Month: July 2018

Making More Meshes

After last week, I finally discovered the workflow for how to edit .nif meshes for Morrowind. And it is pretty ridiculous, but I got it working now.

  1. Import the .nif into Blender 2.49
    1. Because apparently that’s the only one that won’t screw up importing/exporting Morrowind’s .nif files?
  2. Export to .obj (NOT .blend, alas)
  3. Import that .obj into an actual modern Blender, such as 2.79 (what I used)
    1. Note: if you know how to use 2.49, then by all means skip the second import step and edit it in that. I was almost annoyed enough to do exactly this…
  4. Edit it as you’d like
  5. When done, export it back to .obj
  6. Import the .obj into Blender 2.49
  7. Export it back to .nif

I wish… I wish it wasn’t this weird. But, alas, it is.

But I’ve finally managed to edit the hairs so that they don’t have weird clipping bald patches on them.

Aryon’s MacKom Races Redone face, with my edited Vanilla hair mesh
Steen and Aryon with their fixed hair meshes

But then, I’ve been coming across more and more characters with floating heats / necks too short to reach their clothes. So that is another thing I’ll have to fix. It is getting pretty laborious and I’m wondering if I really want to commit to this, or keep using the vanilla faces as I have done for so many years. I really, honestly love the vanilla faces. I just sometimes wish they were slightly more hi-res. But I think the low-res vanilla faces is better than having floating heads (or unintentional bald patches). We’ll see if I can end up fixing that.

But! If there were no floating heads, I must say these faces are absolutely amazing and – coupled with the vanilla hairs – are completely the look/feel I’m looking for. This is the only face replacer I have found where I still recognize all the characters after their faces get replaced. And this is super important to me. After gaining a recognition and intimacy of these characters for many many years, it is jarring to see them look like strangers. Alas, Westly’s face replacers (and the others out there) make everybody look like strangers to me. So most likely, I will roll up my sleeves and continue editing all the vanilla hairs to be compatible with MacKom’s faces.

I realize that all of these peoples’ meshes are 1,000,000x better than anything I could ever make, so this isn’t commentary on anybody’s talent. These modders are amazingly dedicated and have obviously put in countless hours to their craft. I just have such a strong image of how all these characters look (established in my mind), that I get finicky and weird about it. So ultimately it’s a problem with me, that I need to deal with. Which is precisely what this is an attempt at! 🙂

It is weird because, after ~100 playthroughs thinking “I love the vanilla look the very best!” all of a sudden I’ve started seeking out higher-res replacers with the vanilla feel. I think it is because I very recently set up the gaming tower with the Steam controller, and so I’ve mostly been playing Morrowind on my TV these days.

Also, I guess here’s a side-by-side comparison of old Aryon and new, just in case not everybody out there had Aryon’s old face memorized like I did 🙂

Aryon’s new face and new do on the left; Vanilla Aryon on the right. Pretty recognizable! Although I do miss his ears poking out the top…

Adventures in Mesh Replacers

Well, I did the thing I said I’d never do: I tried out a character mesh/texture replacer mod for Morrowind. I had decided that the faces in the Races Redone mod looked pretty good and were very true to the style of the original faces, so a lot of the original feel/character seemed like it was preserved.

However, I did not like the hairs at all. I much preferred the Vanilla hairs. I just about spat out my drink when I saw Aryon’s new “haircut”…

This is actual footage of Steen coming back from adventuring, and seeing (and reacting to) Aryon’s terrible new haircut that makes him look like he’s a 5 year old child about to go to get a family portrait:

I wasn’t a huge fan of Aryon’s old dorky-ass haircut, to be quite honest. But this… Peewee Herman monstrosity of a haircut was… irredeemable. Don’t get me wrong, it is gorgeously rendered, and absolutely 10000x better than anything I could make a mesh for. I just feel like it doesn’t quite have the same feel as the original, and it looks like it was made with a much younger character in mind. Which, given how few hairs there are to choose from in Morrowind, maybe it was.

The new face is great, though. It is pretty much how I’d always seen him in my mind. The facial tattoos are a bit of creative license here, since the original texture did not have any. But, they’re subtle and such things are common enough in Dunmer society that I don’t mind them.

I didn’t like Steen’s new hair, either. I hated how it was luxurious and flowing and beautiful, because Steen’s hair is none of those things and it never should be. So I suppose maybe she waited too long between haircuts here in this photo:

Again, the face is great, but ugh the hair >:-( no way would Steen be caught dead with hair like that. Or even be willing to maintain it, for that matter.

I also don’t like anybody else’s new hairs, but obviously Steen and Aryon are the most important characters for me to be happy with.

So then I had to go on this mad goose chase to get the vanilla hairs without the ears (because then otherwise he’d have 4 ears), but alas then there was still a problem with the hairs clipping into the new face model, making Aryon and Steen both have bald patches.

Too bad, too, because if not for the clipping, the aesthetic of these new faces plus the vanilla hairs is PERFECT for me. Like, exactly what I was looking for. I thought everybody looked great.

Master Aryon with the new face and Vanilla hair… pretty much exactly what I was looking for, except for the clipping giving him a weird bald patch
Steen with the new face but Vanilla hair. I love this look a LOT. I wish this is how it could be.

So I set out on a gallant mission to tweak all the vanilla (earless) hairs in Blender to solve that clipping problem. But, several hours in, and now I apparently have like 5 different versions of Blender installed (because that’s important for Morrowind meshes… for some reason… I don’t even know anymore), and yet ANOTHER version of Python installed on this machine, non-working .nif files all over the place… it’s a madhouse. I might… I might just go back to Vanilla faces and hairs. Because the clipping is a tiny bit too much to ignore.

And also also… I am partial to the tall rabbit-ears of Vanilla Morrowind mer. These stumpy little Skyrim-style mer ears are not cartoony enough for me, I guess. I’m just too used to all the original meshes and textures, I have trouble adjusting to anything else.

I might have just wasted an entire day on this, because I nuked everything and went back to vanilla meshes and textures. Oh well! It was funny to think of Aryon getting a terrible haircut. Luckily it grew back 😉

The Newest Lopapeysa!

Welllp, I’ve finished another lopapeysa… just in time for summer, alas.  I’ve still been wearing it out of obstinance because I don’t want to wait until next winter to wear it.

I've finished yet another sweater :)

I've finished yet another sweater :)

I followed Jenn Steingass’ “Dreyma” pattern and it is different from traditional Icelandic sweater patterns in a few ways: it is knitted from the top-to-bottom (instead of bottom-to-top like most Nordic sweaters) and it has short-row shaping for making the back longer, and decreases for the waist and increases for the hip – so it is more fitted than most traditional peysas, which are somewhat unisex. Also also it has an option for the rolled collar instead of the traditional ribbed collar.

I like the unisex sweater look with the ribbed collar, and of course I could have gone for that again, but I figured I have so many peysas with such a similar layout that I should make at least one different – just to mix it up.