Someone asked for a Nautolan head in the Request thread. I was thinking of making a Togruta and wondering how I would deal with the montrals and head-tails, so decied I'd take a crack at this as a (far more difficult) trial run. Rather than clogging the request thread up, I figured I'd post progress here. I used the SWTOR Nautolans as a guide/target:
Even though the request was for a male, I started with a female first as a proof-of-concept (and because I plan to do a female LS run through the new Steam version of TSL at some point). I wanted to use one of the existing heads as a base, to keep the mouth intact for potential NPC use. Also because I suck at organic modelling, so creating something completely from scratch wasn't an option. I wanted a head that was in both games, so I went with the Luxa head, which is PFHA01 in K1. I got rid of her hair and lopped off most of the back of her head, then grafted on a whole bunch of amputated Twi'lek lekku that I massaged into shape. Plus I gave her some major facial surgery to implant the creepy giant bug eyes.
I whipped up an export with some quick and dirty skin wrapping from the original head to do an in-game test. Aside from a few bits of nasty deformation from sub-optimal weighting, it seemed to work ok:
Once I knew it would work, I went ahead and UV mapped her. That went surprisingly quickly, although I am forseeing some nasty broken shading/seam issues and possible remapping in my future. Currently I'm baking out normal/ambient occlusion/cavity/curvature/etc. maps from a high poly mesh for texturing. Doing them at 4K, so that takes a few hours.
If anyone here is a skilled skinner/rigger and would like to volunteer their services, I'd greatly appreciate a hand. Character rigging was never my bag, and that mass of tentacles/head-tails at the back will need some finessing that's beyond my ability to minimise mesh distortion during certain animations.