74 réponses à ce sujet

[Xaltar81]

Any improvement? I don't have those armors to test with however I do also have to make sure they conform to the vanilla armors so there may be some tweaking necessary on those armors too. I took a look at the screenshots and that does seem to be the case.

[olnorton]

http://i1368.photobu...77.jpg~original

http://i1368.photobu...d8.jpg~original

http://i1368.photobu...1e.jpg~original

The neck fit is much better, I just need to choose a better skin tone.
I couldn't try the heavy armour on Neeshka, but if those ones fit, the others will too. Thanks again.

[Xaltar81]

Thanks for the screenshots, it does seem to fit a lot better now 

 

The proportions also look better with the neck this way, which is funny because in my 3d app they look off hehe.

[Xaltar81]

Female Tiefling head pack is now complete 
It will be some time before the males start rolling out so please enjoy these while you wait 

[Dann-J]

I like the alternate use of the 'facial hair' toggle.

 

Everyone looks so young and attractive though. A few middle-aged or even elderly heads would be nice, as would some less attractive options. Some more noticable flaws (scars, burns, blemishes, etc) would also be nice. The adventuring life can be hell on the complexion. The drow and wood elf heads with missing eyes and gruesome scars are some of my favourites, and the female tiefling face with the prominent veins looks great as well.

[rjshae]

I like the alternate use of the 'facial hair' toggle.

 

Everyone looks so young and attractive though. A few middle-aged or even elderly heads would be nice, as would some less attractive options. Some more noticable flaws (scars, burns, blemishes, etc) would also be nice. The adventuring life can be hell on the complexion. The drow and wood elf heads with missing eyes and gruesome scars are some of my favourites, and the female tiefling face with the prominent veins looks great as well.

 

Hmm, I wonder how well a special effect-based long facial scar would work? Not sure how closely those map to the facial animations really.

[Tchos]

There are a few heads in that pack with scars and gashes...I think even a missing eye.  And one elderly texture.

[Xaltar81]

Thanks guys. I decided not to have older/scarred heads in the tiefling pack seeing as there are only 5 heads per gender. I figure that additional heads can be added at a later date to facilitate that. I typically don't make older looking characters so I personally prefer the choice to be between more attractive heads. Not to mention, modeling less attractive/ older heads is more of a challenge technically. I keep finding myself slipping into trying to beautify them

 

I have only just gotten back into 3d after quite some time of inactivity so I am still warming up

[Dann-J]

I suppose there's nothing to stop any one of us creating our own diffuse and normal textures for the head models, to add all the acne or wrinkles we wanted. I'd probably use them as NPC heads rather than player heads though, to ensure NPCs remain unique and memorable.

 

No mediaeval setting is truely complete without pox-ridden peasants, or toothless middle-aged prostitutes plying their trade beside seedy docks or in filthy back alleys. And personally, I wouldn't trust any fighters who didn't have visible scars. Chances are they spend more time running away from battle than engaging with enemies.

[PJ156]

For me, I think that, when the pool of resource is low i.e. 5 heads then giving something a distinguishing feature limits it's use because the feature itself becomes the defining attribute and it diminished the players chance to create their own identity. Also for npc heads this is true for me, a head with a scar across the eye is a head I can use only sparingly but a plain head with different skin tones can be used several times over.

 

The only real solution Xaltar, is if you do 40 heads for each race/sex, then you can slip in 4 or 5 interestingly featured ones

 

PJ

[Xaltar81]

I suppose there's nothing to stop any one of us creating our own diffuse and normal textures for the head models, to add all the acne or wrinkles we wanted. I'd probably use them as NPC heads rather than player heads though, to ensure NPCs remain unique and memorable.

 

No mediaeval setting is truely complete without pox-ridden peasants, or toothless middle-aged prostitutes plying their trade beside seedy docks or in filthy back alleys. And personally, I wouldn't trust any fighters who didn't have visible scars. Chances are they spend more time running away from battle than engaging with enemies.

 

The Tiefling heads are designed with retextures in mind All heads share the same UV layout meaning all the textures are interchangeable. The same is not true of the rest of the races though, a fact I regret now. In theory you could create a multitude of additional heads using MDB cloner and simply mix and match the existing textures, not quite 40 maybe but a fair few Even the males I am working on will share the same UV layout so you could even create effeminate looking males by using a female texture on a male or vice versa.

 

I have learned a lot in the process of creating this mod. You can clearly see the quality difference between the Tiefling head models and the older models in my pack. I have tried to make sure the difference is not too jarring but it is evident none the less. My new heads are almost half the poly count of the older ones yet the details are much more readable and the silhouette does not suffer at all for the lower poly count. Its actually quite a large irritant because now I feel like most of my older work is unacceptable to my standards The males are better in the older parts of the mod but I had some pretty large inaccuracies in the proportions of the female heads. The idea of redoing all that work is a little much though so I guess they will have to stay as is for the time being.

 

Feel free to retexture and mess with my packs as much as you like, you can even release them so long as credit is given. The only thing I will not allow is porting my work to other games. 

[rjshae]

"Perfect is the enemy of good."

 

The perspective I have is that all of the heads are still a big improvement over the original. Even if they are not up to your current standards, people are still going to eat them up.

[Tchos]

They are excellent heads, and I hope you continue.  I do have a few requests/suggestions, which I hope you'll ignore if they would prevent you from making more heads.  I would not ask that you go back and change anything that's already done, but only move forward with such things in mind.

• For future heads, the differences in the geometry should be more exaggerated, to better distinguish between individual NPCs at the distance typical for running around in an adventure.  I'm having a difficult time in my module making an elf questgiver look significantly different from the elf companion.  This will be a larger problem when I make an elf-dominated area.
• The heads should at least vaguely be in the same spirit as the heads that they're replacing.  Any module where the modder designed NPCs with a particular head may become dissonant with the author's intent if the player is using these replacers.  (Example: the elderly human woman head replaces a young, attractive human head, which some modders use as a love interest.)
• The skin tones of the heads should be blended below the chin to match the original heads' skin tones.  The many existing clothing and armour mods were designed with those skin tones in mind, and do not match with the new heads.

[Xaltar81]

Thanks for the feedback Tchos, to be honest I barely look at the original heads and in truth, for the most part can't tell if an original head is meant to by young or old. Ordinarily I would praise that in an rpg as it means it relies on the hair and other details to denote age but in this case it is simply because the original heads were so fugly it really made no difference hehe. But on that note I did plan to make the old head a non replacing head and add another younger head in its place that is a little more ageless looking. I made the older head as that number because it is used for Bevil's mother who has white hair in the game so I assumed it was intended for that purpose. As for the varying geometry I hope the new heads do not suffer from that malady, I have tried to make the new heads more geometrically distinctive. I am aware that in the older packs my attempt to push out the headpacks more quickly negatively impacted their uniqueness and have strived to improve on that aspect  

So what you are saying with the skin tones is that I should blend them to fully tint at the neck? If so then that should be an easy fix to do once I have completed the pack and I prepare the whole mod in a single download  

[Tchos]

As for the varying geometry I hope the new heads do not suffer from that malady, I have tried to make the new heads more geometrically distinctive. I am aware that in the older packs my attempt to push out the headpacks more quickly negatively impacted their uniqueness and have strived to improve on that aspect

So what you are saying with the skin tones is that I should blend them to fully tint at the neck? If so then that should be an easy fix to do once I have completed the pack and I prepare the whole mod in a single download

 

I don't have experience yet with the newer heads (you mean the Tiefling ones, I assume), so I'm only talking about the older heads.

 

As for the skin tones, I was talking about the diffuse map's skin tone, not the tint map's alpha channel, but while on that subject I would say that they should always fully tint across the board, and there should not be any limiting factor, whether at the neck or not.  You can only choose one skin tone, and if it's limited in the head and not in the body, there's a clear difference.  What is your reason for wanting to dampen the tinting strength for the skin tones of the head?

[Luminus]

One slight criticism I have, is that some heads are going a bit too far from the original ones and some of them are too similar to each other.

For example, for Humans, the default head with the nicely trimmed beard is gone and is replaced by a "wilder" beard.
Or a female Drow head that had a spider-like tattoo on her forehead is gone or the one with downward "horn" tattoo.
Or the Aasimar with the various markings on their face completely gone and look mostly like humans.

I also think that all Human heads are too similar to each other. Same expression, same shape etc with just slight differences.
The older ones had, guys with wrinkles, fatter face, tattoo on the face, more angry-looking, more gentle-looking and sly etc.

I would like to see some older heads updated than replaced.
While the new heads are amazing, don't get me wrong, they seem to go into a much different style.
More like replacing than facelifting.

Basically me and Tchos say the same thing. Could you add a few heads that are the same in shape (if making new heads is harder) with your other ones but are retextured to look like the older ones in style?
Tattoos, wrinkles, marks, etc.
Those give flavor.

[Xaltar81]

You can only choose one skin tone, and if it's limited in the head and not in the body, there's a clear difference.  What is your reason for wanting to dampen the tinting strength for the skin tones of the head?

 

This seems to be a common misconception, you do not have to have the tint strength set to 100% across the whole texture nor should you in my opinion, it completely washes out any color variation in your textures, so much so that you may as well texture in black and white (not quite but close). You set the intensity via the alpha map on the tint map, I create an alpha map similar to what I use for the specular map but inverted, this means that the tint is mostly 100% accept in a few areas where it may vary from 60% - 98% allowing more color variance in the texture and thus making the heads look more lifelike. The specular map is contained in the normal map alpha and can create more varied specular in a similar fashion. I am posting this info for the whole community so forgive me if I am blurting common knowledge here , I am sure that at least some modders were unaware of these details

 

 

One slight criticism I have, is that some heads are going a bit too far from the original ones and some of them are too similar to each other.

For example, for Humans, the default head with the nicely trimmed beard is gone and is replaced by a "wilder" beard.
Or a female Drow head that had a spider-like tattoo on her forehead is gone.
Or the Aasimar with the various markings on their face completely gone and look mostly like humans.

I also think that all Human heads are too similar to each other. Same expression, same shape etc with just slight differences.

I would like to see some older heads updated than replaced.
While the new heads are amazing, don't get me wrong, they seem to go into a much different style.
More like replacing than facelifting.

Basically me and Tchos say the same thing. Could you add a few heads that are the same in shape with your other ones but are retextured to look like the older ones in style?
Tattoos, wrinkles, marks, etc.

 

Thanks for the feedback I have had this pointed out before and agree about the variation. I will however first focus on finishing the mod before I go back and tweak the older packs. The goal of this mod has always been to provide a solid base for other modders to work from creating their own heads and textures so please feel free to adapt my work as you see fit As for trying to keep parity with the original heads, I think its mostly too late for that at this point, my goal was to create a new set of heads for all the races that looked a lot better than the vanilla offerings, trying to maintain parity is a lot of work and will likely still cause disappointment seeing as the original heads are so bad that I can pretty much guarantee that almost every user will have a different idea as to what the "new" head should look like. Imagination varies from one to the next. This mod already represents about 6 months of work, not counting the time I had stopped working on it. This is no small undertaking and I predict I have at least that much work again before the mod is complete

 

Don't stop the feedback, I take every (constructive) criticism into account moving forward

 

Thanks for taking the time to share your views guys it is greatly appreciated. 

[Tchos]

This seems to be a common misconception, you do not have to have the tint strength set to 100% across the whole texture nor should you in my opinion, it completely washes out any color variation in your textures, so much so that you may as well texture in black and white (not quite but close). You set the intensity via the alpha map on the tint map, I create an alpha map similar to what I use for the specular map but inverted, this means that the tint is mostly 100% accept in a few areas where it may vary from 60% - 98% allowing more color variance in the texture and thus making the heads look more lifelike. The specular map is contained in the normal map alpha and can create more varied specular in a similar fashion. I am posting this info for the whole community so forgive me if I am blurting common knowledge here , I am sure that at least some modders were unaware of these details

 

I may have been unclear in my wording.  There is no misconception here.  I understand that you have intentionally limited the strength in the head tinting via your tint map alpha channels (with different strengths for each race, it seems).  I also understand that excessive tinting washes out diffuse texture colour variation.  The issue is that this limited tinting strength makes the heads' skin tones different from the skin tones of all clothing, armour, and body mods.  As in, it cannot match them, because we can't tint the skin separately in the head and body.

 

You should also not texture in black and white, because the original textures, upon which all of these clothes, armour, and body mods are based, are not textured in black and white, so it wouldn't match that way either.  The skin tones, both diffuse (at least at the neck, and not radically different in any case) and tint strength, should match that of the vanilla resources so that they can be compatible with the clothes, armour, and body mods.

 

I disagree that force-limiting the tinting is the way to go to prevent people from washing out the texture.  I don't need that kind of help, because I know what I'm doing, and would tint subtly if the texture allowed me to do so (which it does in my case, because I change it to do so, but my concern is for standards, and matching heads and bodies).

[Xaltar81]

I think you misunderstood my answer their Tchos, by using the tint map alpha channel I try to create more color variation by tinting some areas less than others though some of my earlier heads were blanket tinted less which I will correct when the mod is near completion but I wanted to have my work out there as I grow the pack rather than sitting on it until the whole thing is done. Nothing in this mod is final yet. I think I may have made the same mistake on my tiefling heads, its an easy part of the process to overlook so thanks for bringing it up If done correctly the vast majority of the head should match the armor's skin tones but that is certainly an element I will be looking at before the mod is complete. You see when making the heads and testing them ingame initially I use a blanket tint of about 90% (less for some races as you noted) and then I (was meant to) create a proper tint alpha that tints some area a little less for emphasis whilst still maintaining more or less 100% tint over the majority of the face and neck. It is something I will be correcting before final release

 

As for the comment on black and white textures that was a joke based on how much color variation is lost with a full tint, sorry I misled you. 

 

So you think I should set all the tint maps to 100% and just leave it at that? I won't complain about that at all if that is how you all prefer it. That will cut my workload significantly

[Tchos]

My statements are all based on the human, aasimar, and all variety of elf tint maps, all of which have entirely grey, uniform alpha channels (except for the eyebrows, which are fully tintable).  I don't know when you started using the more subtle tint maps that you describe, but as I said I haven't tried your new tiefling heads yet.

 

In general, yes, I would advocate leaving them entirely white, because that's how the stock resources are done.  It may not be optimal, but it's either that or changing the hundreds of clothing options to match.  But I haven't seen your latest ones, so if it's largely fully tintable, with only some parts limited, then it's only really important on the neck.

 

Another matter of import is the specular map, in the alpha channel of the normal maps.  Granted, this is a problem for all content, because specular mapping seems to be poorly understood in the custom content, and it veers all over the place as well, so I can't say that your specular maps should be made to conform to the vanilla ones, but they should at least be held to a standard range between heads and races, because the specular is as important as the other maps for matching skin tones between head and body since the way light affects the texture causes the colour itself to look lighter or darker.

[Xaltar81]

I will do that on the tint maps then when I am ready for a full release. The goal after all is to create a resource for the community so I will endeavor to create my heads to suit that end. As for the specular maps those are a lot more involved and require significantly more work to create, I will not be making any changes there. If memory serves the necks on my models have little to no specular detail so they should blend well enough with armors which I have noticed use very little specular, if any at all. So that should not prove a problem on the vanilla armors. Another reason I did it this way is because the specular effects the visibility of seams rather strongly so I avoid using it overmuch on areas where there are seams (along the jawline and down the front of the neck in most of my models). If the engine handled things better there would be a lot more I could do to pretty things up but it is an old game so I have to work within its limitations. The specular in NWN2 actually does not effect color at all, you can easily test this if you remove it by blacking the normal map alpha channel. The specular is held in the alpha channel in this game so has no color detail it simply handles gloss and sheen on the skin which can only really lighten the texture and even then, only when it is applied with gloss set to 0 in the material. Setting the gloss to any number higher than 5 will maintain color saturation and hue. I have experimented extensively with the specular map in an effort to make my skin texures look as realistic as the engine will allow, not to mention the eyes sheen and glint. Ideally I create a near black specular map with lighter areas around the eyes, lips and tear ducts with an overall speckle effect I add via a noise filter then crop and trim so it only effects the areas I want it to. Then setting the material to about 40 - 60 specular intensity (the material setting not the setting of the texture map itself which should always be 100%) and a gloss of about 10 - 15. I adhere to these ranges on all my heads and the differences between them are so slight they should not effect parity with armors. The skin tones of my diffuse textures however are another matter I will have to look into. The vanilla textures were very pale so I will have to at the very least blend the neck area and a few areas around the face to match for parity with armors as you mentioned. 

 

Thanks for bringing all this up, I doubt many people are aware of just how technical this can get Its nice to have a conversation with another modder with some experience in this area. From screenshots I have seen tho, it seems most of my heads match the armors well enough, am I mistaken in that assumption? If so could you post up some screenshots for me to look at. I will not be catering to custom content however, only vanilla material because modders need a baseline, not something that is all over the place and drawn from different sources. 

 

Oh and I have to add, I am aware that my ethnic male and female (black) heads will have some disparity with the armors, I couldn't find a way around that while maintaining an ethnic look to them. Compromise is sometimes necessity.

 

Edit:

You are right about the tint intensity, it does not actually wash out the color as much as I thought. For some reason I thought it messed with the color map more than it does, weird I don't know why I thought that. Live and learn I guess. I just have to mask off areas like the teeth (and horns/spikes/jewelry) so they maintain their color but the rest I will go ahead and just tint 100%. Thanks for the info Tchos, that will save me some work on future heads. And I also confirmed that my textures are too dark when compared to the originals, not sure how much that will effect parity with the armors but I can take a look, now I need to find my old saves from when I still played nwn2 hehe, I haven't made a play through in years I think when I started this mod I planned to play through again when the mod was done but I seriously underestimated the work involved lol

 

Still working on it though making this both my largest and most worked on mod ever so that is a good thing. I usually end up calling it quits, sometimes before I even reach release. I guess my love for this old game is greater than my propensity for getting bored with a mod. That or the sheer number of races and variations have kept my interest. Either way I am not stopping till this one is done so plenty more to come

[Tchos]

Glad to hear about the tint maps and matching the skin tones at the neck.  Thank you for the consideration.  I've also gone ahead and looked at the tiefling textures, and the tint alphas are very good (except for heads 1 and 2, which use the same kind as the old ones).  Worlds better than the old ones, and so light that it'll be easy to blend them to white at the neck.  The speculars are also very good, and very close to the shade and pattern of the vanilla heads, except at the neck, whereas the old ones had a wider variation and were much lighter in general.

 

From screenshots I have seen tho, it seems most of my heads match the armors well enough, am I mistaken in that assumption? If so could you post up some screenshots for me to look at. I will not be catering to custom content however, only vanilla material because modders need a baseline, not something that is all over the place and drawn from different sources. 

 

It would be difficult to give you an example of that sort, only because the vanilla armours almost always dealt with the issue by having no skin exposed at all.  If I had the original warlock leather outfit on hand, I could use that, but in one of the expansions they replaced the exposed skin with cloth due to their use of inconsistent skin tones for the new races.  However, the modded clothing was made to match the vanilla ones as best as possible, which is why I would use the vanilla heads as the template for colour and intensity, at least around the neck.

 

The specular in NWN2 actually does not effect color at all, you can easily test this if you remove it by blacking the normal map alpha channel. The specular is held in the alpha channel in this game so has no color detail it simply handles gloss and sheen on the skin which can only really lighten the texture

 

The sheen is what I'm talking about in how it affects the colour.  I don't mean the hue, but the luminosity and saturation, and not in actuality, but only in appearance.  That is, when there's more sheen, it appears lighter and less saturated when the light is hitting it at such angles, and that's noticeable when the other areas don't have the same amount of sheen.  It becomes a problem, for instance, with a high specular face and a low specular body, because it leads to what looks like a sweaty face with a bone-dry chest.  I don't know that this is a problem for yours in particular, but I mention it as something for everyone to watch out for.

 

If memory serves the necks on my models have little to no specular detail so they should blend well enough with armors which I have noticed use very little specular, if any at all.

 

Here's the specular for one of the vanilla heads.  I expect your monitor is bright enough to see the pattern, since you work with these, but anyone other than Xaltar who may be reading this should note that if it looks pure black to you, it's because your monitor's brightness is too low to detect it.

 

I'm showing this to show that in the vanilla heads, the necks are not pure black, but the diffuse pattern is used all over the head.  I'm not saying the pattern has to be all over the head, since your current tiefling speculars are excellent on the faces, but to match, the necks should have a pattern like this, and not be pure black.  I use this pattern whenever I fix the specular maps of armour and clothing with exposed skin.  However, I don't know what model material settings they may be using for the shininess and gloss, which throws another random factor complicating the task of matching things up.  I know you say it's a negligible difference in the range you use, but why not just use the same numbers for consistency?

 

Ideally I create a near black specular map with lighter areas around the eyes, lips and tear ducts with an overall speckle effect I add via a noise filter then crop and trim so it only effects the areas I want it to.

The vanilla textures were very pale so I will have to at the very least blend the neck area and a few areas around the face to match for parity with armors as you mentioned. 

 

I've noted that speckling texture around the eyes before, and was impressed.

 

As for the pale vanilla textures, I'm sure it was to facilitate tinting.  It would have been nicer if they had used an analogue of Photoshop's "multiply" blending mode for the way the engine handles the tints, rather than what appears to be "darken", which I'm sure is the reason that all the details are washed out with stronger tints.

 

Generally speaking, so many of the game's resources are pale and washed out, presumably to facilitate tinting, though in so many cases no one actually tinted them, resulting in a lot of weathered items.  I like what SoZ did with them, both in the placeables and the terrain.

[Xaltar81]

Thanks for taking the time to write such a detailed reply. 

 

I remember now why I lowered the tint initially, it was because of the lighter skin tones, they look overbright, almost luminescent with the tint set to 100%. I am not sure why my heads tint so bright when the vanilla ones don't though I suspect it has something to do with the Diffuse/Ambient color in the material. Any idea what color Obsidian uses for their materials? I think my importer loses that information because whenever I import the color is white (255,255,255). A puzzle for tomorrow I guess. Its 1am and I need my beauty sleep.

 

Thanks a ton for helping me with this mate, it helps to have another set of eyes on things.

 

Edit: On second look its not too bad, a little bright but not so much as I remembered. there are so many variables to take into account with the materials. I will have to go through with a fine toothed comb and check for parity with the whole pack, that will not be fun hehe. Still, worth the effort to get it right. I just need to fix my import plugin again, my skeletons are not importing again. I think it had something to do with the location of granny2.dll last time this happened. Probably because my new installation of NWN2 is under a games folder rather than program files. I will sort it then I can check material settings and start fixing older packs.

[-Semper-]

I just need to fix my import plugin again, my skeletons are not importing again. I think it had something to do with the location of granny2.dll last time this happened. Probably because my new installation of NWN2 is under a games folder rather than program files.

 

jus update the install path within your nwn2utils.ini to point to the right direction. if you're using a version from gog there won't be registry entry and you have to enter the correct path to the installation folder.

[Xaltar81]

jus update the install path within your nwn2utils.ini to point to the right direction. if you're using a version from gog there won't be registry entry and you have to enter the correct path to the installation folder.

Thanks, turned out to be that I was using the 64bit version of max, apparently the plugin does not work with it. Reinstalled the 32bit version and its all working now. I had already checked the install paths (from registry as my game is installed from disks) and it still wouldn't work then I remembered I used to have both versions of max installed and remembered why. I can work on models and export from max 64 but can't import, if I import in max 32 then save and open in 64 it all works fine. Odd but hey it works so I won't complain. I use 64 because I have already installed all my additional plugins there and don't feel like configuring the 32 bit version again, I am aware they function identically

 

Back to work after 2 days trying to puzzle this out :S