Welcome back, folks. Now that I've finally got over the hump of getting back into modding, I'm finding a lot more motivation to actually do stuff. I'll have to watch carefully though to make sure it doesn't start eating into my offline hobby time. White Dwarf 501 goes on sale on the 21st, and the painting challenge of the month is expected to be "Lord of War." We interpret that as either a faction leader model or a model with the "titanic" keyword; while my wife does have Ghazghkull Thraka sitting in her Pile of Shame Potential, she also has a Stompa Boyz boxed set that includes the eponymous Stompa. This is a huge and somewhat infamously fiddly to assemble kit (it's about 7" wide and 9" to the top of the head... in a game where the average model is 1-1.5" tall), and we decided that the June-July challenge will be a joint effort where we both team up to build and paint this mega kit. So if things slow down in about a week - you know why!

 

But what about Skyrim? Well, last time we fixed up Aela to have a unique look and then down in the comments section I overhauled the interior and the exterior of Warmaiden's, as well as giving Ulfberth War-Bear a unique armor set and a custom skin. I'm pretty happy with how that turned out, and I learned some general practices for compatibility on custom interior that don't have Embers XD patches. The short version is that reverting Embers' changes to a cell is generally all you have to do. Older versions had a lot of problems with floating meshes, but I didn't see this in Warmaiden's so I think the newer versions may address this. Worse come to worst, you just need to offset the Z coordinate a little bit in xEdit.

 

I considered just plowing down the street and doing each dwelling or store as I hit them, but I do want to work on those custom Companions outfits and so I decided to skip ahead to Jorrvaskr, which is what we'll be talking about today.

 

On the way there, I did take a moment to gag the two hostages, since when you try to speak with them their dialogue indicates they're gagged. How I want to gag them does call for some thought. My first thought is ball gags.

 

Credit: https://www.deviantart.com/twinphoto/art/Realisation-349876737

 

Let's not kid ourselves, there's something a little sexy about how a well-fitted ball gag can look, but Skyrim has two problems when it comes to these accessories. First, in my experience the sizing of Skyrim gags is very hit or miss. They're almost always too far forward in the mouth and they tend to be too small to really stretch the jaw at all. I'm pretty sure this is because of issues with modifying the face graph, which is fine, but it takes away from the potential of these accessories. The second issue is that most of the ball gags that don't cover up a lot of the actor's face are in Devious Devices or mods that depend on DD. Now don't get me wrong, DD is a solid mod that has enabled a lot of really impressive developments in this community, but I'm trying to avoid using it in this build if I can. Some of that is just a technical challenge for me, and some of it is that I want to keep the background load on the engine relatively low. For better or for worse, DD can be a kind of heavyweight mod (though as I understand it there are efforts moving forward to optimize it, which is great). 

 

Since I don't have a ton of options I like in the ZAZ animation pack, I'm going to use a more conventional gag, seen below.

 

 

This is the ZBF Leather Panel Gag, and we'll add it to both actors' custom outfits.

 

 

Let's quickly check on those two before we move onto the Companions' hall.

 

 

Looks good. OK, back to the Companions. There are a ton of options for customizing Jorrvaskr itself, but most of them are either quite limited in scope or involve lore-unfriendly elements that I just don't have the patience to fine-tune right now. This Is Jorrvaskr has kind of grown on me, and I'm going to give that one a spin. This took a moment because it did require a Lux update, but that went pretty smoothly. The main thing I had to do was compare some new patches to the existing 3rd party ones I had an decide which ones to keep; in at least one case I kept the legacy patch because I didn't feel like redoing ESP compacting. I might still loop back for this in the future, but not today.

 

In terms of compatibility work, a bunch of mods touch Jorrvaskr, including some of the usual suspects like Cheesemod and LOTD. I put together a list of references of interest and checked on them inside the game. Ultimately, I determined that this update was going to actually take quite a while, so I tabled it for the time being. The issue was not so much the upstairs part of the hall as it was the basement, which a number of mod do extensive things with. I may need to loop back and choose an overhaul that is less intrusive in terms of editing the basement. That's not to say that this was a total waste of time - the Lux update connected me with several patches for existing mods I had, so we'll get some enhancement on that score.

 

OK, if we're not going to do the hall itself, let's proceed to customizing the Companions. Let's start with Athis and Njada since they do that brawl scene at the beginning.

 

Athis is a Dark Elf who considers himself - whether it's an adopted identity or rooted in his origins - an Ashlander. In the vanilla game he wears light armor but has heavy armor skill; USSEP gives him light armor skill as well. He's a sword and board fighter, so like Ria he'll have armor on his right arm and hand, and a pauldron on his left arm, though the armor will be lighter. He should also incorporate some kind of Dunmer armor into his outfit, I think.

 

Njada a Nord sword and board fighter who wears light armor. While her armor should incorporate some Wolf parts, like Athis we'll use light armor materials in general for her. 

 

I made this rough cut shown below for Athis, which I think works for a good starting point. This goes with the lighter armor but still follows the general arrangement for sword and shield fighters that we established with Ria.

 

 

I'm somewhat on the fence about what to do with the tender bits. There are certainly plenty of underwear options, but I'm also kind of kicking around using one of Vivi's cages, perhaps in conjunction with the sorely underused ZAZ ball stretcher.

 

 

I kind of liked toying with the idea of the token elf getting some "trick" armor as a hazing prank, and I did have some success spinning up the geometry for device. If I'd proceeded further forward with it I would have done some additional cleanup used the "squish" techniques I talked about earlier to get the presentation looking a little better. However, after further consideration I decided to not go this route with Athis. If nothing else, it doesn't fit the concept of the armor being easy to shed when turning into a werewolf. So we'll go with a more conventional bottom part on his from the TAWOBAE studded set

 

 

After a little cleanup to keep the straps from overlapping oddly, I was ready to generate his custom nifs and create his custom outfit. I won't be giving him a custom body texture, so we just need to rig up the armor and then create his custom outfit. In addition to the armor and helmet, we'll be giving him normal boots (per his vanilla outfit) and also a Companions cape from Cloaks of Skyrim.

 

 

 

I mostly got it right on the first try, though I think the cloak makes the outfit a little "busy" and I forgot to add the ARMA slot references for the leggings. After another round of tweaks in xEdit we're looking a lot better:

 

 

OK, so Athis is all set. Now let's do Njada. Originally I was going to mostly draw on TAWOBA pieces like with the other characters so far, but I just discovered that there's now a BHUNP v4 version of the TES Bikini Armor set, and in general I really like it. I started out by mirroring the armor along the X coordinate so the right arm rather than the left arm would be protected. Then I removed the bottom part, so this was the starting position:

 

 

On small annoyance with mirroring it this way is that I'll need to redo the squeeze slider, but that won't be too much of a problem. Below you can see it with a little bit of additional geometry added on.

 

 

Now let's add the squish to the top, then mirror the glove before we set up the rest of the outfit. 

 

Well, at least that's where I was yesterday. Fast forwarding to today, I got rid of the mirroring on the armor because it was messing up some of the settings for the body. Let's hop into the game and see how it looks. Njada is another ARIS body, so we'll want to pay attention to whether or not we want to do a custom skin as well. 

 

I hopped into the game and spawned a copy of Njada to look at, but the game crashed as soon as OBody touched her. The issue was definitely related to her morphs, so I'll need to drill into this a little to see if there's an obvious issue.

 

 

I refuse to believe that this is actually the morph that is crashing the game. This has to be a red herring, right?

 

 

The problem does seem to be rooted in the reference body, and just to be safe I rebuilt all its bone weights off the standard BHUNP V4 reference body. I also removed the breast bones per my normal squish procedures. OK, let's try this again.

 

 

OBody seems to be playing nice now, but we still need to do a little work. I kind of expected the issue with her hand not appearing - there's an issue with the vanilla bodyslides that I thought would do this but I left alone for testing purposes. Also, the squish sliders on this model are pretty aggressive (provided by the author) and I think I need to done them down just a little to give the top a more natural shape. 

 

The other thing that's a little less obvious is Njada's hair. When I was looking at her records it seemed like she was supposed to have a different hair color, so I need to check on what's happening there. 

 

 

So she is indeed programmed to have hair color #14, which is like a white/gray tone. The screenshots gave her sort of an auburn color. 

 

 

Kind of looks like her custom hair texture isn't inheriting its color from the NPC_ record. I guess that's fine. I do want to confirm that color #14 is correctly rendering on normal hairstyles. There's always the possibility that the color is just screwed up.

 

 

Njada's geometry looks right, but I was getting odd results in Racemenu looking at the hairstyles. I checked the page for the hair color mod I was using and I found something interesting: 

 

 

So year, it seems like there might be some issues with the hair definitions. Let's load in a different set of definitions and see if things look better. 

 

 

Replacing the mod fixed the player hair colors in the character creator but it didn't change hers, so I'm pretty sure her custom hair just doesn't inherit the color from the NPC record. So now let's do something about that ARIS body. In theory at least I could probably leave it as-is, but I kept this body for Ria and I don't really want duplicates of bodies for characters who are going to be pretty exposed in their bikini armor (with the exception of Farkas and Vilkis, for reasons that should be obvious). I decided to try the custom skin from this mod. I also rigged her up with some body hair for color matching. I also updated the head textures.

 

 

 

The skin texture looks good, but there's a bit of mesh intrusion with the thigh boots. Let's see if we can fix that so we don't have to resort to doing a whole new setup for the feet.

 

 

 

Her boots are still screwed up. The answer is probably going to be to make them part of her body mesh and then remove the parts of her legs underneath. Let's give that a spin and see if it works better.

 

 

Looking good! I think we can officially declare these warriors as complete. So who else hangs out in Jorrvasker? Let's take a quick survey. We know about the members of the guild of course but there seem to be some other people here too.

 

 

Not to toot my own horn, but I'm really happy with how Adrianne came out. She's definitely a standard I aspire to with my other custom NPCs.

 

 

Interesting, I hadn't realized that Nazeem's assistant (ex-slave from Hydragorgon) could come up as male with the edits I made. That adds a whole creepy new layer to his hydragorgon dialogue.

 

 

These characters are all members of the Companions - and the people who I need to do custom armor for. 

 

 

Tilma, Brill, and the generic housekeeper are servants. I expect to leave them with their vanilla outfits, if for no other reason than to contrast with the fancy bikini armor.

 

 

That leaves Vignar. He's a civilian, but he's a former Companion according to his lore. Currently he wears generic upper class clothing, but I wonder if I want to give him a custom look that incorporates some Companions touches. Maybe use that cape that was a bit too busy for the armor. I'll have to think on that.

 

In any case, I think that's a good place to stop for today. Despite a false start with the Jorrvaskr overhaul, we generated two custom outfits that I'm very happy with and I think I have a good idea about where to go with the rest of the Companions characters. Once they are done, then I'll loop back and take a second look at overhauling their building. Perhaps I'll only do an exterior edit if the interior is going to be too finnicky.