Jude's Face Creation Project

Hello Neverwinter Community,

I am pleased to announce my newest project. This face creation project pretty much covers the main avenues for implementing and creating your own faces for your own modules and use without needing to model your own base mesh in blender. After using this project and watching it’s tutorials, modders will gain a basic understanding of how to maps works with faces – which applies to most custom content.

Simply put. This project will having you kicking out your own faces and face maps in good time. :)

Included in this project are:

•           Face maps: Diffuse, Normal, and Specular maps compiled in .psd bundles in layers. Players can pick and choose what content they want to add to their faces
•           Premade Maps: Custom premade faces to place into your module as a thank you for downloading this project. These faces are only HHF (human female) and EHF (Half Elf Female) at the moment. The HHM maps will be released on a separate mod to promote this project.
•           Blender Files: For those wanting to go a bit deeper into creating.
•           Premade Beard and Horns: Within a blend scene. Already mapped and all settings ready to go to add onto any face within this project or most other faces from other mods.
•           Additional Tools: Additional tools that are used and required included. Also, links to download 3^rd party software for some plugins provided.
•           In-Depth instructional videos: Youtube tutorials on how to use this project. They may be long but once you learn it, you can be creating your own faces in minutes.

This project requires almost no knowledge with Blender minus knowing how to navigate and click and an object. However, to create your faces you will need software capable of opening, editing, and saving .dds files. Also, the face maps are stored within .psd files so photoshop is recommended. I use CS6 as it was, for a long time, the last version Nvidia updated its Texture Tools Plugin for. I do believe CC version have this plugin as well now. You can also get a free trial of this software at the adobe website. For users of CS6 and below, a link is provided for the plugin.

I believe GIMP can also open psd files and convert to other formats. Gimp can be found by a simple search online and is a free to download. Keep in mind that some techniques demonstrated in Photoshop for blending textures can also be done in GIMP but will require its own method as the layout and UI are different. There are also online converters that can convert psd files to other formats. If the requests for a GIMP format come in, I will post as an update.

IMPORTANT NOTE: To make things easier to follow along I strongly recommend you place your files in the same format as I have in the youtube instruction video (part 1). This ensures that your. blend scenes display the textures correctly as they are relative to their own directory.

WHAT ABOUT UPDATES?

I do plan to expand on this project when I create something new. I do plan on adding a male face tattoo version for you to add to your custom maps as well. Further developments will include new eye textures and some base meshes that you can use as well. Look for those in the future.

This instruction may be intimidating for some to dive into. Please, don’t let the video length of these tutorials discourage you. Half the time im just rambling but as much as I tried to re-record, I found myself rambling more… sorry, couldn’t help it – its sort of embedded.

My hopes are that modders create their own faces and post them on the vault to share with others. If using the advanced modeling technique that I use in the tutorials, perhaps even supplying new base meshes and new base mesh races for other’s modders to use would be awesome!

Thank you to the creator’s community for encouraging me to continue to create and as always, please share your works!

Special thanks to the Creator's of Runnerduck's MDB Cloning tool and Jester, Ardell, Olblach, Duskwind, and RJShae for the MDB Import/Export Plugin tool. Freshlook and his plugin (though not used here in this project - it's uses have helped me further understand and develop). Special recognition goes to Nastya Raynor and MissClick who are essential to the team and what I do.

Instructional videos:

Part 1: NwN2 Face Creation Project Course 1 (part a) Setup and Diffuse Map Creation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaQEKxA2InM&feature=youtu.be

Part 2: NwN2 Face Creation Project Course 2 (part 1b) Normal/Specular Map Creation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpR0q07yfl0&feature=youtu.be

Part 3: NwN2 Face Creation Project Course 3: Blender Modelling + Attaching Face Option (beard & horns)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvybFdRkCsY&feature=youtu.be

Part 4: NwN2 Face Creation Project Course 4: Blender Modeling - Adding face tattoo & in depth face modeling

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWYcV5FEmFo&feature=youtu.be

Part 5: NwN2 Face Creation Project Course 5: Tint Map creation and tecniques

(coming very soon)

Part 6: Photoshop diffuse editing. Increasing the brightness on your map to better reflect custom skins.

(coming very soon) + an actual quick tut.

Thanks all! Updates will be posted below this line.

____________________________________________________