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I think I haven't posted enough screenshots of this guy.
No one actually reads descriptions so here's my chance to ramble--little personal tips on how to work with face sculpts, NPC replacer and follower alike:
1. Nifskope is my number 1 friend. I'd convert all face sculpts from SE to LE format and to SE again just so I could preview them on Nifskope and make edits to my heart's content.
2. Brows, beards, lashes (for CotR heads) need to have their specularity settings toned down. I find that beards tend to be VERY shiny if I didn't do this. Brows (and lashes) already have decent specularity values and I tend to copy those values to any beard parts.
3. Specular colors for all "hair" parts, including the hairs also need to be tweaked. Don't make it pure white or the hairs will look very plasticky with certain ENBs. I personally set it to somewhat mid-gray-ish.
4. It's better to sculpt the character's head to fit the hair, than the other way around.
5. Zbuffer_write flag can be either a blessing or a curse. I'd normally leave it on for scars, beards, brows but sometimes it throws transparency issues with the hair, idfk at this point man.
6. Setting different colors for hair and brows/beards/lashes/ can do wonders for realism. In real life, people tend to have mismatching beard/hair colors.
7. I'm one of those whack jobs who made overhauls by assigning different diffuse and normal maps to individual NPCs (instead of, god forbid, making them share the same textures). There's honestly a lot of ways that I (and you) can make unique-looking textures without having a lick of knowledge on digital painting. Just need a little bit of patience, a good pool of assets and a little bit of Paint.NET know-how. Photoshop? Don't know her.
1 comment
The same applies to Photoshop, but in this case, all the mentioned cases go the other way around.