/brow meshes and, more importantly, the low poly head/brow morphs. The "beam" you keep seeing is the game trying to use the low poly head/brow morphs with my high poly head/brow meshes. They're not compatible.

Modified NAT ENB. Modified Rudy ENB.

@HiroHaro The ESL flag is not supported. @dbrown39 @David Richard It's up to Expired to update RaceMenu (specifically its skee.dll plugin). While the source code for it is available on github, I don't know if it's updated nor do I want to touch it. @Billkwando When modifying an NPC's appearance, both the FaceGen data (.nif) and the NPC head part records (.esp) must match. Otherwise, there will be the infamous black face issue (invalid facetint) or mesh distortion (invalid morphs). It looks like you changed the FaceGen but didn't update the NPC records.

SKSE is one thing, but RaceMenu would also need an update.

@David Richard It looks like you're using a custom head morph/sculpt in your preset that isn't supported by my high poly head mod. @JUKIT My load order detection code doesn't support ESL flags. Also, never run the script on masters. The intent is to run it on a patch created by the user (copy NPC records as Overrides into a new .esp). @Billkwando Using the CK method won't work on custom NPCs that use a sculpted head mesh. The CK will only generate FaceGen based on head morphs. You'll have to manually sculpt it using Outfit Studio, Blender, or 3DS Max. @Neisa It's literally in the description of this mod.

I don't mind the overall head shape that much, but what bothers me the most is the eye shape. They look so alien compared to other medival-fantasy games. If you just want to make some minor edits, Outfit Studio has come a long way and can be used to quickly edit head .tri files. The eyes/mouth meshes do not have racial morphs. As a proof of concept, I merged the racial morphs for elves/nords (50% each) for each elven race while keeping the slim elven base head and ears (all done in 3DS Max). This is the resulting Dark Elf with some minor adjustments. The normal map is a blend of a smooth map with the vanilla map. On a side note, I managed to create functional 3D eyelashes while trying to decouple the eyelash hair cards from the eye mesh. They're not really practical for gameplay since they have nearly the same amount of vertices as the high poly head mesh. 🙃

@Raydonn I've already mentioned this elswhere, but there's no actual Male tag in the game. The Female tag exists and is used specifically for female NPCs. Males are determined by the inverse of the Female tag. This means that things like animals and creatures are considered to be Male. Using the Male keyword for BodyGen will also apply the morphs to every animal/creature. This can be easily checked in-game. One can argue that it's harmless since there is likely no associated morph for affected animals/creatures (all morph data are still saved in the skse co-save), but it's not a good programming/modding practice to modify things outside the scope of a mod. The reason I opted for manually defining morphs for each individual NPC was to follow the original SAM mod which used defined Samson/Samuel values based on class archetypes (warrior, mage, thief, etc). I created a custom xEdit script to auto generate the BodyGen entries for every male NPC in the game (over 2k). Don't use the Enable Scaling morph in BodyGen. It does nothing on its own. I use morphs to store certain values for each NPC to avoid bloating the main game save. Defining a range for a random morph value is valid, but the main reason I used rigid values was to keep them looking nice and clean when viewed in RaceMenu. There will be lots of numbers beyond 2 significant bits otherwise.

Testing Ethereal Elven Overhaul support for my high poly head mod. Despite numerous requests, I'm still not quite sold on it compared to EFM.