Over the weekend I started making some progress on this again. My hold-up had been creating the normal map for the revised head, but I've got the tools working at last, and producing the wrong results

I still have a bunch of work to do getting all the settings right. The normal map generator needs .obj format, and it appears that the exporter settings are critical. Unfortunately, the tutorial sends everything through MAX, and the settings for the Blender export aren't given. So far I've had the map flipped in two different ways. In one case, the kids looked like the light was coming from under their chins, and in the other, the ridges became dents, as the height got inverted. There aren't all that many things I can change. One of the combinations must be the right one!

I've made the elf head separate from the human one, even though it's really a morph, just moving the vertices. It could become part of a .tri at some point, but I can test it all in isolation from the base mesh this way, and not mess up the human kids. The human one uses a _n (tangent normals) rather than _msn (model space normals) so it should also be less work if they're separate.

I found out that the hair is saved when you do a CTRL+F4, so my issues with Sephiah (elven Sophie) getting her hair crooked was all due to saving a bad version. She's looking better now, but I still need to fix a few gaps/clipping issues with the hairstyle itself, as well as making some more. A single pony-tail for the girls, and a mohawk for the boys should be relatively easy to adapt from the adult styles.

I downloaded the Orc child mod, to see if I can figure out how to use the Orc teeth. Argonians and Khajiit are on the distant horizon, if at all.

This was where I left off - tangent normals, ears and chin more pointed, female hair off the ears.

Gosh, morphing heads in the CK. . . that is so far beyond what I could dream of making the CK do.

If you see a small elf with a mystic bow, be careful! She's not a child!

That will be how I know. You can give a child a dagger or a wooden sword, but not a bow. They don't have any animations for one.

Mind you, the dagger/sword animations are only for wild swings at a training dummy. Hopefully if I do an Orc kid, he/she will be able to whack with a kiddy hatchet, using the same one. I'd also like kids to be able to cast spells on self, so they can heal themselves if they scrape a knee, but I don't have the skills to add animations yet.

Headless children! This is awesome, Ghastley! And SO much better than those "scaled-down adult models" they made for Oblivion!

Can you make them look like different faces? (I read somewhere that all the vanilla children looked alike). Oh! Can the facial texture mods effect them? (enhance or disfigure, either way).

I'll bet the teeth were a problem! I'll never forget the "Stoker Wolf" teeth fiasco - he looked hidious, and the poor girl/guy who made him couldn't fix the teeth to save their life. Another modder finally was able to fix it somehow, but wouldn't upload it (probably just made their own NPC and attached Stoker's scripts to it - that's what I would have done had I wanted to keep the mod)

These look great, Ghastley - keep us up to date on your progress, I LOVE following your mods in progress!

This is the first step in that direction. I took the human one - which is used for both male and female children - and adjusted ear and chin vertices to be a bit more pointed. I've adapted one adult hairstyle to the child had size/shape and that needs more work!

When I have it all working standalone, I'll see if I can't add it as a race morph in a single all-race head, and then try doing a few other morphs for noses, mouths and things that will allow for distinct kids of all races. The child head has none at present, which is why they all look alike. There's a mod, TK Children, that provides a replacement head with morphs, but the new head is smaller, and looks wrong. It also doesn't do elves.

The next step is getting the normal map right, then I plan:
- morphs for facial variations
- more hairstyles
- more clothing choices (e.g. adapt Dunmer outfit from Solstheim, something Orcish...)

One thing I hope to avoid is needing to morph the hair to fit the head. If I keep the scalp part of the head fixed, that should work. I should be able to make cheeks rounder/more gaunt, and vary the width of the chin, and that kind of change, without breaking the phoneme morphs for speaking. You won't get as many options in the CK as an adult would have, but there would be fewer kids anyway.

I just went and looked at TK's children - some of them are actually pretty cute and SEEM to be making some child-like expressions in the screens, but in his own screens for the mod I saw some of the hair clipping issues you were talking about; some of the teeth issues I anticipated; and a few really scary looking kids:

Example: Crossed eyes; overly large teeth; crazed/angry expressions; gray hair (really bad color choice on a child); green hair (Especially on a child, because the first thought that hits is that they are doing the old "hidden snot wipe.")

The few cute ones were very well done though. Those other few really bad ones - I'd leave town quick if I saw them, visions of Liz's story foremost (although actually, Asta was one of the cuties TK did, lol).

Made some progress, but it's a case of one step forward, one step back.

I now have a working normal map, but it affects the way the diffuse texture works when you switch from tangent normals to model-space ones, so now I need to re-do the diffuse textures, and that's face, hands, feet and body for each race (Dunmer, Altmer and Bosmer at least, plus Orc if I get the teeth working).

At least I already know what I'm doing with those.

I'll shoot some screenies when I get the Dark elves done, as Galen has a pair of them at Windstad, and I have some of the in-progress images to show how things have evolved.

Yay, I’m glad you’re working on this again!

Another child mod that I’ve looked at (but I haven’t tried) RS Children Overhaul doesn’t have elf races either, but they do have different faces and hairstyles for different named kids. I don’t have a clue how any of this works, I’m only mentioning it in case it might help in some way.

Your elven hairstyles and race-specific clothing styles sound great. This is exciting to follow!

Those children looked much better than the others, that guy did the teeth much better - and made children playable, which I really liked the idea of!

I liked the work DreamBurrow did on knocking the age sliders way down - Example:


http://static-1.nexusmods.com/15/images/11...-1383490129.jpg



How do you peel the age back like that, Ghastley? I'd sure like it if I could knock a few years off of Misa!

That mod is doing the exact opposite of what I'm trying to do. I want to leave the Breton/Nord/Redguard kids unchanged, and add elven ones.

In general, armor/clothing will work on kids, but it replaces the child body with an adult one when you do that. This is because the skeleton is the same for all of them. It looks like RS Children has a mix of child-enabled regular armor, and new ones in kid styles. The latter may be useful, but I really want specifically elven styles, too.

The inverted lighting issue is back, even though I've got the normal map looking correct. Somewhere between the mesh and the maps, I have something flipped, but I can't find it.

That cute little Ramy in Oblivion had the same issue, kind of odd to see boobs attached to a child's face/voice/actions - reminded me of that horror movie where the cute little girl was actually a 40 year old murderous dwarf woman, lol.

(So you had to keep Ramy in her little dress all the time).

The nice thing about long holiday weekends is that you can actually make progress.

Male Dark Elf Kid in appropriate outfit.

I finally got the head normal map working, and figured out what to do with the skin textures. The CK doesn't seem to save FaceGen data correctly for kids, but it's fixable afterward.

The clothing is the low-weight version of the adult male clothes, with a small edit to close a gap at the wrist. It will fit the girl, too, but I'm trying to add a skirt for her.

Nice job, ghastley. As you're seeing, elven children are hard to conceive, difficult to deliver and high maintenance once they do arrive.

He looks great, ghastley! I love his brow ridges and pointed chin. He looks like a Dunmer, but still a kid and not a shrunken adult. The clothing you made for him is awesome. This is very exciting!

Lol, Acadian.

I'm always rolling up new characters to run though my mods with a fresh game, and some of them become "sticky". My latest Orc has run around the Strongholds rather than visiting the walled cities, and she's just started building Lakeview, before even setting foot in Riverwood. So she wants to adopt an Orc kid, and there isn't one.

I'd pulled down Urshug - Adoptable Orc a while back to see what it did, and all that was different from what I'd been doing for the elves was to use the female Orc's teeth. Except that I'd reshaped the elven kids heads, and the Orc needed the same. Urshug's teeth bite into her lips, and with her mouth closed, she just looks like a sick human. She doesn't even have an Orc's ears, since a hairstyle was chosen to hide them. I think that's why there's no boy Orc in the mod.

So now I'm working on remodelling the head. I have it almost convincing, just needs a bit more widening of the bridge of the nose, I think. The lips have been moved out of the way of the teeth, the chin is broader (like the elven one was narrower) and the ears are the same as the elves'. She needs an Orcish hairstyle that shows them, but not a shaved one, as the same head is used for boys, and the hair is a major gender clue. A fur/hide outfit is also called for. Looks like I have a lot more work on the ticket.

Edit: I checked the Nexus, and it looks like some of the head issues may have been addressed already. The images show a different one than I downloaded. It's still not quite the face I had in mind...

Uzgash now adopted by Marghak. See the screenshopts thread.

Looks like I'm not the only one working on this stuff, and someone else is further along.

http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/top...p-elf-children/

Already using morphs on a single face, and has a lot more variants than I do.

What I'm likely to do at present is make my kids an optional esp in the Orc Hearthfires mod, so you can have an Orcish kid or two at the new stronghold. If Hallgarth's mod is released, you'd be able to use that instead (assuming I get the adoption stuff to work).

Edit: Adoption at the Stronghold's not an issue. Another mod fixes that for any player home with the right features.