[QUESTION] Attractive Player Face

[MadGenuis]

Not sure whether to tag this as a SEARCH or QUESTION, but here it goes...

 

So, I've been away from Skyrim for a while and decided that since I was probably going to reinstall and start over anyway (given the volume of mod updates required anyway and the fact that I'd like to try using ModOrganizer this time, since people seem to swear by its reliability), I'd like to actually get my player character to be attractive this time, which is a feat that has eluded me in the past; in fact I think the last character I made the appearance of which I was even remotely satisfied with was an argonian, the facial structure of which tends to not work too well with SexLab mods.

 

A quick bit of research taught me that the most reliable way of making a player character with an attractive face is through racemenu presets, which suited me fine since I'm almost certainly installing racemenu anyway, but when I started browsing these presets I kept encountering requirements to skins (many of which lacked nude textures, which is... less than optimal) and such, and quite frankly I dread the prospect of how many conflicts could potentially arise from such things with the beautification mods I usually have in place for NPCs, potentially forcing me into a cascading sequence of necessary adjustments and replacements...

Part of me honestly feel guilty about even posting this question, since usually I'd just tamper with it until I got it to "sort of" work eventually through trial and error, but honestly I'd prefer if stuff just worked this time and let me play the game rather than spend half of the time I'd otherwise have played trying to fix stuff.

 

But all of that is really just background information of limited relevance to you, there more than anything just because I feel the need to justify being a little lazy just this once. And to satisfy my obsessive need to explain everything... just as I'm doing now...

 

My question is this: what are your recommendations as to making a player character with an attractive feminine face? (I plan to play a female Breton, by the way.) Are there presets that you recommend, or mods that achieve this that won't/are unlikely to conflict with other (cosmetic) mods?

[Adane7]

If you are planning to play as a breton I recommend you to export the files from ECE to Racemenu, doing this will allow you to choose the race of the preset, because a great percentage of the Racemenu presets available for download are nord race and for the recommendations of the beautification mods I personally use a customized version of MCBM body (UUNP), Demoniac Skin texture, Lind's human eyes, KS Hairdos, Brows, and Yev mods for makeup, here a screenshot of one of my characters:

 

[Pauduan]

Apologies in advance for a very obvious statement - if you are aware of the file and folder structure of Skyrim, it is quite possible to install many, many, many mods with almost zero conflicts, specially those with just textures and meshes.

 

Some follower/NPC mods are very badly written and will sharing some of the default textures because the modder forgot to update texture paths. some will have custom assets partly packaged with the mod and partly will depend on a brow or eye replacer being installed, in order to display correctly. Some are fantastic, but the way Steam works means that it takes quite a bit of expertise to get a mod working on a base (clean, default, unmodded) installation. You can;t just write a mod and test it on a 'second' machine, that's just illegal. But since modders work on their own installations, if you are not running an exact replica of that setup it is possible you will have a conflict of some kind sooner than later.

 

Now, to attractive faces - I've never downloaded a preset from anyone ever. I prefer making faces from the base game presets, with vanilla hair, no makeup and no cosmetics to begin with. That way can be sure that the face is correctly structured before I start amping up the look. Leonardo DaVinci's work on human face proportions is a good place to start, along with a pencil and paper. Usually the problem with most presets I see is the absence of a well-defined jaw and chin structure, and noses that do not resemble real attractive human faces. I am often guilty of this myself as it tends to look 'better' on screen but makes gimped square-faced characters that need tricks like facelight to seem remotely attractive.

 

The second part is the nose, mouth and eye size and spacing, and this tends to be very tricky because you have to work in three dimensions. You need to look at the work of people like rkz and Neus to really get to grips with what a good face is like, the quality of the faces are superb with a lot of work in all these areas. You will know you have a good face if it looks good in low light and under bright light, that is very tricky to achieve with a limited tool like racemenu and the horribly low-poly mesh in default Skyrim. Can be done, but you will almost always have to manually sculpt the face.

 

I haven't given you the answer you wanted, but here it is, all the same.

[MadGenuis]

I see about changing the preset through ECE... won't that change the character's height too, though? Not that it matters all that much given that racemenu (if I remember correctly) allows one to adjust character height anyway. I'll look into it when I get that far, thanks for the suggestion.

 

I'm pseudo-aware of the file- and folder structure of Skyrim, I'd say, in the sense that experience has taught me to recognize what most of those are when I see them, though I'd not necessarily remember where to find a particular file or folder. Are you saying that I shouldn't use ModOrganizer, though? Granted that I do have more experience installing mods manually than I have with ModOrganizer (which I've never used; the only mod manager I've used previously for Skyrim was the Nexus one), what I've heard of it suggests that it works fairly well. Would I be better off without it?

It's not that I can't install mods without a manager to do it for me, granted, as much as it is a desire to achieve a measure of ease of use, namely in hunting down causes of errors... in fact I'm quite frankly not confident that I'd be able to without a means to quickly and easily add and remove mods to see which is causing the error.

 

I see your points regarding making the face myself, and I would have agreed just a couple of years ago - I've generally been able to make faces I've been happy with in Dragon Age Inquisition and the Mass Effect series (though I'll never forget the face of my first character in that; thought it looked fine in character creation, entered the game and realized that it looked like it'd been hit in the face with a shovel due to being completely flat), and even back in The Sims 3 - but for some reason I just can't get it right in Skyrim, which is why I've resorted to asking for presets to (at least) base my character's appearance off someone else's work. I'll look into your recommendations and see if I can figure something out - once I get that far, that is - but I have a sneaking suspicion that I'll end up frustrated with my own failure yet again and use a preset anyway.