Well, we made it past our first milestone - Patrician ENB is up and running with no unresolved deficiencies other than that fishing error (which fortunately seems to be benign). However, as you've no doubt observed from the screen shots, we have some issues with potato people in the game world. In this session, we'll focus on making our NPCs more realistic.

Laying the Groundwork

First things first, we need bodies. We will be using BHUNP for females and futanari, and HIMBO for males. However, there's plenty more we need to do in order to get this right. And we'll start at the core of the matter with our skeleton. XPMSSE remains the consensus standard for the community, but it has a lot of janky, obsolete, and performance heavy features surrounding things like weapons styles. Consequently, we will trim the mod to turn it into XP32 Lite. 

Concurrent with this, we need to get a body physics mod (Faster HDT-SMP) and a replacement for the weapon placement elements we killed (Immersive Equipment Display). This also sends us down a little bit of a rabbit hole to obtain the racial height variation information and some associated functional fixes.

These should have minimal conflicts, but we'll give them a quick check-out in xEdit just to be safe. By the way, did you notice that I'm not using LOOT or making any effort to manage my plugin load order? That's because this build is being made with 100% conflict resolution from the start, so plugin load order only really matters if A) I want to avoid lots of repetitive data entry for some reason or B) I have BSA asset conflicts to manage. The only conflicts involved some fluff text in the race entries, which were benign.

Putting Flesh on Bone

So with the skeletons in place, our next step is to install the bodies. BHUNP also requires CBP collision physics, which we'll install at this time. I also grabbed Fair Skin and Tempered Skin, respectively, after which time I built the bodyslides for the naked bodies.

Updating Vanilla Clothing

A quick check in xEdit reveals no problems with the plugins, so now we can get the vanilla clothes built. For HIMBO this is easy, since they come pre-packaged. We'll go ahead and build these with zero sliders, since we'll be using OBody for body shape randomization.

The situation is a little trickier for the female side, because BHUNP doesn't come with baseline outfits, and the bodyslide set on the Nexus has some deficiencies, such as breast physics for rigid chest armor. Some research revealed that this LE mod appears to best meet my needs, so we'll grab it and then port it over to SSE. After a quick run through Cathedral Asset Optimizer, the meshes should now play nice with SSE.

While the outputs here will be UUNP (and older version of the body) though should be fully compatible for gameplay purposes. Before we go any further, let's hop into the game and make sure everything is playing nice. I'm also going to tag the 12femalebrows.esp file as an optional plugin to get it out of the way for now, since nothing is referencing it and it's unlikely that I'd remember to use it. We can reactivate it if an NPC overhaul needs it or something like that.

HIMBO seems to be morphing with no problems, but I realized belatedly that the TCf mod only contained armor. There is a separate TCf clothing mod, but since we have a BHUNP clothing mod and those don't have any rigid parts that need physics disabled, we'll use that for the clothing. As you can see below, I've arranged the assets so the UUNP armor outputs overwrite anything that came out of the BHUNP mod with its lower quality armor morphs.

At this point I started encountering crashes to desktop during the Bethesda logo sequence, which normally indicates a serious problem like a missing master or some similar critical, early-loading asset defect. Removing the BHUNP conversion quickly confirmed that the problem rested somewhere within that mod, but in the process of troubleshooting I discovered this mod with much better BHUNP native bodyslides. So we'll rewind and install that one instead! Further troubleshooting localized the problem to the conflict resolution patch between this mod and HIMBO, though I was on my own from there. Fortunately, there were only about a dozen records to scrutinize and I quickly identified the issue: something about the armor addons for HIMBO and BHUNP outfits weren't playing nice when I merged them. Further testing narrowed things down to two records, and both versions of each record worked fine. 

So what's the issue? The first question is: are both records causing issues, or only one of them? We know that just smooshing both together crashes the game at the logo, so what about just one? This process revealed the issue: a first person mesh wasn't loading right, but it was also removed from one of the source files. I went ahead and removed the first person mesh mapping (it was for Sheogorath's outfit, so unlikely to be needed by me in gameplay) and that fixed the problem.

There we go, now the morphs are working for both sexes. I took a quick walk around, and even with some dramatic weather going the exterior frame rate was floating around 90 when walking north from Helgen (higher when relevant occlusion planes were closer to me). 

We're nowhere near done with the bodies yet, but we've made an important first step in the process by successfully installing the core assets. In the next part, we'll get body randomization up and running, using OBody and Schlongs of Skyrim. SOS will probably just get a 'placeholder' install for basic functionality for now, since I'll need to replicate my previous SSE work for this new build, using some of the newer assets that have become available. See you all soon!