Along with my buddies Spillsandstains and BossDaddy, we thought we'd create a thread where we can ask questions as we attempt to move up through the ranks of LH creation.
We are eager to learn, enthusiastic to share our knowledge, and would greatly appreciate any help along the way
Okay, wheeling our first LH into the shop, I present New Tomyris. She is based on the lovely Penthesilea and Nanye-hi LHs by SaibotLieh, and we were also inspired by Xyth’s Tomyris (she can be found in the excellent History Rewritten mod).
Spills and I have taken her as far as we can at this point. We would like to optimize this new Tomyris and release her to the community. If anyone can lend a hand or advice, we would be most grateful.
Here are the issues we are experiencing:
1) Helmet Issue. You can see her hair / head bulging through the helmet on -both- sides. This seems to be a rigging issue: when she moves, the helmet doesn't fully follow the head movements, so the hair pokes through.
2) DDS Minor Issue. The underside of the helmet (shadow?) is showing a little too red for our tastes. We would like a nice shining (resplendent) effect, but the helmet lining still seems too bright?
3) Glitchiness around the Eyes. There’s something happening when she blinks - a kind of frostiness to her eyelashes which would be truly distinctive if it didn’t look so glitchy. Early on we tried adding eye shadow and mascara to, well, mask the issue.
SpoilerSpeculation :
Viewing her up close in nifskope, some of the eyelashes did indeed appear frosty, so I clicked on them to get a sense of the mesh / texture.
The issue seems to be contained in 'Penthesilea_Clothes_trans'. I also compared this to SaibotLieh's original Penthesilea. I originally thought that this was giving her the frosted mascara eyelashes. In game, when she blinks the frostiness seems to appear on the inner and outer eyelids.
And why not try a ‘Pink Test’ to see if we can discover anything new?
Hmmm…
4) Finally, her eyes seem a little dull. Is there a way to bring more sparkle to her eyes so she appears more lifelike?
As is evidenced by the attached images, Spills has put in a heroic effort to perfect Tomyris. We are close, but still need help. Two nifs are included in this zip. The ‘TomyrisNewest’ is the result of Spills’ uvsetedit.
Okay, wheeling our first LH into the shop, I present New Tomyris. She is based on the lovely Penthesilea and Nanye-hi LHs by SaibotLieh, and we were also inspired by Xyth’s Tomyris (she can be found in the excellent History Rewritten mod).
Spills and I have taken her as far as we can at this point. We would like to optimize this new Tomyris and release her to the community. If anyone can lend a hand or advice, we would be most grateful.
1) Helmet Issue. You can see her hair / head bulging through the helmet on -both- sides. This seems to be a rigging issue: when she moves, the helmet doesn't fully follow the head movements, so the hair pokes through.
2) DDS Minor Issue. The underside of the helmet (shadow?) is showing a little too red for our tastes. We would like a nice shining (resplendent) effect, but the helmet lining still seems too bright?
3) Glitchiness around the Eyes. There’s something happening when she blinks - a kind of frostiness to her eyelashes which would be truly distinctive if it didn’t look so glitchy. Early on we tried adding eye shadow and mascara to, well, mask the issue.
SpoilerSpeculation :
Viewing her up close in nifskope, some of the eyelashes did indeed appear frosty, so I clicked on them to get a sense of the mesh / texture.
The issue seems to be contained in 'Penthesilea_Clothes_trans'. I also compared this to SaibotLieh's original Penthesilea. I originally thought that this was giving her the frosted mascara eyelashes. In game, when she blinks the frostiness seems to appear on the inner and outer eyelids.
And why not try a ‘Pink Test’ to see if we can discover anything new?
4) Finally, her eyes seem a little dull. Is there a way to bring more sparkle to her eyes so she appears more lifelike?
As is evidenced by the attached images, Spills has put in a heroic effort to perfect Tomyris. We are close, but still need help. Two nifs are included in this zip. The ‘TomyrisNewest’ is the result of Spills’ uvsetedit.
1) The issue here is that the helmet is rigged to a different skeleton, with the b_head node probably being a different distance than for this skeleton. Therefore, the helmet will move to a different amount when the node is move, which makes it shift around on the head. You can move the helmet around a bit more or make it bigger, but the only way to really fix this is to go via Blender, where you could join the helmet mesh with one of the body meshes, thus rigging it to the right skeleton.
3) Not completely sure what you are seeing there, but I would guess it is a combination of not having coloured the inside of the eyeholes black as well as having exchanged the eyebrows of Penthesilea with the ones from Nanye-hi, which you did when you exchanged the hair. You could try exchanging only the eyebrows back via Blender, or at least adjust the texture of Nanye-hi's eyebrows.
4) Since the eyes are rather deep in the eyeholes, maybe moving the eyes around a bit using the dummy nodes could make them appear a bit larger. Otherwise, you could try brighten up the texture of the eyeballs. They are already shadered, so not much extra can be done there.
I have attached a nif and some textured where I tried a bit to go after these problems. For reasons unknown to me the enviroment texture seems to glitch at times though, using instead the texture of the leaderhead viewed prior going to this leaderhead.
Also, you might want to adjust the isabella norm, env_msk and spec texture files to your modified diff file, since otherwise you might run into strange effects (like the weals on the arms, caused by the norm texture). In short, the norm texture defines contours, the env_msk how much the env texture is reflected and the spec general reflectiveness (with not much effect most of the time, especially if not used together with some env_msk intensity). There are filters plug-ins available for most graphic programs to create a norm texture out of the diff texture, the env_msk and spec are normally grey versions of the diff file, with parts changed in intensity accordingly. But you can also try to play around with colours in those.
I converted this crest from a RTW2 mod. Usually when I convert a TW file to DAE and open it in Blender, there appear to be multiple meshes, varying in quality. I assume this is LoD (level of detail). For some reason, this crest didn't have LoD meshes, it simply 'repeated' the same mesh a few times. If you open the Blend files (in "SeaPeople Crest Attempts") you can see what I mean.
There are four different crests from this mod, but they also come with Masked versions - although I am unable to tell the difference between the masked / unmasked files. ("SeaPeople Crest DAE Files")
I might mention that these crests are the only TW meshes I've seen that don't come with a UV map
Typically, I save a mid-quality mesh that will scale well to civ4 and delete the other meshes. However, whenever I tried to add texture to a single mesh, it would become slightly transparent (not pictured here). So I tried to add textures to all the meshes in the file, creating a 'Multi' mesh My Blend files are labeled accordingly.
TL;R: I might need to do a better conversion of the crest mesh? Thank you very much for any help or guidance
hi bunnies
do have a fix for that crest problem, will give it a go tomorrow ... bit of uv mapping might work
ikausu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achish
- hardly a well known individual! but better than goliath. this lh also known as: fallout phil. i would now go with a transliteration of the Philistine mentioned in the link, Akayush maybe
- they have a fascinating history as defeated Egyptian enemies settled on the frontier. One archaeological report I came across claimed their pigs had a distinctive Aegean heritage, but they quickly lost a lot of 'sea people' features they had, so the converted hat is a delightful anachronism tantanmen dug up.
- you get the impression from the OT the Philistines vs Hebrews pagga is a major event of regional (and cosmological) proportions, to me it looks like some minor city states squabbling in an area the size of a smallish English county, but that wouldn't make such a good story ... as every pub brawler knows. The area was a Bronze Age townscape, but one where major trade routes crossed, and big political players acted, and was already a palimpsest of cultures and peoples when texts put an untrustworthy spotlight on it.
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R: I might need to do a better conversion of the crest mesh? Thank you very much for any help or guidance 
