Paatru Race - Progress Thread

[Koniption]

Paatru Race for Blackmarsh

New Progress (as of 4-21-2011):

http://img215.imageshack.us/g/paatrufrontrigbend01.jpg/

I got the vanilla beast skeleton.nif tweaked to align to the Paatru's body mesh parts. I also got the Paatru mesh weight-painted to the skeleton. I think I'm done weight-painting. The screenshots above show the mesh bending as certain bones were rotated (I hid the bones, so you can't see them).

I had an idea for making it quicker to adapt vanilla race animations, to be compatible with the Paatru skeleton/mesh, so that the Paatru does not become deformed when a vanilla race animation is applied to its skeleton. I sent my idea and feature request, to the Niftools team, in hopes they can put together a Blender nifscript that'll do what I describe:

http://niftools.sourceforge.net/forum/vi...f=8&t=2946

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Progress (as of 4-20-2011):

http://img52.imageshack.us/g/paatruunder...mless.jpg/

Got the foot textured and seamless. This basically completes the texturing job. Next, I will import the human skeleton, reposition the bones to align with the Paatru body shape, then rig the Paatru mesh(s) to the skeleton. I might add some extra bones, to test some ideas of mine out.

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Progress (as of 4-12-2011):

http://img121.imageshack.us/g/paatruhandbottom01.jpg/

Got the hands fully textured, and seamless at that. Last part to texture is the foot.
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Progress (as of 4-11-2011):

http://img33.imageshack.us/g/headbodysea...ack01.jpg/

All I got done in this new update, was getting the head to be textured seamless to the body texture. It has been warm, nice, and sunny outside, so I have not done as much modding as usual. Yes, I am guilty of taking some real time off...for once.
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Progress (as of 4-5-2011):

http://img39.imageshack.us/g/paatrutexturingback01.jpg/

I haven't worked a lot on the Paatru recently, because of the need for Plague Doctor stuff. But the Plague Doctor stuff is almost all done. Despite, I worked some more on the Paatru head and body textures, and got one more step toward making the head and body go seamless together, texture-wise. It's not perfect yet, because there is another step I've yet to do, before the head & body are seamless where they attach.

I still have not done the hands and feet. Those are next on my to-do list.

Lastly, regarding the head facegen morphs creation and using FaceMix, I figured I can "cheat" a little to cut down on my work in creating all those morphs, and reuse some morph poses for other facial expressions, that look visually similar. It's a frog, let's face it, and has no teeth...so if it pronounces words at all, a lot of it's facial/lip movements probably look alike between words, because it is using it guttural throat muscles, tongue, or something else to help make the sounds (I guess).

The good thing, is that I can make a few morphs initially, and spread them out/reuse them over all the facegen morph slots that the head's egm/tri need. When I find more time, I can make proper morphs for certain face expressions, and use FaceMix to replace the duplicated morphs, with the proper morphs for that facial expression. This means I don't have to make all the morphs at once, implement them with FaceMix all at once, and wait until that is all done before I send the egm/tri files. Basically, I can just send updates to the egm/tri files, as things progress.
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Progress (as of 3-25-2011):

Sorry folks, no pics for this update, but it is still exciting news nonetheless, and applies to the Paatru race (and any other race with totally custom heads....and perhaps custom bodies... ):

I have successfully expreimented with the FaceMix program written by Cold Blood (aka Alecu). I got the sload race's head to play the "Aah" facial morph in the game, on cue. It will also use this "Aah" animation when in dialogue. This means that it is now possible to make a totally custom head utilize FaceGen facial animations in the game, when the race talks.

Of course, it's a lot of work to make all those morphs from scratch. But if the sload head worked, I just need to do same steps and procedures on the Paatru head, when I finalize the body and head meshes, and the Paatru head will animate in FaceGen style, too.
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Progress (as of 3-23-1011):

http://img689.imageshack.us/g/paatruheadback01wipz.jpg/

Despite being on modding break, I found some time to do the initial texturing of the head. There are lots of seams and irregularities right now. I'll fix those later.

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Progress (as of 3-19-2011):

http://img835.imageshack.us/g/paatrufront02.jpg/

Got the arm textured, and also made the arm/leg transitions where they meet the main body texture, seamless.

Normally, I would have gotten more than this done by now. But things go slow right now. For further info, read the "Away/Return" thread in the "Sticky Guar" section.

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Progress (as of 3-15-2011):

http://img141.imageshack.us/g/paatrutext...1back.jpg/


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Old News & Progress:

Hi all,

I decided to not use the Ninja Turtle race as the base for the Paatru race. I am thinking that maybe a more "froggy" looking race would be best instead.

Here are some very, very early WipZ pics of what I am leaning towards:

http://img14.imageshack.us/g/paatrufrontwipz01.jpg/

I will have to make everything from scratch for this race with my current ideas: skeleton, animations, head morphs.

The head morphs would be the hardest to implement, and I'd have to buy the 010 Hex Editor program (for about $50), in order to get the head to work with morphs, by following ThrottleKitty's "advanced" tutorial ("Eye Morphs for Facegen" tutorial).

The good news, is that I don't think the head needs to have morphing ability initially, and that it can be implemented at later time. This means I can get the Paatru over to you earlier than if I tried to get the head morphs done first, so that you can get the Paatru in the game sooner, to populate those villages. And once the head morphs are done, it should be simple case of overwriting old files with those new ones (plus adding some additional tri and egm files, etc), and then the Paatru can visibly talk in the game.

I do want to do this, even though it is harder than the Ninja Turtle route, and the slight financial cost. For one, I finally have time and reason to follow, learn, and implement ThrottleKitty's head morph tutorial. I've been wanting to try it out. Secondly, it'd be a spiffy race this way.

Is this ok with the rest of you?

Koniption

[Ibsen's Ghost]

Okay? It's zupa-cool! :yes:

Nice to hear you've found another way to stretch your impressive skills...and I'm really liking the initial work. I did have some really good textures you might have benefitted from but I can't seem to find them at the moment. Nevertheless, I do definitely have some absolutely ace creature eyes that I had figured might come in useful at some point. When you're ready to work on stuff like that, I can send them straight over, if you wish.

[Koniption]

Originally posted by Ibsen's Ghost
Okay? It's zupa-cool! :yes:

Nice to hear you've found another way to stretch your impressive skills...and I'm really liking the initial work. I did have some really good textures you might have benefitted from but I can't seem to find them at the moment. Nevertheless, I do definitely have some absolutely ace creature eyes that I had figured might come in useful at some point. When you're ready to work on stuff like that, I can send them straight over, if you wish.

Heh, it's a relief that you like it.

The frog "half" is fully welded together now. I next need to resize it to ingame race size, texture that half of the frog, and other stuff (insert tech jargon here).

You can go ahead and PM me those creature eyes. It'd be good for me to have them on hand, for when I'm ready to work on the eyes.

Koniption

[Ibsen's Ghost]

Sounds great....and I liked the part about tech jargon! I have a good imagination so it all sounded really clever to me, didn't baffle me at all and made perfect sense.... =)

I'll send you a PM for the creature eyes. They're all in jpeg format.

[Koniption]

Hi all,

Here are the latest progress pics on the Paatru:

http://img141.imageshack.us/g/paatrutext...1back.jpg/

I have now fully welded the body parts together so that they have no holes. (It's still just half a frog body, but I can easily make a whole frog body and mirror it on the other side - to do later.)

I have done the preliminary textures on the main body and the legs - and these textures WILL end up being changed, especially on the legs, because there is a visible, ugly seam straight down through the inner thigh (not visible in above pics).

I'm going for a plain frog texture. Of course, this race can be retextured like vanilla Oblivion races, once everything is said and done. But I'm only planning on doing the plain frog texture, then I'll move on.

I have also updated the OP with the newest pics' linky.

Koniption

[Ibsen's Ghost]

Wow! Cool stuff....another completely new race on the way. This is exciting stuff... :goodjob:

How were the creature eyes....any use?

[Koniption]

Originally posted by Ibsen's Ghost
Wow! Cool stuff....another completely new race on the way. This is exciting stuff... :goodjob:

How were the creature eyes....any use?

Yeah, they are of use. I think I'll be using the eye called "ceye007.jpg".....it's very close to what a frog eye looks like, according to some frog pics I found.

So thanks!

I also discovered another cool feature of Blender that will allow me to make the textures on the Paatru race virtually be seamless *gasp*, even between different body parts that use different textures *double gasp*.

I came across it last night, after struggling to get rid of that ugly leg seam for a couple hours. I finally decided to play with the "Texture Paint" section of Blender, just to see what it might do...and it was worthwhile!! And I can save those texture painting changes to my original Paatru textures, by resaving the texture as PNG, from Blender's UV editing window. So cool!

Anyway, I was so excited last night, and actually repainted the whole area along the leg seam, to match what was on the main body side of the seam, color-wise. Everything looked perfectly seamless between the leg and body, like on a real creature.

But in experimenting in getting the changes to save to a texture format, I lost my changes, and reloading the previous Blender save file didn't help.. So I have to repaint near that leg seam all over again. At least this next time, I'll know how to safely and properly save the texture changes.

Anyway, that'll have to wait until later tonight, hopefully.

Koniption

[Ibsen's Ghost]

Originally posted by Koniption
...I think I'll be using the eye called "ceye007.jpg".....it's very close to what a frog eye looks like, according to some frog pics I found....

That's good. It's a particularly nice-looking one...reminds me of a Chameleon tbh.

Bummer about the lost work....that sort of shit happens to even the most organised and experienced of people. The other bit sounds like great news though... :yes:

[Koniption]

Originally posted by Ibsen's Ghost
That's good. It's a particularly nice-looking one...reminds me of a Chameleon tbh.

Bummer about the lost work....that sort of shit happens to even the most organised and experienced of people. The other bit sounds like great news though... :yes:

Yeah, I hate it when I lose work like that. I'm sure my family heard an audible "NOOOO!!!" from my room when I realized what had happened.

I have updated the OP with more pics.

Also, I might not have to buy a hex editor after all (WARNING: Technical jargon lies within below linky):

http://niftools.sourceforge.net/forum/vi...=10&t=2922

To sum up, Cold Blood, has written a program that should allow me to avoid a hex editor. Cold Blood posted, and baduk and linked me to, some instructions for using FaceMix.

Anyway, progress has been slow for past few days. See the "Away/Return" thread, btw.

Koniption

[Ibsen's Ghost]

Nice new pics!

I got a rough impression about what Facemix does from that thread but it's all very advanced to me.... :eek: