If you've been following my self-narrated comments in Part 6, you know that as I tried to discover the source of an issue with patching the diffuse maps for character faces I discovered some fairly serious deficiencies in several NPC mods. I won't name and shame them here - I already reported the worst offender to its author - but after spending a bunch of time thinking on how to fix the mods myself, I realized that I was falling into the sunk cost fallacy. The whole purpose of using Easy NPC was to broaden and diversify my NPC selection, and I think now I'm going to lean into that and try out some new looks. 

 

Before I obtain more resources to work with, I need to check my existing mods to see which ones have deficiencies. There are two general categories of trouble I'm running into. The facegen dds path should look like this:

 

 

The problematic mods fall into one of two categories:

 

1. The texture path contains a data\ before the 'textures\' part. I haven't tested this variation in-game and it's possible Skyrim handles them correctly. However, spoof the facegen patcher and prevent the diffuse maps from updating because it is looking in data\data\textures... instead of data\textures... for the facegen DDS.

 

 

2. The texture path contains an output path from an SKSE plugin with a completely different file name (usually the actor's editor ID). Needless to say, these cause a hard fail for the facegen patcher since it can't find the non-existent dds file

 

 

Any mod that reveals these defects on inspection will be removed from the EasyNPC pool and moved to a holding separator. Once I've checked everything, then I'll rerun EasyNPC with the new pool. I'll also grab a few NPC mods I haven't used before, like Men of Winter to ensure I still have plenty of options. 

 

This process revealed a few individual problematic mods, along with one high profile series where almost all of the component mods had these problems. I removed them all from the pool of options and then grabbed a few new options to broaden my choices. After the usual couple of hours to pick all the new faces, I successfully compiled a new NPC merge and then went into xEdit and patched the facegen with the D&D racial textures. This will require the following steps:

 

• Export and patch non-Elf, non-WNAM facegen
• Segregate, export and patch (with a hacked patch that comments out the WNAM check) non-Elf, WNAM-bearing facegen
• Move the non-Elf files to MO2 staging folder
• Export and patch Elf non-WNAM facegen
• Export and patch Elf WNAM facegen
• Patch Elf facegen with teeth textures
• Move Elf files to MO2 staging folder

 

Note as we run the hacked WNAM script that now we aren't getting the errors caused by facegen dds pathing:

 

 

Checking the files before I go to inject the teeth, you can see that the D&D textures are now propagating out correctly:

 

 

Having purged the defective facegen and rebuilt our library, now let's go and see if the body coloring is more consistent.

 

 

Things are looking good in Helgen - you have to really look to see the seam, and that's about as good as you can get in this game. Let's COC to Solitude and see how things look there with a more diverse population.

 

 

Sybille Stentor appears to be affected by the vanilla "orc face" bug, and we'll need to address that, but otherwise I think we can officially declare victory on D&D integration. As an aside, so far I've had basically no problems with using vanilla textures for the UNP Minidress/Spice Gear meshes. The only issue is the old "purple panties" bug, which we can patch out. 

 

So what's our next order of business? There are a few different avenue we can follow. Of course, the obvious next step is to install some content mods like quests - I asked my wife to spend some quality time on the Nexus and find something we haven't tried yet, but until she picks something I'm going to put that on hold. Major content addition, like getting Legacy of the Dragonborn working, is going to wait until much later in the process since that'll trigger a whole cascade of other activities. But since we've been working with bodies, how about we clean up and improve the basic equipment. 

 

We'll start with clothing and armor textures. Clothing is pretty easy, because I already had a whole suite of these tested and working on my last build. We'll start with these items:

 

 

One change compared to my last build is that I don't want a huge number of variations of basic items. I do, however, want to get some new and fresh looks for the vanilla gear and therefore need to look not just for a texture improvement mod but for one with new models. Again, we're strictly talking about the vanilla weapons here - we'll get more variety later when I start doing the Legacy of the Dragonborn suite since it incorporates a number of weaponry mods. 

 

 

That's a good start. Last but not least we want to try to get some Legion/Guard enhancers. NordWarUA's work really dominates this space, and  I'm happy to go with his mods as long as they have LOTD and body support. GAR has HIMBO and BHUNP, so that's an easy pick. For the legion side, the options from NordWar are Heavy Legion, New Legion, and Authentic Legion. Authentic is based on the Oblivion Imperial Legion, and so it's my least-favored choice since that makes it kind of lore-unfriendly for a game set 200 years later. The other two options both have HIMBO, but none of them have BHUNP support. Looks like we will probably just be using vanilla Imperial meshes (albeit with improved textures)

 

After patching up Guards Armor Replacer, I went back into the game to see how the outfits are looking. Incidentally, I toyed with fixing Vampire Orc Face right now, but I'm going to wait until later since if I do it now I'll need to re-do it later.

 

 

Looking good! I think we've got the actors to a pretty solid baseline position - other than potentially critical bugfixes, I don't plan on doing more NPC work until we're much further along in the build. In fact, we're getting pretty close to the point when we can start actually playing this build instead of just tinkering with it