kozakowy

The Story Behind - Black Corset Dress

Added 2021-01-22 16:01:01 +0000 UTC

So here goes the first The Story Behind post, and we're talking the Black Corset Dress. It's my second published mod, but it was the first outfit I made for my character Eve Vette. I'd like to tell you a bit more about what made this mod happen, what inspired me to start the project and a little bit about the technical struggles. Hope you'll find this stuff interesting :)

So let's get to it. Shall we?

1. Eve Vette

Let's start with a bit of Eve's backstory. She's been my main character since I started playing Skyrim in 2012.

Eve is a Breton. She was born in Daggerfall and was most of the time raised by her older sister Eveline, since their parents were killed by bandits while being on their way to the market one sunny day. Her big sis was a mage, and little Eve had a nice opportunity to learn some basic magic skills when she Was young. She also played a lot with the kids on the streets of her hometown so she's learned also a lot there about survival. She spent quite some time then wandering through the woods with boys, making bows, sharpening arrows and even hunt.

While reaching adulthood, she no longer wanted to look after Eveline's house, since her big sis was out most of the time. One day she just packed her belongings, and went off to Skyrim leaving only a short message behind. Eve was eager to look for adventures there since the fuss about Ulfric's Rebelion came around. When she arrived at Riverwood, she quickly got into trouble with the Imperials. Then the gal also discovered the effect of the so-called Dragonborn blood running through her veins.

She started to settle her status as an adventurer, a self-taught witch, a hunter, a mercenary and even a travelling saleswoman. Over time Eve also started to gain some fame among the folk of bigger Skyrim holds, and thus developed her own a bit excentric style. She loves to wear black and to dress to impress almost every day. That's why she's got a "Wicked lady" reputation also attracting some extra attention as a Dragonborn.

2. Visual Inspirations

Well, the main inspiration for Eve's Black Corset Dress were the works of Royal Black Couture, namely the "Divina" ensemble. It was mainly because I just love black outfits. I was really enchanted by the spiked plunge decollete and this Morticia Adams-like fishtail silhouette.

Just before creating the Black Corset Dress, I also downloaded SparrowJuice's Something Wicked outfit, which is very classic and nicely fitted in form, and all black. I just fell in love with it. That made me sure that this color was perfect for my character. Eve also liked to wear the Raven Witch Armor pieces then.

For the jacket I used mostly inspirations from Thierry Mugler's 1991 "Insect" Collection, which is full of beautiful fantasy well fitted jackets and dresses. I also looked a lot at Dior's classic New Look jackets of course. The first textures were made in Photoshop from a large Dior piece photo, but soon I did it again from the scratch in Substance Painter. That was my first major SP project.

3. The Process

As you could perhaps read in my bio, my partner is a corsetiere, and I do think that a corset can do a lot for a lady. :) The idea of creating this dress in 3d came to me when we tried to model a corset form for a real person, based on her real dimensions. We were also looking for an opportunity to design clothes in 3d and then flatten the form. Therefore I learned how to use Unwrap UVW modifier in 3dsMax. Unfortunately it became clear that Unwrap modifier stretches elements in all cases, and does not hold the initial dimensions. :/ The project became a failure, but you can see the resulting flattened form below. I really liked it then and still do now. :)

I used the newly gained skills to render a template for Photoshop and I created a texture for the model. It was a horror since I had to stretch everything piece of the texture by hand, using warp tool, and add some wrinkles using maps from textures.com. See the image below for the actual wrinkles I used to create the BCD texture.

When the textures were done, I found some tutorials on YouTube on rigging and putting meshes into the game. I also installed Creation Kit Right Away and started experimenting quite quickly.

The first rig wasn't working at all :D The dress levitated beside the character, and the second rig made it a black ball of spikes moving along with the character. :D A thorough investigation led me to the first working dress model, but still Eve got holes under her arms, :D and in the back, which were becoming larger while zooming out. This was a tough one. I spent weeks on googling it. None could help. Suddenly, I stumbled upon some info about Skin partitions, and that sometimes there are shading glitches when vertices have too much bones attached in the skin modifier. There is a limit for this in Skyrim's engine.

All these small upgrades led me to releasing Steampunk Outfit (which is actually based on the same form but without the skirt and with some modifications) first, and shortly, I also uploaded the Corset Dress to Nexus. The reception wasn't that good. People were complaining about textures. I saved the first ones in DXT1 or DXT3 formats which had a pretty poor color range. I also didn't use ENB at that time and I really couldn't focus on any details that much. I was totally amazed though that my model was moving in my game. :D

Soon, peeps at Nexus told me to have a closer look at the textures, and I did them from scratch at higher resolution, and saved them as 8.8.8 24bit Unsigned DDS format. It made the files huuuge, :D but they looked awesome. By the way, I did normal maps by converting the diffuse map with the NVidia normal filter, ;) which means not much control at all. But I was all super happy then.

The mod started to gain some popularity at Nexus, thus I decided to make the outfit complete. I was looking already at Substance Painter at that time, and soon I did the Gloves and the Jacket to match the dress. The gloves were my very first texture project in SP and I'd do everything differently now. ;) Finally, last year I managed to do five retextures of the dress in Substance Painter.

4. To Sum Up

So, this outfit was a whole journey for me, from a 3d artist to a modder. I tend to forget how much I learned during the whole creation process. The mod isn't perfect, but the look is really simple and classic. The last element from the original design - the neck corset wasn't released so far. I'm planning to redo it maybe ;)