While looking at the facial skeleton and deciding on the order of this next batch of sculpts, I noticed something interesting; there's actually a bone on each side of the face, situated underneath the outer brow and "outside" the outer corners of the eyes. These bones are called "skin_bone_(R/L)_Eyefat".
Running a search on the rest of the sculpt file, these bones aren't included in other sculpts, which really got my curiosity going. I immediately created a sculpt for them to see what they did.
Alas, nothing happened when the bones were moved.
This meant one of two things: the bones were effectively immutable like the head as a whole is (extremely unlikely), or nothing was skinned to them.
Checking BaseFemaleHead_faceBones.nif - the face model - finds that the latter is the case: the bones aren't even included with the face (they would need to be if any of it were skinned to them).
So why are they there, in the face skeleton? It's possible that some headgear uses them to avoid clipping, but I doubt it; none of the vanilla facial sculpts move them to, say, make room in the hypothetical headgear for the eyes or brows.
That leaves us with the sad realization that they're probably just useless leftovers. Judging by their positioning, they would have bulked up/slimmed down the face around the eyes when the eyes were moved outwards/inwards. As things are, that area is mostly static (iirc).
Along with these bones, there's also another one called "skin_bone_C_MasterMid", which I imagine was originally intended to move the middle of the face. It, too, has nothing skinned to it.
It's possible that, like the bone "skin_bone_C_MasterBot" moves most of the bones of the bottom of the face (they are its "children"), "skin_bone_C_MasterMid" was going to handle moving all the bones in the middle of the face.
Bethesda must have decided to not use them fairly late in development, and nobody remembered to go back and snip them.
I'll probably end up making sculpts for them anyway, for use in placing glasses and such. Don't look a gift bone in the mouth and all.
Running a search on the rest of the sculpt file, these bones aren't included in other sculpts, which really got my curiosity going. I immediately created a sculpt for them to see what they did.
Alas, nothing happened when the bones were moved.
This meant one of two things: the bones were effectively immutable like the head as a whole is (extremely unlikely), or nothing was skinned to them.
Checking BaseFemaleHead_faceBones.nif - the face model - finds that the latter is the case: the bones aren't even included with the face (they would need to be if any of it were skinned to them).
So why are they there, in the face skeleton? It's possible that some headgear uses them to avoid clipping, but I doubt it; none of the vanilla facial sculpts move them to, say, make room in the hypothetical headgear for the eyes or brows.
That leaves us with the sad realization that they're probably just useless leftovers. Judging by their positioning, they would have bulked up/slimmed down the face around the eyes when the eyes were moved outwards/inwards. As things are, that area is mostly static (iirc).
Along with these bones, there's also another one called "skin_bone_C_MasterMid", which I imagine was originally intended to move the middle of the face. It, too, has nothing skinned to it.
It's possible that, like the bone "skin_bone_C_MasterBot" moves most of the bones of the bottom of the face (they are its "children"), "skin_bone_C_MasterMid" was going to handle moving all the bones in the middle of the face.
Bethesda must have decided to not use them fairly late in development, and nobody remembered to go back and snip them.
I'll probably end up making sculpts for them anyway, for use in placing glasses and such. Don't look a gift bone in the mouth and all.
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