Hi folks, hope you are all bearing up well during another record-high-temperature summer. Between some home improvement projects and my office window subjecting me to the "bug under a magnifying glass effect" during the afternoon, I didn't do too much hobbying over the weekend. Things are a little more bearable today however, so I wanted to take a few minutes to advance my Soljund's Sinkhold project a little.

 

After some further consideration, I decided to leave the NPC faces alone with the exception of the Ork blacksmith, for whom I had already picked out a custom face. I used the same technical approach I had previously applied to the male vampires for the cannibal banquet scene, which involved grabbing the source mod, then changing the form ID numbers on the replacers so they are standalone (and unconnected to anything), then I changed the form ID (again) on the one face I wanted to override the custom NPC. Once that was done, I merged the appearance data on her record with the original modded version. I also went into the all the custom NPCs and patched their facegen data so that it used the proper skin textures and would avoid tint mismatches at the neck.

 

While I was getting resources for this project, I noticed another interesting new mod: an overhaul for The Taste of Death. Based on the written description, this sounds like a good addition to my game, though I don't know if I want to start messing around with overhauling the Markarth area just yet. Still I'm putting it in my proverbial back pocket for more attention in the near future. Actually, the Soljund project will be a good foundational exercise for that one, since I'll need to put some thought into the Reach "look" for characters as I move forward with this integration.

 

 

Before we patch the other actors (the ones whose faces I'm keeping), let's make sure this custom job is working properly in-game.

 

 

OK, tint issues and all her custom face geometry is loading in without problems, so looks good.

 

 

I wonder if I should customize her vendor list to include some of the weapons from Armoury of Tamriel that are made in the Ork style but using conventional materials. I think that would be a nice little extra benefit to come from visiting her, especially at lower levels.

 

First things first though, let's patch the rest of the new NPCs from this mod.

 

 

While it's not the worst mismatch ever, there's definitely a difference between the vanilla face textures (which in D&D are the Nord textures) and the Breton ones. We'll fix this by opening up each of the face nifs and changing the texture path to the custom ones from D&D. 

 

 

 

Now the skin tones are consistent with the bodies. That pretty much completes the most basic level of integration. I could walk away from this mod at this point and it would be a fully functional extension of the game world. But I want to put some more effort into it before I do that. The next logical thing to look at is clothing. For the Reach region, which basically covers everything west of Fort Sungard and south of Druadach Redoubt, I envision there are basically three general clothing templates:

 

• Urban Elites: These are the people who live in the upper class areas of Markarth, as well as artisans and village chiefs throughout the Reach who have the resources to imitate their affectations. The "Urban Elite" style is influenced by the Temple of Dibella and tends towards visible skin and comfortable materials. Jewelry and adornments are common in this style (though not so common in the 'poseur' subclass). Billiame, the village chief, belongs to this class, as does his wife Larza*. 
• Assimilated Commoners: Many non-Bretons and especially Nords in the Reach fall into this category, but so do Bretons who may have moved to the region from elsewhere and who are not deeply immersed in Reachman culture. Their outfits will reflect Nordic styles or, in the case of upper class people who aren't tied to Markarth, Cyrodiilic styles. Tuthul's wife Midelle belongs to this class.
• Native Reachmen: Breton commoners who are native to the Reach fall into the category, especially those who live in isolated rural areas. I kind of envision them having a bit of a Celtic look and I'll likely try adapting this mod for the baseline outfits. The miners Perth and Tuthul, as well as Perth's sister Prynn belong to this class.

 

* if Larza's backstory bears out her having any kind of meaningful Orkish cultural heritage, we'll want to reflect this in her outfit as well.

 

Before I start putting together I want to go back into the game to talk to these characters and get their stories. This'll require a quick run through the dungeon to unlock the relevant dialogue, after which we'll have some discussions to learn more about these characters.

 

 

That turned out to be a bit of an anticlimax - other than unlocked a few small side quests, the characters in the Sinkhole don't actually have a lot of dialogue beyond greeting lines. This does kind of make my job easier though since I'm not getting stuck having to adapt to a ton of detailed background.

 

Since Midelle is in the "assimilated commoners" class, we're going to just leave her outfit alone. She'll get the nord-style (albeit cut for more coverage and protection from the elements) outfit that she'd get in most other holds. 

 

Tuthul, Perth, and Prynn will get an outfit adapted from the Celtic Reach outfits if I can get them working right with the appropriate bodies. Let's grab the assets for that mod and then do some Outfit Studio work. For this mod we won't be activating the plugin files or actually going into the game with any replacer nifs - though we will be loading the textures of course. We'll be looking to use the bare-chested male outfit for both Miners (relevant to some later work I have to do) and the "kilt and sash over clothes" outfit for Prynn. By the way, as we get into these outfit tweaks I do have some bad news - most of the mods I've been looking at for customization assets all have varying levels of closed permissions, so while I do hope to share some of the products of this work, the custom outfits probably won't be one of them.

 

Before I even hit Outfit Studio, I started by tagging all the plugins as "optional ESPs" so they won't load into my load order. I won't be using any of the plugin data from this mod. 

 

 

As you can see, the mod itself is overwriting some of the vanilla nifs. After we've finished working with the mod we'll need to move or hide these conflicting files. It's slightly frustrating that the mod author chose to also replace the vanilla dds files, which is going to be more work for me in terms of making these standalone. But hey, good news! On further review all the replacer stuff seems to just be minor tweaks of the vanilla versions. The new models are indeed separate files, including their textures. So that's a nice relief.

 

 

This one appears to just be a reskinned mage apprentice robe, which makes me wonder... can I load up my existing BHUNP mage apprentice outfit and just drop this texture on top of it? Let's find out.

 

 

Kind of, but not exactly. So we'll still need to do something with the modded mesh to start. While we're at it, what's with this low resolution texture on the shirt material?

 

 

Yuck! Look at those muddy textures. We'll want to clean those up before we finish implementing this outfit. For now though, let's first get the geometry working for BHUNP.

 

 

Digging deeper behind the scenes, I keep finding little defects in this mod that are making the conversion more difficult than it needs to be. I tried a few other technical approaches but they too had complications that, the of the day, traced back to the assets from this Scottish clothing mod. So I'm going to shelf that one for a while and start looking for different options.

 

As I reach this point, the sun is starting to hit that point where it gets uncomfortable to work in my office, so we'll call this one a day for now. I'm going to do some research into alternate asset sources and see what we can come up with when I return!