My stance on supporting custom mod creatures (Pixiv Fanbox)

I was asked my thoughts on making animations for custom creatures and my response ended up being quite long and I figured it may be relevant to some other users, so I decided to just make a post about it.

I actually covered this area back on my patreon in one of my ‘future plans’ posts. It’s of course lost now so I’ll readdress it again here. The short answer is ‘no real plans except maybe some fringe cases’.

Fairly early on in my animation exploration I tested out making animations for custom creatures that seemed uniquely interesting, but they never really caught on for me for a number of reasons. Things of course may have changed since then but to keep it short I’ll just start listing my reasonings.

1. Skyrim creatures already don’t seem to have great skeleton and mesh rigging to be flexible enough for some more acrobatic sexual positions. This issue with custom creatures is often even worse and on a number of creatures I had tested their mesh starts to separate leaving a void of nothingness in the model. Perhaps in an effort to save time, many of these creatures didn’t have all their body parts rigged either. Mouths specifically were often not rigged, so they wouldn’t animate. Some models even have new additions like extra arms that aren’t rigged either and just look odd.

2. They’re somewhat niche. I don’t personally even use any of them either.

3. Time. Probably the most significant reason why I don’t do specific things in general. So much to do, so little time. Skyrim has like 40ish creatures which those alone have kept me on my toes trying to saturate all of them with animations. I still have many more things I want to make for them. I also know that they’re much more likely to be used as everyone has them in their games.

4. Need to be supported by other modders to allow for creature framework to work, and also need dick models/textures made for them. I’m not sure if they get ABC dicks either?

5. Most aren’t very interesting for me to use. Seeing as they just reuse existing skeletons they are often have the same feel of creatures I’ve used a lot before. I’d be better off just like converting existing animations for them. Actually some standard skyrim creatures suffer from this too. At least for me Gargoyles get somewhat neglected as they use the werewolf skeleton, and don’t really bring anything new so are just clunkier, less-interesting werewolves. Similar situation with Lurkers (though eventually I want to make something for lurkers specifically…).

All that being said I’ve not ruled them out completely in the long-term, though I really only have any interest in supporting something that was really interesting or unique. More humanoid creatures is not something I’d consider interesting to me, I've made hundreads of those already. Just some general examples of things I’ve been somewhat interested by in the past: Bloatflys or some sort of small flying creature, facehuggers, large worms, slime blobs, etc. All of which are areas skyrim creatures don’t cover. Still no real plan to cover these lads though.

Another exception I have is if for some reason these ‘mods’ finally come out, are functional, arn't totally niche, AND I’m still around animating, then I’d be interested in supporting creatures from Skyblivion and Skywind. Of course before that they’d need dicks, and maybe ABC ones, but I’d like nothing more than to see some general lewd moding support for Skyblivion if it was possible.

I’d also consider supporting some Loverslab-specific custom creatures if they ever come to fruition, though I’m sure there are many challenges getting brand-new custom creatures working in-game which are beyond me. I think I’ve seen a couple attempts to make some tentacle things on Loverslab…

Anyway that’s all I can think of off the top of my head.