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Creation Kit – Details

Kris Takahashi Other 1 Comment

With the NPCs, I can churn them out fairly quickly.  There are only so many details to be parsed through with regard to facial features and inventory.  Most are chosen at random to prevent myself from crafting them based on my own personal tastes, although it’s debatable whether human beings are capable of proper randomizing.

However, as my powers have grown and I’ve started making quests, I’ve learned just how pain in the ass painstaking modding truly is.  There are battles to orchestrate, scenes to direct, and dungeons to build.  All of the sudden you have to consider a whole new world of things.  Music, furniture, AI pathing, to name a few. The amount of work involved makes me wonder if this is the last new location I will ever build, as I will probably die from exhaustion.

It really doesn’t have to be that way.  I could just copy something from another place, and for the most part, that’s exactly what I’ve done.  But the devil is in the details.  Take this picture for example.  I probably spent the better part of an hour(and half of the shitty part too), crafting this stupid bowl.  When I was done with the bowl and done questioning my sexuality, I looked at it like a proud papa and thought, There isn’t a person alive who is going to fucking notice this bowl.  Not one.

This is just the stuff of the self-inflicted variety.  There are just so many ways for even the smallest of cells to get buggy, so many permutations that you can’t possibly account for while testing, that you really have to admire what Bethesda was able to create, albeit with a much larger army and a giant money pit guarded with alligators.

Everywhere, details, details, details.  The decorative ones I put in, the fundamental ones you try not to overlook, and all the types in between.  You have to remember all of them, because one single fuckup can break immersion.  This is why arranging a set of virtual flowers and apples may not necessarily be a waste of time.

I mean, it’s like I tell in Hjoromir in our imaginary conversations.  It’s important to wire yourself a certain way.  If you spend an hour on a stupid bowl of apples, you’ll be that much more meticulous when you make the rest of the quest.  Still, I wish I had a better grasp of when to be lazy, and in exactly which details the devils like to hide.

Creation Kit – On Faces

Kris Takahashi Other No Comments

One thing Bethesda did remarkably well was diversifying Skyrim’s faces.  If during the opening sequence, the guards rounded up Ulfric and his Stormcloaks for an old fashioned police lineup, you would have little trouble distinguishing Ulfric from Ralof or Lokir from the Dragonborn.  Well, maybe you might.  Yet I do think there’s an obvious distinction between NPCs of similar size and race, such as Uthgerd and Mjoll.  And you certainly wouldn’t confuse a demure lady like Ysolda with a strong Nord woman like Olfina Gray-Mane.

Although it’s a stretch to say the faces are memorable, they definitely have a uniqueness when placed side by side.  It’s quite an accomplishment considering the number of NPCs in the game, although some of the results –  *cough* Benor *cough*  – almost make you wonder if they were adjusting the facial sliders at random.

Similarly, the goal was to make the faces in the mod unique, if only upon closer examination.   When I construct a face, I really only have two rules.

1.  Choose mouths, lips, and eyes you haven’t used before.
2.  Do not make them all purty.

The first is easy.  The second, not so much.  Still, it’s important to resist any inclination to make them attractive unless it’s an essential component of their character.  The key is diversity.  Trying to create a world of beautiful people will typical result in a world of clones, because it’s very easy to fall into a subconscious trap of making all the NPCs conform to your standards of beauty.

All that being said, it’s evident I have a problem with #2, but only with women.  Compare, for instance, the sliders on the following two images for Olivia Meronin and Hjoromir.

The slider on her nose is long and high, but many of Skyrim’s nose types tend to be flat.  Her eyes, jaw, and mouth are extremely balanced, and the mouth is actually adjusted to fit better with the contour of her face.  Ultimately, little about her facial features is adventurous, yet I had no problem giving her a fancy shmancy tattoo, cat eyes, and other affectations, so clearly this wasn’t the product of laziness.

Evidently, it seems with Olivia I was hesitant to shift the bars away from the center, despite the fact that appearance factors little into her character.  She’s essentially asexual.  I had no problem going to town on poor Hjoromir, however, whose facial settings look like a small child fiddling with a graphic equalizer.

So it’s an ongoing battle.  The point isn’t to make the NPCs ugly, but rather, to create variation.  And if there’s a few Benors in the bunch, I’ll live with the results.  Lately I have tried to make a stronger emphasis on screwing around with the sliders, especially with females.  After all, It’s better to have a  few neanderthals in the group than a lineup of the usual suspects.

Hello World

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This is a blog for the mod Interesting NPCs. The ultimate goal is to have this be a hub of information regarding the mod, with articles on characters, interviews with voice actors, and basically looking under the hood of this product of Dwarven engineering.

You may be curious why it’s in blog form. Curiosity is bad for you and is known to cause cat scratch fever.  However, if you must know, it’s in blog form because I am too cheap to pay for a website.

In all honesty, I do not know if I will have the time to even come up with articles, posts, or pictures to propagate this blog with. I do not know if the actors are willing to subject themselves to my terrible questions, or if that is considered torture by the standards outlined in the Geneva Conventions. We shall see.

In closing, I offer a picture of my current game, as I build dialogue for Zora and the other super friendies. I use Zora because I know everyone loves Zora, and everyone loves her voice actor, the talented Viridiane. If you don’t you probably are an unpleasant person to talk to.