Festive Holiday Disaster #9

Hey KITTY, I’ve got another update for you!
“hang tight, I’ll be there in a minute…” – Kitty

“You like my new swimsuit? It’s shiny!” – Kitty
Gulp! Um… suit? Yeah! It’s… wet.
“Sometimes you’re just TOO easy you know. Wait just a minute, I need to dry off.” – Kitty

“So, what’s new with the Disaster?” – Kitty
Um… I… um…
“Maybe it would help if you closed your eyes for a minute? Closing your mouth might help with the drool too.” – Kitty
OH! Yeah. The… thing. Well, it’s not going to be dramatic changes from here out. Just small things really, but they’ll add up.

“Do you mind. I’m kinda getting undressed here.” – Kitty
Oh, sorry. So I added the little thing under the knees.
“Did you add a shinguard or something?” – Kitty

Naa. It seemed better just to paint the leggings.

“Easier at least… Ok, you can turn around now. Where’s the outfit?” – Kitty

I left it up on the patio.

"Ok, so what else?“ – Kitty

Well, I dropped the shine factor. And I adjusted the normal map so the triangle things on the top look at least a little more like separate material.

"How’d that turn out?” – Kitty

Not as well as I’d hoped, but it’s ok. I also used the same to bring that little red button up a bit.

Here – try it on.
“Ok, but turn around again – I’m not as fast as Katia… yet.” – Kitty

“So, how do I look?
To quote someone on the fanart, better than you have any right to!
"Heheh! That’s me!” – Kitty
“Oh, I see you’ve adjusted the ankle cutout a bit too. Good, good.” – Kitty

You know, the cloak and the outfit ARE separate items. You can take the cloak off when you sit so it doesn’t look so weird.
“Oh, thanks! Hey, I’ve been thinking. You’re going to have this cloak done soon aren’t you?” – Kitty
Yeah, getting close, though I’ve not a clue how I’m going to do the turtleneck yet.
“But… when you do… you won’t need me anymore to model for you.” – Kitty
That’s true.

“So, I won’t really see you after that.” – Kitty
I guess not. Why?
“Well… I’ll kinda miss you I guess.” – Kitty

Oh, don’t worry about that! I said I’ll start a new comic like Katherine Managan. How about if I star you in it?
“OOO! Really? ME?” – Kitty
Sure! Why not, you know I’m going to use SOME Khajiit anyway. Might as well be you.
SQUEAL – Kitty

Did you really just squeal?

Cloak of Gray Tomorrow entry

Well, I went ahead and posted my entry. Frankly, it sucks. I regret at least a little bit having taken the time to do it. But now that it’s done, at least I can move on to other things.

I did use Nalim’s catsuit mod as, while it’s a catsuit, it’s a more believable one with seams and a leather-ish texture. Made it gray and darkened the buckles in the front so they’d blend in better. It’s based on the original Skyrim body which keeps the bust a reasonable size (appropriate for Katia)

The cloak itself is “grey linen” cloak from the other mod I’d mentioned. I actually based the color of the catsuit on it rather than the other way around. If meant for stealth, grey would be the way to go after all. Black is much easier to see than grey (gray? whatever.)

It is equipped with a hood, though not really wear-able in Skyrim. I left her without gloves/boots as 1. – I don’t think those would be included in the box and 2. – I didn’t have time to mod any existing ones to grey – they look cool in black but that sort of ruins the point for grey IMHO.

It’s got a neat effect you can’t see too well in screenshots when crouching, her face goes dark and swirly mystical smoke sort of curls around her. Eye’s therefore become quite bright. Pretty nifty and appropriate. When the final CoGT outfit is chosen and I make a mod for it, I’ll want to include that.

Ok, enough of my failed attempt at a CoGT suggestion. I know a good one from a bad one and, though in my mind it looked cool, in reality it does kinda suck. Fortunately there’s a LOT of really good ones coming in now. So this one can go in the Recycle Bin and I won’t feel too bad about it. Just too bad I cant get those 2 hours back! 😉

Katherine M. Commentary

Well, it’s an experiment. One thing I found right off is my style doesn’t fit cartoons format well. Too much exposition to fit in a couple balloons. Plus, the balloons get in the way of the screenshot. I may convert to image then text as I’ve done for a lot of this one and just keep the speech balloons completely out of the images. It kind of breaks the image/speech apart, but I feel like it’s worth the slightly unusual format to keep the images separate.

Probably won’t surprise anyone to notice that I found the facial expression/modification features before I posted this one! Some of them were quite fun to work with too. Along with some mouth positions, they really widen what I can do with screenshots.

I think I’ll keep Mr. H offscreen too. After all, we all self-insert as the man behind the camera to some extent anyway don’t we? That may get a bit tricky to pull off though. I do imagine him as a Khajiit though, for what it’s worth.

Ok, enough for now. Comments always welcomed though!

Another Katherine M. coming soon.

I’ve actually NOT been procrastinating on this project. Instead, I realized that I need a screenshot of every possible pose with a reference so I can find it again to do this right. So that’s what I’ve been up to. I’m hoping that I will end up only RARELY ever re-using the same pose – and even then mixing it up with different angles to keep it from looking too obviously repeats.

I’ve also learned quite a bit about different techniques to use when doing Skyrim screenshots – varying focal lengths for example. Between that and the hundreds of poses I have to choose from (I’m probably 75% done with my reference screenshot project), this should be fun!

I’ve got a couple of storylines already in my head – but I’ll probably make it up as I go anyway.

It does help that I have such a lot of time between Prequel updates that I can feel confident that I can beat it. (Of course, I’m not programming minigames either!)

Katherine meets Sabhira. Just Sabhira. Sabhira is a Khajiit. Katherine is… something else.

Standard Skyrim Arena Armor Mod (pt. 3)

This thing is taking forever – because I keep NOT working on it. But I did some more finally. When last we left, we had this texture file:

I’m now down to THIS texture file:

So I’ve really lightened the color, added the blue borders and “wolf” icon, changed the front skirt into leather fringy things and almost (but not quite) removed the rear of the skirt. I also did some modding of the “normal” file so the fringes don’t have the same roughness or pattern as the cloth sections – they stand out as more independent material that way. Result?

Coming along. Those shoulder pauldrons still needed, and some touchup in the back needed, but all in all, I’m pretty happy with the progress.

(All my starting/stopping of Skyrim for the work today popped Kaz into my chat to speculate on me modding – he was right of course. But I had to un-friend him in Steam so I wouldn’t keep bothering him with my constant start/stopping!)

Standard Skyrim Arena Armor Mod (pt. 2)

Ok, took a couple months off. Back to work. If Kaz can update, I can too. Not a LOT of progress, but here’s the latest. So once again I’m going to start with the Prisoner outfit. I do have the highres mod in – but that’s the official Bethesda highres mod so that’s OK. I exported all the files from the file named HighResTexturePack01.bsa and found the Prisoner texture files in there. This is the main one I’ll be working with:

Once again, “white” areas are holes in the fabric. For our mod, we don’t need the pants or the belt textures (top right). So I’m going to delete those totally. Also going to fill in all the “holes” in the parts we do need and I also smoothed out the rough sleeves a bit. End result is this:

That’s frankly all I’ve done so far. But the question is, what does it look like in-game so far? Well, HERE is what it looks like:

No, that’s not a bug – her legs only go up just above the knees. Then… nothing. But remember, with the original prisoner outfit, there are pants – so you never SEE the missing legs. While not true of all outfits, lots of them have missing body parts inside the outfit. My understanding is that, by not including them, the graphics processor doesn’t have as much work to do – so when there’s no expectation that anyone will SEE the body missing, they remove it.

And again, EVERY OUTFIT HAS ITS OWN BODY inside it(!). They don’t even have to be the same body really. So that obviously is going to have to be fixed. Fortunately, in the last mod I did, I not only fixed it, but I was able to essentially put 2 bodies inside – one in blue “tights”. That’s what I’ll do to fix it this time too.

Hehe – here’s a real test for Pepsidude… would you rather have flat-butt Katia or NO butt katia? Remember, you can always Imagine! Oh, for that matter, here’s the ONLY upskirt screenshot of a khajiit I’ll ever take on this project…

That’s just nasty. ^_^ Anyway, that’s where it stands for now. But I’m going to keep working on the textures before I fix that body – so you’ll have to get used to Takia’s Missing Torso for awhile.

Standard Skyrim Arena Armor Mod (cont.)

Ok, got Steam/Skyrim all fired up and my base, unmodded Katia in-game. WOW it’s been a long time since I’ve seen unmodded khajiits. (Wow they’re ugly!) No offense Katia! It’s not you its just…

…rough. There’s a river right there Katia. How about you go wash those undies huh? ^_^ But at least I don’t have to worry about showing nudity anymore!. Yeah, this is the model I’ll be using. Stock. Standard. Not even yellow. But no, this mod is about the armor, NOT about Katia. So lets just say this is Katia’s third cousin, twice-removed…

…on her father’s side. Oh Pepsidude ain’t gonna be happy with that flat tush. But remember, it’s all about the armor (keep repeating that… it’s all about the armor, it’s all about the armor… You CAN survive this unmodded horror that is default Skyrim!)…

Maybe not. I need a name for her I can remember since she’s definitely not Katia. Let’s call her Tackia. Well, this is about as good as I could do with all defaults and no mods. And no, I’m not going to mod her this time. We’re going full-defaults here.

Some other new adventures we get though will include the Creation Kit. I never used it before, so I guess I’m going to learn how this time! Also, I cheated with my other mods. I just replaced an existing armor with my mod’s files. By doing that I didn’t have to sweat getting it into the game or what stats it should have. This time I’m going to build a new armor and I’m hoping the Creation Kit will help me to get it in-game like that.

Which also brings up the question of what the armor itself should be like. I’ve been concentration solely on the visual aspects of it. But should it actually be GOOD armor, terrible one-step-above-rags armor, superpowered magical kick-ass armor or what? Should it have any magic powers? I mean really, to be canon it really probably shouldn’t be much. But if you play Skyrim at all, you’re not going to want to keep this on when your a level 46 Assassin unless it’s got something special going for it.

I’m really open to opinions on that. If you have any, go right ahead and respond to this.

Yet More on my skyrim katia arena armor mod…

As “proof” of sorts, here she is with a different outfit. What does this prove other than that I’m a pervert and install sexy mods? Well, she has no blue pants here, THATS for sure!

Yeah, you keep dreaming shopkeeper. This kitty ain’t for you! She’s given up the booze and the one-night stands… (well, maybe not wearing that outfit!)

Ok, enough silliness. So when last I left off, I had an upper-half-khajiit body that worked beautifully with the rest of the armor (which allowed me to have a 2nd body inside the armor with the blue pants texture) – but it was only available at max-size. I tried making a minimum size body, cutting out the same vertexes using 3ds Max program, but it either crashed the game completely or in-between things went hyper-wonky because the vertexes didn’t match up exactly between the two.

(weight settings other than Max and Min were failing miserably – not now as you can see!)

I even went so far as to post for help over at Nexus – (with no results). But then I got an idea – what if I import the complete, max size body into 3DS Max, along with the complete min size body AND the partial, max size body. With all three in at once, I can edit both complete bodies precisely to match the partial max-size I had. Then, when I exported them after removing the lower half, the two originally complete bodies SHOULD be identical. The same process will have been done with both bodies so the result should match too. It worked. IT WORKED! Hurrah!

Ok, so there are still some small touchup things I want to do – plus this is still the Ragged Trousers clothing and it needs to replace an existing armor. (I’ve no plans to create a truly NEW armor in the game here – I’ll just replace an existing armor mesh/template)

So not really done yet – but nothing is stopping me now. And now, for something completely different. First, for HoodieKatia, the closest I could find in Skyrim!

More like HoodED Katia but it’s still cute!’

Anybody like succubus-es? (Succubi?) How about Katia as a Succubus? Maybe if she hangs out more with Nah she might someday…

(And this shows the problem with lazy modders – max-size body regardless of the weight settings you choose. Not MY mod tho! But perhaps for a succubus mod I guess that max size might be somewhat more appropriate.)

Ok, enough of my screenshot-fest. I’m going to go head to the beach and see if I can catch Katia there. Or at least take a break from this for a few days. A few tweaks still – I’d like to work on that belt a bit, got a few clipping issues (minor though), maybe re-work the wolfs head. For now though, something with ice and rum sounds good!

Success!!! Katia’s Skyrim Arena Armor for CHSBHC!

Who’s bad? Well, in fact, >I< am! I FINALLY fixed my last major remaining issue! My Arena armor for CHSBHC body is now 100% functioning as intended! To celebrate, I’m going to load this up with screenshots because I like ‘em!

See this kitty? Notice anything DIFFERENT about her? Something, perhaps, LESS? She’s skinny! (well, relatively) AND she’s wearing Katia’s Arena armor! HURRAH!

See that booty? Well, heck, what would my tumblr posts be without a booty shot anyway? She still has awesome glutes, but they’re not Monster Booty anymore! This COULD be Katia in Skyrim finally. So, to sum up, I’ve now got a new Arena Armor that:

A) – conforms to canon rear design.

B) – Supports CHSBHC body (including jiggle)

C) – can be sized properly from minimum to maximum

D) – dons blue “pants” along with the armor and does NOT require all khajiits to have blue pants all the time!

Yeah, that’s right. Uh-huh. Me Bad. (BTW, I’ve bumped her size up a bit here. Not Monster Booty but a bit more.)

Following up with another post in just a sec. to continue this gloat-fest…

Katia Revised Armor – Getting Close!

Ok, the pauldrons took a bit more than just copy/paste but really just revising the names of some objects and copying some “bones” over. I’m really getting close to being done with this CHSBHC model version, and it will be better than my original because the blue pants are part of the armor this time, not a separate body texture that applies to ALL Khajiits!

So, the latest. First, I still have the problem that I can’t reduce the size of her below max, so I know you’ll all think I’m some sort of big-boobs pervert. I may be a perv, but not for unreal silicone. I can appreciate them as well as the next hetero type, but I KNOW this can’t be Katia with those mammoth mammaries. I’ll try to explain as best I can what the problem is.

As I mentioned before, there is an actual body underneath all armors (that have any sleeveless, breast or leg showing anyway). But I can’t just paint the legs blue to simulate pants – if I do, ALL khajiits will have blue legs. I want them to come-and-go with the armor though. Well, I did figure out how to do that. Inside I now have TWO bodies. The lower half is separate from the upper half, with transparent texture on the upper half so you never see it. Very fortunately, I found a mod that had an upper-half-only body too so that’s what we see for the arms and chest. Problem is, that mod ONLY had the full-size body. It didn’t have the corresponding minimum size body. So I’ve been looking for a mod where someone has just the upper-half as a minimum size for CHSBHC shape. I’ve not found a SINGLE ONE! Everyone is just creating single-size CHSBHC mods…

or their armor is full-coverage and thus there is no minimum body or it’s a full body. And I can’t use a FULL body – the lower half must not exist. While I can make the upper part of the blue pants body transparent, I can’t do the same for the lower part of other body because the other body’s texture is used by ALL female khajiits. They would be floating around legless! I’ve got an idea that I may be able to use a non-CHSBHC upper body though – so I’ve still got hope. Meanwhile, I HAVE gotten a lot of other stuff done…

Pauldrons obviously, and I fixed the texture issue with the pants – and made them shiny. (I like shiny things.) I even tried making the main armor shiny, but – though these screencaps show the shiny version – I’ve gone back and put back the duller version so it wont have the sheen you see here (except her leggings – like I said, I like shiny!)

WARNING – MORE KHAJIIT BUTT AHEAD! HIDE THE CHILDREN!

Anyone who has worked on textures knows the bane of the “seams”. Seams are hard to avoid when you have a 2D texture laying over a 3D model.

Two are quite obvious here on her butt. I could try and minimize them, but then I realized that, in this particular case, they’re actually a benefit! While in reality her “pants” are really just bodypaint for all practical purposes. But those seams, normally a bad thing, help create the illusion that the pants ARE leggings and not just paint. Ok, not MUCH, but a little bit at least. So I’m going to leave those as-is.

I had another problem – hard to see in screenshots, but just above her tail there was a section where both the upper body AND lower body textures were in the exact same place. Causes weird flashing colors when that occurs as one texture gets slightly over the other and then vice-versa. I solved that with some VERY careful editing of the blue texture to just the point where the upper body starts. End result is good as the tail actually joins with the upper body texture and not “poking through” the blue.

If you look close, you’ll spot a bit of clipping (blue poking through the armor) at her hip. I should be able to fix that too with some careful texture work. So I’ve got quite a bit of tweaking to do when I’m finally finished with the last major hurdle – the ability to tone down her curves to a reasonable level! But I’ve a fighting chance now and the end is in sight.

So, with some luck on my current plan to use a non-CHSBHC model for the upper half minimal-size version, I might just be able to pull this off yet! If it works, the next update may actually show Katia’s sammich-loving sister trimmed down and with some breast-reduction and butt reduction – they go together. Just so you needn’t fear that her butt must always be so… well… round?