How To: Make Leaderheads! Ekmek's Guide

[Ekmek]

well the problem is in your degaulle suit blend. It still has the skeleton attached but when I open the blend I cant find the skeleton. how did you delete it?

the best way to fix it is to open the suit blend and get rid of the parent (see picture below). select the ssuit (or all) and export the nif. then import into your zara_11 blend and reassign the suit as you did before

 

[peteandbill]

that's odd. once i separated the suit i went into global mode, pressed ctrl+I, and then delete and clicked the little confirmation popup, i'll give this a try and post back when it's done

 

[peteandbill]

ok that definitely helped! I was able to do the nifswap with no problems. Now, though, whenever i load him in the game all the areas around his facial hair on his face is transparent. So like the half an inch (assuming it was lifesize) around each eyebrow and his beard all i see is the background. His shirt also pokes through his coat when he moves, but i'm assuming that's just poor rigging i'll need to go back and fix

I read the troubleshooting section and i didn't use skin partition and there's no part to select in nifskope (as far as i can tell) that's just around the facial hair

 

[Ekmek]

ok that definitely helped! I was able to do the nifswap with no problems. Now, though, whenever i load him in the game all the areas around his facial hair on his face is transparent. So like the half an inch (assuming it was lifesize) around each eyebrow and his beard all i see is the background. His shirt also pokes through his coat when he moves, but i'm assuming that's just poor rigging i'll need to go back and fix

I read the troubleshooting section and i didn't use skin partition and there's no part to select in nifskope (as far as i can tell) that's just around the facial hair

the easiest way is to click on the ninode zara_hair and expand it. then click the alpha property and remove it.

 

[Wonderblunder]

Ekmek,

After making a few units, I'm back to LHs. Do you think I should use Caesar's upper arms for the Greek queen LH I'm making?

 

[The Capo]

You probably could, but why not try out Pacal or Hatty's arms, they would appear more feminine to me.

 

[peteandbill]

the easiest way is to click on the ninode zara_hair and expand it. then click the alpha property and remove it.

so there's no other way? It's just that that will give him a full beard and large bushy eyebrows which i think will be awkward

 

[The Capo]

I am working a new LH, and I remembered there was some issue with Lincoln's suit. I need to use it for my Camillo Benso LH and it seems like it is having issues with it. It looks black in textured mode (first attachment), and it has one texture file, "ABE," rather than the shadered ones (at least I think that's how it is supposed to work). I was just wondering what that issue with the suit was and how to fix it or what my issue might be?

I hope this makes sense, I'm kinda drunk right now...

 

[Ekmek]

so there's no other way? It's just that that will give him a full beard and large bushy eyebrows which i think will be awkward

the other way is to remove the alpha then click on the zara_hair node and right click and choose node->attach property->nialphachannel

basically remove it and add it back. for some reason some property gets forgotten on export from blender.

I am working a new LH, and I remembered there was some issue with Lincoln's suit. I need to use it for my Camillo Benso LH and it seems like it is having issues with it. It looks black in textured mode (first attachment), and it has one texture file, "ABE," rather than the shadered ones (at least I think that's how it is supposed to work). I was just wondering what that issue with the suit was and how to fix it or what my issue might be?

I hope this makes sense, I'm kinda drunk right now...

yeah the abe suit is weird. I think you have to replace it wit the material properties (pushing the globe thing and choose the texture)

After making a few units, I'm back to LHs. Do you think I should use Caesar's upper arms for the Greek queen LH I'm making?

I agree with capo steal hatsheputs or pacal's arms. but rigging them maybe tough. bare flesh may not look right when animated as opposed to cloth.

 

[The Capo]

Ekmek's right, whenever you put bare skin over what was once cloth it usually results in a strange look. It is basically unavoidable.

There are ways to make it less obvious though, the first way would be to remove the armos from being animated, but this makes the LH look kind of stiff. If you want to, you could do what I did with my Dido LH which uses Isabella's body, and just turn the cloth parts of her arms into bare skin. All you have to do is resculpt the sleeves to look more like arms, then reskin them (which also requires changes to the shader files if the LH will be shadered). It is more work, but ultimately it will look better.

 

[Wonderblunder]

Ekmek's right, whenever you put bare skin over what was once cloth it usually results in a strange look. It is basically unavoidable.

There are ways to make it less obvious though, the first way would be to remove the armos from being animated, but this makes the LH look kind of stiff. If you want to, you could do what I did with my Dido LH which uses Isabella's body, and just turn the cloth parts of her arms into bare skin. All you have to do is resculpt the sleeves to look more like arms, then reskin them (which also requires changes to the shader files if the LH will be shadered). It is more work, but ultimately it will look better.

Thanks Ekmek and the Capo, I really did not think about hatsheputs's or pacal's arms. Hopefully, I'll be able to make the problems you said about less noticeable.

 

[The Capo]

For the most part, it will be beyond your control unfortunately.

This is the precise reason I never released/finished that Cartimandua LH, because she had bare arms and Elizabeth (who it was based on) did not, so her skin would look strange and twisted when she moved her arms around. Your best bet would be to try and resculpt Izzy's arms to look the way you want and retexture them, because at least with that method, the polygons are in the spots the animation wants them to be in. That's all I can say, I hope you can pull it off, because it is something even well-established vets can't pull off seamlessly.

 

[Ekmek]

For the most part, it will be beyond your control unfortunately.

This is the precise reason I never released/finished that Cartimandua LH, because she had bare arms and Elizabeth (who it was based on) did not, so her skin would look strange and twisted when she moved her arms around. Your best bet would be to try and resculpt Izzy's arms to look the way you want and retexture them, because at least with that method, the polygons are in the spots the animation wants them to be in. That's all I can say, I hope you can pull it off, because it is something even well-established vets can't pull off seamlessly.

i think thats how the original dido did it. i gues you could take her arms too.

 

[peteandbill]

the other way is to remove the alpha then click on the zara_hair node and right click and choose node->attach property->nialphachannel

basically remove it and add it back. for some reason some property gets forgotten on export from blender.

What do you mean remove the alpha? There's a NiAlphaProperty node under zara_hair, but there's also a NiMaterialProperty with an Alpha row in the block details section

 

[Ekmek]

click the niAlphaProerty and choose remove. then add it back by clicking on the zara_hair ninode and then right click and choose node->attach property->nialphachannel

sorry fo rnot being clearer

 

[peteandbill]

click the niAlphaProerty and choose remove. then add it back by clicking on the zara_hair ninode and then right click and choose node->attach property->nialphachannel

sorry fo rnot being clearer

thanks! And one more question: I'm going to try and make myself as a leaderhead after i finish the one i'm working on, do you have any suggestions, because all of yours look really realistic

 

[Ekmek]

thanks! And one more question: I'm going to try and make myself as a leaderhead after i finish the one i'm working on, do you have any suggestions, because all of yours look really realistic

lesson 1: patience. your first few will still be a little rough and you may run into problems (post here if you do and we'll help). Thanks for the comment, it took a lot of LHs to get where I'm at.

Lesson 2: open a LH gallery thread. This is so you can post Works In Progress pictures as your modelling. My LHs have looked better after feedback and suggestions than if I did it on my own. You can post problems there to. I subscrribe to LH making threads

Capo may have other recommendations

 

[The Capo]

...Capo may have other recommendations ...

Basically what he said; your first couple of LHs are probably going to suck. But don't worry, they'll probably be better than *MOST* of what has come before them, especially when you have this thread to rely upon. Ask anything here, I'm not so great at the technical stuff, but Ekmek and co. really are. I'll try to help out when I can.

Another thing you should do is get as much source material as possible. Even after you have images of the leaders themselves, try to get contemporary images of the world around them at the time that they lived. It sounds lame, but it helps to get a sense of what this leader was like and how she may have lived. And don't forget to try as many new things as you can.

I hope that helps, it probably hasn't, but we could always use more leaderhead-makers.

 

[peteandbill]

Basically what he said; your first couple of LHs are probably going to suck. But don't worry, they'll probably be better than *MOST* of what has come before them, especially when you have this thread to rely upon. Ask anything here, I'm not so great at the technical stuff, but Ekmek and co. really are. I'll try to help out when I can.

Another thing you should do is get as much source material as possible. Even after you have images of the leaders themselves, try to get contemporary images of the world around them at the time that they lived. It sounds lame, but it helps to get a sense of what this leader was like and how she may have lived. And don't forget to try as many new things as you can.

I hope that helps, it probably hasn't, but we could always use more leaderhead-makers.

thanks a bunch! ... not sure how to quote two people so thanks to you too ekmek!

 

[peteandbill]

ok i'm working on my first LH and just got a problem.

I used Augustus Caesar's head and hands with FDR's suit. That went fine, but now i'm trying to edit Caesar's face and things are getting weird. I'm trynig to length the head by scaling it along the z axis about 1.2, but whenever i just scale the mesh it messes up the animation. Then i tried scaling some of the bones along with it, and tried nifswapping the bones as well, but when i went to open that up in the civolopedia it had that blank screen it gets when it can't read the art file.

Is it possible to adjust the bones' positions/lengths and still have it work in the game? or is there some better way to do this?