Under sun and sky

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According to Wikipedia:

Ophiuchus is a large constellation located around the celestial equator. Its name is from the Greek Ὀφιοῦχος serpent-bearer, and it is commonly represented as a man grasping the snake that is represented by the constellation Serpens. Ophiuchus was one of the 48 constellations listed by the 2nd-century astronomer Ptolemy, and it remains one of the 88 modern constellations. It was formerly referred to as Serpentarius, a Latin word meaning the same as its current name.

I made this as a gift for Max who is always very kind to me. It's a very simple outfit featuring a big serpent coiling the body and a pendant with the Ophiuchus symbol carved on it. The necklace also works as seam concealer. This comes in two variants: one for the muscular and one for the scrawny body. I din't make the serpent, I got it from a mod called Blackmarsh Maiden. I don't even know who the author is, so I cannot give proper credit; and as long as I don't have his/her permission I need to limit the redistribution of this mod by password protecting the download. All I can say is that the password is written here in this post, but you can't see it...



You'll find this costume in a small container among the tombstones of the Green Emperor Way, just outside the Imperial City Palace. The chest is placed against the corner of a short wall fencing one of the burial areas, there's a statue surrounded by columns right in front of it. The picture below shows the exact position of the chest on the map.

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This is my Northern Lich Armor for the bodybuilder body. I made this mashup long ago and I never had the time to upgrade it to Robert Male 5.2. I thought I had to remedy this so I have spent all the weekend working on it. And since just replacing the body underneath the few armor pieces wasn't ok with me, I decided to add something new. I think the straps around the chest and the fur skirt give this armor a much better look than the previous release. I had a very hard time with the transparency of the skirt; somehow I couldn't get it right although I've been working a lot with transparency in the past, fixing uncountable hairs for my Comprhensive Cosmetic Compilation. In the end I found a way to workaround the problem and I managed to fix the skirt. I have made an image that shows the exact location of the armor in game. It's in a chest placed on top of the entrance to the Ayleid ruin of Ninendava, near the statue. The ruin is northeast of Chorrol and hosts a vampire coven, so it's better not to venture inside...

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A Portable copy of Blender 2.49b bundled with all the required librairies to work with nifs. I asked Hashmi to update this with the latest components but he never replied, so I learned how to do that by myself. This comes as a 7zip archive so you can carry it with you anywhere. I also included the necessary plugins to import/export .geom (useful for converting hair from The Sims 3), .mesh.ascii and PSK/PSA files.



Component details:

- Blender 2.49b
- Python 2.6.6
- Pyffi 2.1.11
- NIFscripts 2.5.9
- True Normals by Anthony D'Agostino
- Geom Plugin 0.5
- Mesh Ascii Plugin
- UDK Scripts
- Blender Tools 1.01 by Kormgar aka gerra6
- Blender TRI file scripts and Tutorial by Kapaer and Deedes

Credits go to Hashmi and the creators of X-Blender (winPenPack team). I have no merit except updating this with the latest version of Python, Pyffi and NifScripts. Special thanks to Kormgar for his scripts.

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Here's my second stock armor conversion for the bodybuilder body. I have completely remade the chest, thighs and upper arms and added a chainmail underneath the armor. I tried to be as much accurate as possible with the rigging, so there should be no major clipping issues. The one part I don't like is the plates on the sides of the hip, which bend unrealistically with the legs, but besides that I'm quite satisfied with the result. Since male and female characters share the same meshes for the steel armor a plugin - included - is required to replace the meshes only for the men. Oddly enough, this doesn't look that bad on the girls anyway...

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I made this mannequin to test custom made animations in nifskope. I also use it to test armor rigging and see if there's clipping to get rid of. It is based on Robert's male body 5.2 muscular and Growlf's universal skeleton so you can attach any animation to it. In order to do so open the mannequin.nif with NifSkope, then click on Spells/Animation/Attach .KF, select a .kf file of choice and press the play button if the animation hasn't already started. A few animations from Robert are included. Textures are included, too, click on Render/Settings/Auto Dectect Game Paths if they're not visible. You can replace the body meshes with female ones if you like. And here's the best tutorial to learn how to make custom animations and poses for Oblivion in Blender.

I've been working on this for about a month now... very slowly. Like I said the mesh is derived from the default head. Why not from Head06? Well, I thought it was more challenging to attempt at getting something good out of the low-poly vanilla mesh. I have made fitting eyelashes for the new eye shape and the texture has finally eyebrows. In this picture I've put together some random faces I made on the fly. I have decided that the final texture set will also include new age maps and some of them, featuring beard, will be specifically designed for the guys (the one with the goatee and the scar is infact an age map I normally use for my character Raoul). Hopefully making good-looking men will be easier eventually...

This is my other WIP: a remodeled steel armor set for the bodybuilder body. I had planned to release it this week but I'm afraid it won't be possible: tomorrow I'm going on vacation... I did my best to finish this by today but I still miss the upper arm pieces and it's never good to rush things. I'll release it when I'm back in September... Even though this is taylored on a heavy muscled body it looks surprisingly good on ordinary characters and women - arms apart - too. The part I like the most is the legs, I think I did a good job on them!

I've been sluggishly working on a new head mesh and texture. The mesh is derived from the default head, I tried to give the nose a better shape and deeper nares. I also fixed an uv map issue in the region between nose and mouth. As for the texture I put more focus on the eyes, I still need to work on the eyebrows, though. The result is pretty good even though it's not a high-poly mesh like Head06, it works fine both with male and female characters. Since I've changed the shape of the eyes I'll have to make fitting meshes for the eyelashes, too... those in the picture are visibly offset.