First off, my Khajiit thief Kzhirra, after many adventures in Cyrodiil and Elsweyr, eventually managed to complete the Thieves' Guild questline and inherited the title of Gray Fox. She immediately decided to shirk any and all responsibilities as Guildmaster and retired to the desert with the Cowl and all her ill-gotten gains. It was refreshing to have a character come to the end of their story naturally rather than have the playthrough end prematurely due to boredom or bugs.
 |
| gg skooma kitty |
The same could not be said for my subsequent character, an Imperial whose goal was to make his riches through crafting and business mods, and who largely relied on companions to stay alive. Sadly one of said companions broke in a big way and I stupidly did not keep backup saves from far enough back. RIP Vilja, never came back from shopping in Skingrad :(
So I decided to take a break from playthroughs for a while and focus on modding. One of my quarantine projects was to learn how to convert clothing to new body types. My preferred body mod is Luchaire's TGND2; I feel it manages to be both naturalistic and attractive. It also has conversions available for most of the big overhaul mods I use.
I'd been "converting" various mods' clothing that was simply retextured vanilla meshes by taking an already-converted model and pointing it to the mod's retexture, then saving over the mod's mesh. In other cases I used outfits that covered the whole body, as in the above picture of Kzhirra, and didn't care if that meant the character went up a couple cup sizes because I am very lazy.
But there are other modded clothes I want to use where that simply won't work. While TGND2 is based off the HGEC body and uses the same UV maps, the wrists and hands as well as feet and ankles are smaller. This creates a noticeable gap in those areas when you wear a HGEC outfit in a game with TGND installed. (The mod attempts to circumvent this with equippable "HGEC" hands and feet, but they never made a difference for me). Now, there is an automated tool called the Clothing Converter that can attempt to make the appropriate edits to meshes based on a configured "lattice", but even in the best of times the results are imperfect.
Eventually, I realized there was no other option. I'd have to learn some Blender.
I'd been brainstorming an Argonian mage character for my next playthrough, so some cool mage robes seemed a good place to start. My first project was to convert the vanilla robe remodels by yuravica aka Fly. These remodels vary, some are skimpy, some are just odd, but there's some that I could totally see fitting into my game. Once I converted a mesh, I could have a huge variety of robes by pointing the models at various robe textures, as done in this mod.
 |
| some are very odd |
The process has left me a broken shell of a human being. First, all the Oblivion tools for Blender are based on the ancient 2.49b version (though at least there is a handy compilation of said tools available here from Room207). This makes general Blender tutorials hard to follow as so many are meant for later versions of the software that made significant changes in the UI.
Then there's the models themselves: I may have chosen a rather poor place to start as the remodels already suffer from clipping issues and the like before I bumble in with my poorly-done conversions. I can't really blame Fly, as they're deliberately doing weird and experimental things with these meshes while keeping the UV maps the same. But after converting 8 of the 15 or so unique models, I decided it was time to take a break. Perhaps permanently. I may try and see if I have an easier time on other conversion projects before going back to this one. I definitely have a newfound respect to the effort that goes into converting dozens of meshes from the big overhaul mods and the like!
After putting that effort on hold, I turned to other projects. I scoped out various house mods for my next playthrough, and really liked the look of one from Trollf called Alchemists Cave. It had a few issues that needed fixing, and after cleaning it up I decided I might as well chuck it up on Nexus in the rare case that someone else found themselves in the same situation as me. Most of the modding I do isn't shareable, as I mostly tweak, compile, or build on the contributions of others to make my own perfect game world. I might as well put up what I can without running afoul of permissions issues.
My new project is a marketplace to house vendors selling the robes, staves, and other magical swag from various mods I've collected over the years. The original mods usually dump their wares in a chest somewhere or into the inventory of a vanilla shopkeeper. My vision is a sort of weekend wizard farmer's market with various vendors and activities, that also serves as a handy way to compile all these resources into one .esp. I may put up the marketplace itself as a modder's resource, sans actual modded content, then add what I want to my local version. Don't know if anyone would actually care or have a use for it, but hey, that's modding for you!
