2024 AE Build: It's Always The Obvious Thing You Miss
Entry posted by gregaaz in 2024 AE Build
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So if you read my last blog entry and its postscript comment, you'll know that I had a minor dyslexic moment and made a "prisonalternative_solitude_executions.esp" folder instead of a prisonalternative_executions_solitude.esp one. Because the original facegen was never shipped with the mod there wasn't a valid facegen texture folder for the plugin and the game crashed out when it went looking for the face tint textures. Once I corrected that, I was able to spawn the NPCs from this mod correctly.
I toyed with giving them custom outfits, but after consideration I decided that was too much effort for some NPCs who will only be seen during a single "bad end" scene - the custom faces were enough. So I restored their templating data (which included inventory) and moved on to the male half of the party.
I'm going to pull the male vampires from a different replacer set, but I'll apply the same methodology (just without the typos!). Since we won't be using every character from this resource, we'll also start out by changing all the Form IDs for these actors so they don't replace their vanilla counterparts. We'll hold the rest of them in reserve for other uses.
Here we have the form IDs remapped to the mod itself; I also renamed the main FaceGen folder. Now let's pick out who we want at the party. We need 4.
We'll do these guys. Disappointingly, "Mister Moustache" isn't in the version of the mod I installed and I don't feel like installing more of its stuff right now, so we'll use Malkus instead for the last slot.
With the form IDs remapped, we'll strip out the non-appearance aspects of these characters in favor of what was in the underling mod, then we'll move the facegen to the new folder.
One thing with these guys is that they do not have custom bodies, so I'll have to go back and update their face textures most likely, lest we suffer from the "vampire orc face" bug. That took a little extra work but nothing out of the ordinary; I just looked up their face textures and made sure they were properly reflected in the face texture paths within each nif. Let's see how these guys look in-game.
Something's busted with the Orc's eye textures but otherwise the characters loaded in just fine. I have mixed feelings about them all being in Volkihar regalia. On one hand, it makes more sense for Sybille to be in league with "civilized" vampires than with just some randos, but on the other hand I don't really see these guys wearing their faction colors to a party in Solitude, no matter how exclusive. I'll have to put some further thought into doing custom outfits for them.
Malkus' eyes call for a diffuse map out of TEOB that is indeed repackaged with this mod but isn't in the texture path that the author entered. I grabbed the correct texture path from file explorer and pasted it into the nif.
Now let's go get arrested in Solitude and see how the scene looks with the new faces loaded in.
After making the chance of the vampire feast event 100%, I went and got myself thrown in jail.
It's too dark to see for sure if the guard's templated face loaded in, but it looks like the tip of his nose at least matches the bit of illuminated bicep. I'm pretty sure we've got the jailer working right. Sybille, of course, has always had her custom outfit and face working right, so nothing new there.
Transfer to the holding cell worked fine. Interesting detail that when I went in without a follower, the game spawned a random additional prisoner so the whole scene can play out.
All the characters loaded in OK but it looks like maybe I forgot to restore the outfit records to the two female attendees. No real problem though, I'm kind of already half way through talking myself into doing custom outfits for this scene, so we'll come back to that later.
Most importantly: no black face overlays! The spitroast scene itself worked pretty well with only minor issues that are about what I'd expect from doing this with a male character (the schlong not shading with the rest of the body and the pole being slightly out of alignment).
Now that we've fed the vampires, let's switch gears and address the other noticeable black face overlay issue: the two guards from the outdoor event pack. They have a somewhat more complex issue, in that they also use a faction outfit that won't necessarily match the location they're working in. So we'll also do an outfit swap for them - and I know exactly what outfit to use. But first things first, the faces. We need to pull templates that use the Male Guard voice, so we're going to dip into the same leveled NPC list we used earlier on the main Prison Alternative jailer.
Easy edit there, though we'll actually make this a patch rather than committing an edit directly to the mod's esp file. That'll fix the black face overlay. Now the other part is the outfit. The Riften Guard outfit only really makes sense in... Riften. So we'll use the executioner outfit instead, since that's location and faction agnostic. Moreover, considering how this scene goes, let's get the exposed version of that outfit and save it as a standalone clothing item.
Now I'd thought that Kreiste had included a version of this in his HIMBO exposed outfits pack but I don't see it. Fortunately, I know The Isle of Mara includes a version of this so I'll import that into Outfit Studio and just convert it to use the HIMBO body.
LOL hang on, that's a bit more exposed that I remembered. Not saying I can't work with it, but... let's look at our alternatives. Further review revealed that this one is identical to the outfit that ships with SOS Revealing Armor, and the vanilla HIMBO armor, while it might have had some potential, swings the other way in terms of coverage (and it's a single-piece outfit so chopping it up would involve more work than I really want to do right now).
After some cogitation however, I think I figured it out. The execution party's outfit will mix Fur Armor 2 (no changes required - just the vanilla one) with the harness and executioner mask as separate items. The latter two will have the SOS No Strip keyword on them so they stay on when the kilt comes off for "fun" with the prisoner.
I also moved the straps to Slot 56 so they won't conflict with the fur armor. Then I made a quick outfit and hooked it up to the guards. Now let's roll a new character and get in trouble with the law.
The guard's template is working right - no more black face. Though in retrospect I should have given him the modified outfit, too.
After a little "softening up," the execution scene started.
Haha, I'd forgotten how - being Nord - the guards would automatically use the skimpy versions of the fur armor. That kind of works, though!
The straps successfully stayed equipped when the guards' pants came off.
This is what happens when you don't use your Sexlab animation filters...
I think we can declare success on today's work. On further consideration I decided to not do the custom outfit for the vampires right now - I'll just fix issue that was causing them to spawn with no inventory and go from there.
I'm not sure what the next topic to work on is going to be. Might be finishing up the companions, might be doing more facelifts on Hydragorgon actors... I guess we'll see what takes my interest in the days ahead.
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