Having worked on one of the larger face replacer mods for Morrowind I have to say the original stock Bethesda heads were just horrid for that game even for the time.
Rhedd (a modder at the time who had also done some professional stuff) really revolutionized the modding scene and the characters for that game. Almost every head and hair replacer was based on his work.
A face replacer mod pretty much a prerequisite for playing Morrowind, so much so that I think people forget what the original stock faces looked like. To say they were low resolution, even for the time, is an understatement. Also some of the UV maps were all messed up.
While I appreciate the sort of gritty art direction, in terms of the humanoid characters it was not Bethesda's finest work by a longshot.
Oblivion and the Fallout games that followed it added the 'Sims style' face tweaking which makes a huge difference. A lot of how the character looks is on you and how much time and effort you spend tweaking it to be just so. There definitely are cosmetic mods to help that along as well and I'm sure there will be with Skyrim.
I don't think Bethesda (or for that matter Obisidian in FNV) are necessarily the best at creating decent looking faces but the tools are there and the modding community will generally step in and remedy that.
Rhedd (a modder at the time who had also done some professional stuff) really revolutionized the modding scene and the characters for that game. Almost every head and hair replacer was based on his work.
A face replacer mod pretty much a prerequisite for playing Morrowind, so much so that I think people forget what the original stock faces looked like. To say they were low resolution, even for the time, is an understatement. Also some of the UV maps were all messed up.
While I appreciate the sort of gritty art direction, in terms of the humanoid characters it was not Bethesda's finest work by a longshot.
Oblivion and the Fallout games that followed it added the 'Sims style' face tweaking which makes a huge difference. A lot of how the character looks is on you and how much time and effort you spend tweaking it to be just so. There definitely are cosmetic mods to help that along as well and I'm sure there will be with Skyrim.
I don't think Bethesda (or for that matter Obisidian in FNV) are necessarily the best at creating decent looking faces but the tools are there and the modding community will generally step in and remedy that.
- Joined
- Jan 24, 2011
- Messages
- 966