So its been said by Todd howard that the so-called 'pesky' feature-sliders used to scale and distort your character's features during customization will be non-existent in Skyrim. I, personally, found these sliders handy when trying to make a truelly original look for my character that I knew no one else would have. I can, however, see the purpose behind this. It was obvious when using th sliders, that if you were to make your character's features a bit too extreme, the proportions of the head and face would be warped and look quite rediculous. What shook my nerves was this: Todd howard said that instead of sliders, they have built preset facial features for the characters that we will be able to choose from. The first thing that came to mind was my recently-bought Mass Effect 2. And i thought, "Oh God, pick nose 1, 2 or 3." I am a freak for customizing my character, and making him absolutely outlandish and individual, so I expect nothing less than atleast 40 different presets for each feature, and atleast a few ways to modify them yourself. Summing this up, i feel that Bethesda can either take a step backwards, or a step forwards in a new direction depending all on variety. Input please.

Well he said you pick a preset and alter it from there.

Well sliders cant handle small details, think about different base meshes with additional details thats cant be done with sliders but can be tweaked by them, like
Head06 Resource Pack by throttlekitty
http://tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=20166

Basically, pick from a preset of noses, and then adjust the size and positioning. The customization in Oblivion svcked. Too many options that didn't make sense, some that didn't even do anything.

When did he say there were presets? So pretty much the same as Fallout now? Or am I missing something.

I'd much rather that they work on quests, story, and gameplay rather than 50000 nose types.

Yep, however current trends in gaming you'll be glad for 5 of everything.

This said a mix of pick a nose and tweak it is fine for me, it seems a practical solution.

Maybe something close to EVE's new Character generator?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5i_mgF7Vas

Trying to make a character in FaceGen never worked out for me. And then I saw the awesome creations over on the Nexus of beautifully crafted characters and it made me even more depressed.

I think most of the characters I played in Oblivion were with savegames from other users, just because every one of my own creations looked horrible.

So I have high hopes for this new approach. Maybe now I can get a decent face without messing up everything all the time or having to resort to loading someone else's character saves.

Wow, that's pretty impressive from when I first dabbled in Eve. Swap out the metal plates for actual hair and it would work great in Skyrim!

I'll miss the slider customization from Oblivion. I've spent many an hour trying to make the most hideous monstrosities I could. Oh, the laughs I've had at the expense of my ugly, ugly children.

Actually, the customization in Oblivion was very good. You just had to know how to use it. The character in my avatar I created in less then 20 mins. People whined about it because they were too damned lazy to figure out what each slider does and how it affects the others.

Well it only took me two hours to make an attractive female in oblivion so I have no idea how you could come up with a better system...



Is that a male or a female in your avatar?

I will make a new female right now in Oblivion. BRB

only 2 hours? thats a decent amount of time and work.

I was decent at using it to, it's all about attention to detail, but the facegen system was still terrible. The default mesh looked god awful and faces were bloated and unrealistic.

Oh come on you can't expect poor poor bethesda to do as well as those insane icelandic programmers -coolface-
(no really tho, learning things at industrial schools in iceland is worlds apart from learning it in the US or UK, instead of learning just 1 specific thing, like game engine programming, here you'll learn everything from HTML programming up to coding a full fledged computer game from scratch, in that order too. every last programmer in iceland who has finished his course can do those 2 things and everything inbetween, this includes almost every employee at CCP and i am not exaggerating. i've been there, i didn't manage to get on the course tho, i'm a dropout, but i'll go again sometime, preferably sooner rather than later.)

Sorry it took so long. I had to start over 10 mins in because I didn't have fraps running.

Here is the female Nord I created in approx. 25 mins.

http://img51.imageshack.us/img51/9844/testestfemale1.png
http://img822.imageshack.us/img822/2125/testestfemale2.png

Keep in mind it takes a little longer for females due to makeup and things like that.

My character is a male Dunmer. But story-wise, he is a Dunmer/Altmer.

I guess it's pretty similar to sims 2 and 3 who uses this system, just hope we get plenty of pre selected ones for beast races and orcs to as they has unique faces.

This is Awsome for me, as i would just like to pick my Character and and get on with the Game, i hardly see his face anyway.

Yeah, well I just hope it offers a lot of customization for those of us that are not content with a generic character.

I just want a bunch of pretty, ready made faces to choose from that I can then customise like changing the hair, adding tattoos ect.

If anything they should beg CCP to use their carbon technology.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nN8_EkfdIEg

Something like that would be awesome.

Looks very intuitive and effective.


The Oblivion face editor wasn't too bad, but it does take some getting used to, and the pull on other sliders can mess up your face pretty bad if your not careful.
My avatar is the character I created first time I played Oblivion, spent a good hour or so perfecting it.