OG Vanilla Tattoos as Overlays - Both Vs - KS UV VTK Gymfiend

Hey folks! It's been amazing coming back to Nexus. The tutorials have stayed up and you've all been so welcoming! Hope you've been enjoying the new mods from me!

For a while I'd been working on converting the OG Vanilla tattoos (2020 launch OGs) into Custom Overlays for the various body mods and frameworks available. Why? Because the vanilla tattoos are attached to meshes, and those meshes clip horrendously with certain clothing options; especially tight fitting or modded clothes. Overlays aren't attached to a mesh, and so do not have any of those issues!

I do plan to tackle the 2. 0 stuff. I know some have been done, but I want to do it for all body mods/frameworks and cover all the tattoos; face and neck tattoos included.

Want to support my mods in an additional way? Consider checking out my Patreon page. There's a bunch of tiers, but you can join for absolutely free, which will open my entire modding catalogue to you! This includes around 40 mods that haven't yet been uploaded to Nexus; again for free. (I am slowly uploading those here though) So yeah, consider checking out MeltingAngels' Patreon. We also have a Patron exclusive Discord server, with a wonderful community being built. That's free as well!

Before we proceed through this massive wall of text and screenshots, two amazing people from my Discord contributed their own photos to this mod page:

- Bee -

-> honeyforbees over on Tumblr.

-> Honeyforbeesover on Nexus.

- Valorie -

-> @valsilverhandover on Twitter.

This project took several months of on and off work. Why did it take so long, and why did no one make this mod yet, you ask? That's because it required wrestling with Blender. A friend on Discord introduced me to the concept of Texture Baking, and I went from there; with myself and others stumped whenever I hit roadblocks. Which was pretty often.

But obviously, I figured it out in the end after repeatedly running into a metaphorical wall. I extracted the vanilla tattoo meshes, as well as the meshes and textures for the various custom bodies.

With texture baking, I 'baked' the vanilla tattoos to these custom uv maps. It re-arranges the vanilla tattoos to fit into the custom uv maps. This took several times to refine, as textures repeatedly got twisted up or just borked entirely. You cannot imagine the sigh of relief when I finally figured it out. As for the result, with KS UV the placements are 100% spot on.

This is because their uv maps are very similar to vanilla ones; meaning the textures baked over better.

With VTK/Hyst and Gymfiend, the placement is more in the range of 95%. This is because their uv maps are vastly different to vanilla; meaning it