Cooking up something

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karurawasabi

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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

  1. DamiLovesSunflowers
    DamiLovesSunflowers
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    I recently discovered that Paint.NET works best when used alongside other image editing programs, such as Clip Studio. Using Paint.NET alone can slow down the process of texture-making, as it has fewer tools than other programs. However, Paint.NET allows you to copy and paste DDS files into other programs, and vice versa, and even lets you save the DDS file after doing so. Additionally, Paint.NET works well for directly opening DDS files with only two clicks and by default. Lastly, Paint.NET doesn’t require any external plugins to open DDS files because it can do that by default. And the best part? It’s free! :)

    The same applies to Photoshop, but in this case, all the mentioned cases go the other way around.