On occasion I'll get feedback asking "Can you make the girls look like this?"
The answer to all of these inquiries/requests simultaneously is yes.
Whatever faces/bodies/styles you want, we can find a way to accommodate.
I've been looking carefully and modding systems for IllusionSoft, Bethesda and Taleworlds titles.
Illusion has in-game character creation and "studio" clients to pose in.
But any extension of these systems involves outright hacking the game.
Illusion is often the butt of jokes vis-a-vis how they could create the ultimate
H-game but never will because it would put them out of business.
[Google "The Illusion Grief Cycle"]
Their message to the players/users is "relax guys; the game will have all the customization you could ever want."
The users then proceed to retroengineer nearly every aspect of software.
Bethesda goes for an almost entirely inheritance-dependent paradigm.
A bandit in Skyrim that you encounter in-game is about 10 levels of inheritance down from a base abstract bandit.
[Bandit Base] becomes [Bandit Subcategory] becomes [Bandit Caster Base] becomes [Bandit Caster Subtype]...
And this system can be convenient for making changes to an entire family of units with a few changes.
But the drawbacks become readily evident when trying to pluck something from one of these trees.
The interface of the Creation Kit showers you with popup menus and lacks many
features for seamless side-by-side or bird's eye viewing of related content.
Meanwhile the strengths and weaknesses of ESM/ESP files could be a book all on their own.
Mount & Blade by Taleworlds has a really clever, highly flexible... and incredibly obtuse modding system.
They seemed to want the best possible experience for "modders" (i.e. people who install and play mods)
while also holding an undying hatred for the other type of "modders" (i.e. people who make mods).
Theirs is a wholly composition-based paradigm that compiles content via a Python process into a series of txt files with arrays.
It also includes modules in separate folders which provides natively the function of many mod organizers.
Many talented people have created amazing, in-depth overhauls of the various Mount & Blade titles.
(Keep in mind that this is all based on Classic, Warband, Fire & Sword etc., not Bannerlord which has its own kit with which I'm not yet familiar)
Yet splicing content from one module to another can be a very delicate operation.
After examining these different systems I've come up with some modding tools for RF that will take into account all these lessons.
Among these tools will be a node-tree system for getting your characters to look the way you want.
Whenever I would make new characters or download character cards for an Illusion game,
I'd make the same handful of tweaks to give them more of an hourglass figure.
But with this node-based system I could take a character card and drop it into the folder which populates the game world
and the game will automatically make those adjustments to every female character.
Textures, materials and shaders will all be accessible.
Body types can go through Add/Subtract/Average/Lerp/Floor/Ceiling/Clamp/Multiply/Divide
operations so the distinct variations will be present but they'll all be "drawn in your style" so to speak.
6/11 - Reorganizing data fields, deepcopying data in various places, eliminating redundancies.
6/15 - Reassigning clothing surfaces. Often a clothing item has parts that should really have a separate shader. Like metal or gems on a mostly cloth item.
6/16 - Worked on user-accessible decal system. Useful for tattoos, tabards, flags and scars.
6/22 - Converting outfits with a focus on shoes/boots.
