Custom Cosmetic: Novabeast

"The Novabeasts are dragon-like beings.

Their oversized mane and fluffy features make them have quite a presence!

Elegant, calm, and friendly, these creatures deeply connect to their surroundings."

Custom cosmetic to play as several different Novabeasts. Highly optimized to keep texture memory usage as low as possible while retaining as much quality as possible. Comes with several different accessories for customization.

### Important

Since this is coming up quite frequently: Since Update 50 you are now REQUIRED to use any of Glove and Helmet skin options (Goggles, Collars or Outfits). The Novabeast skin does NOT hide Helmet and Glove slots anymore, this is necessary for the accessories to work as separate pieces! The cosmetic comes with "invisible" options called No Goggles/Collar if you just want to hide the Helmet and Glove skins without adding accessories.

The Avali cosmetic is out!

The Maelstrorca cosmetic is out!

Update Notes

Update 59 improves the tailwagging with respect to collisions, no more clipping!

How To Use

Select the 'Mods' option in the Ark: Survival Ascended main menu.
Search for Novabeast and subscribe to this mod ingame.
Restart your game after fully downloading and installing the cosmetic. It is REQUIRED that you restart every time the cosmetic updates! Otherwise it will not show up.
In the game, open your Inventory and select the 'Cosmetics' tab at the top.
Open up the Novabeast cosmetics folder on the right side in the 'Custom Cosmetics' section.
'Use' or drag any Novabeast body to its corresponding slot.
'Use' or drag both any of the Goggle or Collar skins to their corresponding slot. Use the No Collar/No Goggles skin if you don't want any.

#### Features

Conditional Overlays

The Novabeast visually becomes wet while standing in rain or while swimming and slowly dries when not.
The Novabeast visually becomes covered in sand as you remain in a sandstorm, jump into water or stand in rain to wash it off! (NEW)
The Novabeast will visually get dirty and bloody. Scars and cuts appear and the goggles start to crack as health drops. Healing will mend the wounds but the cracks in your goggles will stay until you repair them by sleeping.

Lifelike Behaviors

The Novabeast will visually show some of its statuses.
- Facial expressions change to show the player its condition without looking at the UI.
- Eyes close when sleeping or knocked out.
- A pained facial expression when hurt or dead.
- Blushing when drunken or poisoned by a troodon. (NEW)
- Eyes close progressively more as torpor rises. (NEW)
The goggles will pull down while in a sandstorm or underwater to shield the eyes.
The eyes move and jitter around randomly as eyes do to breathe some more life into this fluffy fellow.
The pupils can dilate depending on whether you are inside (house buff) or outside.
The tail will slowly wag around while you are not in motion. (NEW)

Body Features

The tail, ears, mane, fluff and body have physics, interacting with the environment, structures and objects around, colliding with them.
Most of the Novabeasts are available in both a male and female version unless the specific author has chosen to gender lock them.
All Novabeasts come with a first person view model that reflects the fur color and patterns of the third person model as well as the damage,wetness and sanding overlays.
Most Novabeasts come with emissions, stripes or patterns that will glow in the dark similar to aberrant dinos.
All Novabeast textures have been carefully optimized to keep the texture memory usage at a minimum. All Novabeasts together use less memory than just the male human model alone for one of its AO textures alone. Most textures also have been carefully modified to reduce their filesize to a minimum in order to keep the mod size as small as possible while offering as much quality and quantity as possible.

Variations

There are many different Novabeasts available, they come in different colors, fur patterns and model features. Some have goggles, some don't. Some may have a collar, others don't.
All Novabeasts can now utilize all collars, goggles and outfits, present and future. You can mix and match them however you like allowing for more customizability. Some Novabeasts have special conditions that will change how these are displayed. (NEW)

???

A few Novabeasts have received mysterious descriptions... what could they mean?

Available Variations:

Amethyst Aquamarine Aaron Erin Wolfstrike Toxas Sunday Regina Solstice Paladin Shinsei Nocturna Dusk PhantomFoxx Rylan Raisie Caboose Dusk Ruby Ribeyrolles Squishy FireDaisy Diamond Topaz Noxtra Emerald Saphire Zer0 Nokly Naitekiakki Neopolitan Hydra Crunician Akira NefariousFoxx Coldpaws Zaaru Aaron Icestel Raptor Fang Lilypad

Upcoming

N/A

Future Plans:

Add coloring regions to allow recoloring (Planned)
Add Ark's default armors as wearable outfits.

Known Issues:

Wildly taking off cosmetics that have mixed customization deforms the shape and requires taking off everything or re-applying the base body to fix. (Nothing i can do about that, this is how cosmetics work and how bone modifiers are handled, i've already fixed several many other weird cases like this)
All cosmetics with physics cast secondary capsule shadows onto objects nearby both in third person and first person. I cannot prevent this, the Capsule Shadow options in the Devkit Blueprint are being ignored. This can create overshadowing when prone and can cause weird shadows in first person. You can disable Capsule Shadows via the console command 'r.CapsuleShadows 0' as far as i'm aware nothing in the game uses Unreal's physics so it should be safe to disable without any negative visual impact.

### Changelogs

Version 70 (Upcoming)

Swapped Body Physics Collision Channel from WorldStatic to OnlyCollideWithStationary to fix sea mines exploding your physics while nearby (should keep all other collisions with terrain, structures, beds etc)
Added Dakota's Lilypad Novabeast.
Added Freddy's Fang Novabeast.

Version 69

Fixed Ruby's first person model using the original Novabeast's textures.
Fixed Naitekiakki using outdated materials for female and model for male version.
Fixed Hydra using outdated materials for male version.
Fixed Loki using outdated materials for female and wrong model for male version.
Fixed NefFox using outdated materials on the base model.
Fixed Caboose using outdated materials on base model.
Fixed Toxas using outdated materials on base model.
Fixed Wolfstrike using outdated materials for female version.
Fixed Nocturna using outdated materials for female version.
Fixed Sunday using outdated materials on both versions.
Fixed Default Nova using outdated materials for female version. (WOW)
Fixed Diamond using outdated materials for female version.
Fixed Emerald using outdated materials for female version.
Fixed Erin using outdated materials for female version.
Fixed Noxtra using outdated materials for female version.
Fixed PhantomFoxx using outdated materials for female version.
Fixed Raisie using outdated materials for female version.
Fixed Ruby using outdated materials for female version.
Fixed Rylan using outdated materials for female version.
Fixed Solstice using outdated materials for female version.
Fixed Topaz using outdated materials for female version.

Version 68

Renamed Aaron (Icestel) to Erin (Icestel).
Fixed Body Physics collapsing in on themselves when mounting/dismounting certain Dinos (Example: Mantis)
Updated Tribal Outfit physics to match the main body (hopefully fixing breasts clipping through)
Added sand overlay to tribal outfit.
Fixed some main body shading issue causing textures to break and fade out on distance.

Version 67

Fixed empty hard reference to mesh resulting in a missing body for Raptor Novabeast.

Version 66

Added Erin's Icestel Novabeast with new textures.
Added FireTheNardo's Novabeast.

Version 65

Fixed superfluous extra weather checking code resulting in the goggles flicking down repeatedly when inside during a sandstorm.
(Potentially) Fixed Ragnarok sandstorm not triggering any of the sandstorm features. (It is unknown if it ever worked since Ragnarok uses its own Sandstorm buffs)
Interpolate blush to make it gradually appear over time.
Fixed accessories and outfits causing overlays to flicker and fight if they get out of sync of another. Only the body runs the overlay logic now unifying all effects and saving performance.
Cleaned up large parts of code in all accessories related to damage, wetness and sandstorms.
Removed collar animation code animating non existent ears, cheeks and fluff.

Version 64

Fixed more cases of goggles not staying down while in a sandstorm.

Version 63

Fixed eyes twitching when blinking after being torpored.
Simplified blinking code.

Version 62

Made Ribey's goggle in combination with Ribey's Nova have the goggles down at all times.
Fixed Sandstorm not applying sand overlay over time.
Fixed goggles repeatedly going up instantly during a sandstorm.
Fixed beer/troodon buff detection preventing blush from working.
Made googles slide down smoothly instead of instantly snapping into position.
Made eye dilation smoothly interpolate over time instead of happening instantly.
Fixed eyes not staying closed when sleeping or unconscious.
Made eyes slowly close as torpor rises, this goes all the way from 0 to 200 torpor at which point the eyes are completely closed (and you fall unconscious even with max fortitude).

Version 61

Fixed empty first person view model triangle being visible in third person when wearing accessories.
Overhauled fur Normal Map completely with NefFox's new fur Normal Map.

Version 60

Renamed Akira to Loki.
Improved Fox tail rigging and model.
Potentially fixed skins turning black under some circumstances by forcing Ambient Occlusion to 1.0 for all materials.
Switched Zaaru's Novabeast to public as per request.
Split out private avatars into its own mod.
Fixed Amethyst (and potentially others) not able to have goggles (they hide automatically)
Made rain only affect Novabeast when outdoors. Being sheltered now protects you from rain.

Version 59

Split tail physics into its own physics asset to target it separately.
Target separate tail physics with internal force simulation to "nudge" the tail around to replace the hardcoded tail rotation, to fix collisions being ignored.
Cleaned up and optimized AnimBP code slightly.
Added Hydra's Novabeast
Added Nef Foxx's Novabeast
Added Akira's Novabeast
Added Crunician's Novabeast
Added Coldpaws' Novabeast
Added Foxtail Novabeast variant for future use, with sand and wet overlay included.

Version 58

Fixed Hide Collar/Goggles not respecting customization
Fixed Goggles not respecting customization
Cleaned up Goggles animation code
Fixed several many cases of all accessories not applying or removing customization when switching base skins.
Fixed several cases of all accessories falsely double applying bone modifications or breaking the skin if reapplied multiple times in a row.
Further improved physics by switching them to world space. Should prevent the tail from falsely turning/dragging slightly when turning your head.

Version 57

Fixed Outfit not respecting customization
Fixed Goggles not respecting selected variant and showing on Caboose
Added tailwagging.
Overhauled tail physics.
Cleaned up code and removed some debug code.
Fixed some tag/flag code checks.

Version 56

Added Naitekiakki's Novabeast.
Backported better customization tag matching from Maelstrorca.
Fixed facial expressions for when affected by beer and troodon poison.
Cleaned up AnimBP code.
Fixed sand overlay not working and made it actually dependent on being affected by a sandstorm (indoors no longer counts).
Reworked Neopolitan Novabeast, massively reduced number of splotches all over the place (especially tail), reduced clipping, introduced assymetry to the legs according to the refsheet and fixed emissions inside ear.
Fixed slit eye morph target not working because UE5.5 now uses underscores instead of spaces.
Optimized Novabeast core animBP a bit.

Version 55

Added Neopolitan's Novabeast.

Version 54

Fixed a material error.

Version 53

Added Nokly's Novabeast.
Fixed emissive spots on Ribeyrolles' Novabeast.
Fixed human body appearing when unseating or burying on a basilisk (and possibly when relogging).
Changed Ribeyrolles' eyes to round.

Version 52

Added Saphire Novabeast.
Added Zer0's Novabeast.
Added Tribal Outfit as separate skin to wear for all Novabeasts.
Added Male variant of the Tribal Outfit (topless).
Added Male version Round Ears.
Added Hyena Ears to both male and female version.
Fixed Male Novabeast lacking pain and dead facial expressions.
Fixed Male version normals around face just like with the female version.
Fixed Collars not respecting customizability.
Fixed some Novas missing the warning about being customizable.
Changed all accessories to no longer hide the body, to prevent becoming invisible and gaining unfair advantages in PvP.
Improved description to clearly indicate that a Nova is customizable and that it can be disabled if desired.
Improved description to let the user know that goggle and collar skins are required to hide armor now.
Improved general description of all Novabeasts.
Improved general description of all accessories.
Fixed hiding third person and first person models incorrectly when wearing goggles/collar/outfits after the base body.

Version 51

Fixed round ears blendshape missing in model resulting in FireDaisy no longer having round ears.
Changed Ribeyroller's fur normal back to the old one as per request.
Optimized Damage/Hurt code a bit.
Optimized several irrelevant functions such as random eye movement to not execute when dead.
Consolidated all blendshapes to form the pained expression into one mixed blendshape to save on concurrent blendshapes and thus on processing power.
Added custom blendshape for when dead.
Fixed some blendshapes pulling random vertices.
Fixed normals around mouth and cheekfluff.
Fixed Toxas's tail fluff having a slight black line along the UV seam.
Removed unused pre-shaded tail fluff texture for Toxas.
Fixed Toxas's tail fluff texture using wrong texture group.

Version 50

Added Sanding overlay when in a sandstorm.
Fixed default human body popping visible when applying and removing cosmetics on other slots than the chest piece.
Reworked all goggle textures.
Reworked all collar textures.
Overhauled Novabeast fur normal map completely.
Make all goggles and collars optional and wearable by everyone. (Outfits excluded for now)
Split out goggle and collar textures into their own texture set.
Theoretically allow collar and goggles to be recolored via ingame dyes, although currently unfunctional for unknown reasons.
Reconfigured all Novabeasts to use the default model without any accessories.
Completely reworked the internal AnimBP code for better optimization, only a single timer and split the relevant code into collar and goggles respectively.
Combined all different Novabeast AnimBPs code into one and made it selectively execute what is necessary to give each unique Novabeast its functions.
Switched out static models variants for a tag/flag system that allows quickly and dynamically changing Novabeast variations as well as extending for more in the future.
Threw out predefined physics asset from AnimBP to prevent it from overriding the model's set physics, this prevents the requirement for Novabeasts with different physics needing its own copy of the code and instead have them use the set model's physics asset.

Version 49

Added Topaz Novabeast.
Added Diamond Novabeast.
Added FireDaisy's Novabeast.
Added Noxtra's Beastmode Novabeast.
Added Emerald Novabeast.
Added Ruby Tribal Novabeast as requested.
Added pupil dilation when inside/outside. (Only non-dilated Novas)
Added blush when affected by Troodon torp or drunken from beer. (All main Novas that aren't uniquely scripted)
Added mysterious descriptions to Amethyst, Aquamarine, Emerald, Diamond, Topaz and Ruby.
Added blush material for all Novabeasts.
Changed Shinsei's Tribal version to not have goggles.
Changed Ribey's private Novabeast to have glowing pawpads.
Changed Amethyst's collar attachment to be a unique icon.
Changed Amethyst's to be locked to female only.
Changed Cyan's name to Aquamarine.

Version 48

Added Topaz and Diamond Novabeast files (Not available yet).
Added Rasvim's Squishy Novabeast.
Changed Ribey's private Novabeasts to be customizable.

Version 47

Fixed several issues in some cosmetic definitions.
Added proper physics to Toxas's Outfit.
Fixed Toxas's Outfit using a non-outfit skeleton.
Fixed Tribal Amethyst not having mane physics.
Fixed Tribal Sunday not having mane physics.
Fixed Tribal Erin not having mane physics.
Fixed Tribal Shinsei not having mane physics.
Fixed chestfluff on Topless Tribal Amethyst sticking out too much.
Added Ribeyroller Novabeast. (Private)

Version 46

Added Koda's Dusk Novabeast.

Version 45

Fixed oversight that made all Novabeasts available to be picked, including those that people have chosen to keep private.

Version 44

Fixed several tangent space warnings for multiple meshes, hopefully reducing the likelyhood of the cooker getting stuck on CF.

Version 43

Toggled customizability on for Toxas's Tribal outfit to match the non-tribal.
Toggled customizability on for Shinsei.
Toggled customizability on for Solstice.
Added Caboose's Novabeast.

Version 41 & 42

Changed Shinsei's right eye top half of the iris to be golden colored, as per request.
Added Tribal version of Shinsei.
Added Tribal version of Toxas.
Changed Amethyst's Outfit to be topless.
Changed wrong name -> Solstica to Solstice.
Changed tribal outfit feathers default wetness to 0. Was 1.

Version 40

Added Phantom Foxx's Novabeast.
Added Raisie's Novabeast.
Added zZSleepy's Dusk Novabeast.
Added Wolfstrike's Nocturna Novabeast.
Added Rylan's Novabeast.
Fixed eye normals on Shinsei.
Fixed pupils not glowing on Shinsei.
Changed Shinsei's ear tips to fade to white.
Allowed Novabeast to be skinned on Training Dummy Dermis's allowing the training dummy to be skinned (It's clipping though)

Version 39

Renamed Dakota model to Nox.
Added Paladin's Novabeast.
Added Solstica Novabeast.
Added Ginga Novabeast.
Fixed Nox's eyes not moving.
Removed Nox as public model as per request.
Fixed blueprint error passing a bad object to the Blinking function.
Optimized several more textures.

Version 38

Packed and optimized base Metalness ,Specularity and Roughness into one texture.
Optimized Purple and Cyan emissions, reduced them to greyscale and combined both models to use one texture.
Fixed Tribal Sunday being wrongly named Tribal Dakota.
Fixed Tribal Sunday and Erin using the wrong body physics.
Packed and finetuned Regina's Metal, Specularity and Roughness textures into one.
Packed Wolfstrike's Metal, Specularity and Roughness textures into one.
Fixed a texture or two using the wrong texture group.
Optimized several more textures by removing alpha channels and lowering them from 16bit to 8bit to save in disk space and in some cases VRAM.
Modified several texture's compression format for better quality and/or lower VRAM usage.
Removed several now unused textures.

Version 37

Revamped Amethyst's textures for massively more detail.
Added Cyan's revamped textures for massively more detail.
Added Aaron's Novabeast.
Optimized lots of textures down from 16bit to 8bit to save on disk space.
Optimized a lot of textures by removing unnecessary alpha channels to save on disk space.
Re-rendered icons for Amethyst (normal and tribal) and Cyan with new the textures.

Version 36

Fixed Wolfstrike broken materials causing missing textures.

Version 35

Fixed Novabeast fluff master shader having slightly different roughness and specularity than the rest of the body resulting in a slightly brighter than intentend fluff.
Added Tribal Outfit variant of Amethyst.
Added Tribal Outfit variant of Dakota.
Added Toxas's alternative hair.
Added Regina's Nova.
Renamed all Novabeasts for a shorter proper name.
Made Dakota and Sunday public Novas as per request.
Updated Dakota and Sunday UI icon.

Version 34

Manually downscaled all textures.
Fixed some oversized 4K textures on Dakota.
Fixed some oversized 4K textures on Wolfstrike.
Fixed wrong texture pools being used for Wolfstrike's textures. (World -> Character)
Internally organized folder structure more.
Removed unnecessary extra textures.
Added AO bakes to Wolfstrike's body textures.
Added Fur normals to Cyan Novabeast.
Fixed Cyan Novabeast using male normal for female and female for male.
Added missing Cyan Novabeast emissive map so now Cyan actually glows cyan.
Fixed Erin using wrong texture pools. (World -> Character)
Fixed Erin having some wonky texture compression settings on the eye textures.
Added Fur normals to Erin's Novabeast.
Added Fur normals to Toxas's Novabeast.
Fixed Wolfstrike's Novabeast using the wrong normal for the male version.

Version 33

Added Novabeast fur normal to Purple Nova.
Added Novabeast fur normal to Default Nova.
Added Novabeast fur normal to Erin's Nova.
Added AO to the Default Nova.
Added AO to Erin's Nova.
Added new Novabeast variant: Toxas.

Version 30/31/32

Cleaned up the mod by removing all extra mesh copies and using the override material entries instead.
Added simple random eye movement to female purple nova.
Added bone scaling to tail, physics however do not scale and still bug around, no idea why they don't scale
Added slight flowing water effect when wet.
Added Wolfstrike's comissioned Novabeast as new selectable costume.
Added Erin's comissioned Novabeast as new selectable costume.
Added different icons for all Novabeasts.
Lowered glaring reflectiveness of glasses a bit, less blinding now.
Renamed unavailable cosmetics and clarified that these are private ones for people who opted to not share them.

Version 29

Improved First Person weight painting of hands, less crunchy arms.
Greatly cleaned up how custom material properties are applied (wetness, bloody)
Created instances of all materials and upgraded the master materials to allow for easy texture swapping.
Removed all instances of runtime normal generation and replaced them with hand made ones.
Altered bloody overlay, much more blood and wounds, tweaked colors a bit.
(Experimental) Enabled Virtual Texturing for most textures.
(Experimental) Allowed mipmaps and streaming again for almost all textures (this previously caused the emissive map to blur randomly)
Added alternative Novabeast that allows bone overrides. Trust me you will not like it but people asked for it.
Added second Novabeast colored Cyan (aka the original Novabeast). Currently very basic, no AO bakes.
Wetness and bloody textures are now applied in first person too.
Tweaked fur darkening effect when wet slightly (darkens 1% more).
Tweaked fur wet specularity (capped at 50%) to make it look less super reflective in indirect light.
Lots of internal cleanup.

Version 28

Fixed normal map that got deleted out on upload for some reason resulting in a material compilation failure causing "missing texture" glasses.

Version 27

Wetness has been upgraded with generated normal maps this should give the effect some depth.
Glasses now become wet too.
Wetness now darkens the fur color to simulate .. well wet fur (obviously).
Male version of the Novabeast has been added, currently if you are playing as male character you will get the male version instead. I might make this choosable later.
Following a report from a user i refined the breast topology a bit and managed to smoothen the normals more, making it look less like nipples under very specific lighting conditions.

===============================================

It's main purpose was intended as a personal mod but with official permission it's now a public mod for use and might actually turn into something bigger with more features.

Here's the discord for my cosmetics (looks like more are to come), it is currently very basic though: https://discord.gg/RuEjm7crJP

Also if you like this mod you might want to check out my other cosmetic mods: