Misc Characters – Page 5 – Syls Amusements

Viconia DeVir 3

November 12, 2018

Now I felt like I was getting down to the wire, and it was time to make some final choices on hair, outfit, and so on.

First, the hair:

See all that yellow? No good.

Now, there’s several ways to make an NPC’s hair white in-game. The first is to wear a white wig. The second, to wear a hairstyle that has a texture that’s been color-adjusted or that’s pulling from a different set of textures than the vanilla hair. And, of course, the third- which is to add a haircolor to the mod and to the formlists and to the race records for the NPC.

That last bit is a lot of work.

So, I used wigs to trial a lot of hairstyles.

While some of these were a whole lot of nope, there were others with possiblities but many of them seemed like maybe a bit too much work for a woman who’d be having to rinse out the ichor and blood spatter out on a regular basis.

I tried a few other styles, most of which did not come in white:

On the top, Viconia does space opera rock; on the bottom, Viconia wants to speak to your manager. Brr.

I didn’t like any of these at all.

Thankfully, there is Ponytail Hairstyles and Ponytail Hairstyles Recolor, which neatly solved all my problems. The base hair texture on the recolor is colorless, which means no more yellow.

Why is Viconia trying on so many crazy outfits?

Well, that’s payback for my having to put up with her for so long!

Next up: More clothes, trying to set an outfit for Viconia.

Viconia De Vir 2: Face and Skin

November 4, 2018

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.

Cyrelian / Misc Characters / Screenshots / Several Characters

Project Rainforest LE, Part 2: Vacation.

October 29, 2018

Thought I’d clear some more beach pictures out of the way before we head into snowy weather, heh.

So what’s a lovely day in the tropics without a family vacation and a couple of bratty and extremely bored half-grown kids who don’t want to be tagging along?

The older elf lady might look familiar; that is Morna, wearing a different cosmetic mode. She’s a mage; she’s aged well. I was able to get her into the shot by using a mod called Blueprints, which has since been removed from the Nexus. Sadly, I’ve forgotten what Bodyslide I used for her.

As our Cyrelian has not gotten to the point in his life where he would contemplate children, as a conceit I have made some for him, so that he too will have offspring to stand around and whine and glower at him– these are Sinead with a few elements changed and Wolfgang from an old withdrawn mod from the mod author who did the Project Rainforest Overhaul. And yes, it looks like Wolfgang is working up to a wicked sunburn.

The kids’re both manmer, of course, so quite a bit shorter than the Altmer, even more so than their mother. I don’t know where the heck Erdi is; probably heard the first of the arguments and headed out on another adventure.