Try the chocolate-dipped cones at Dairy Queen.

One thing I've been wanting to have in this mod for quite a while is some kind of bodysuit to use with the cyborg bodies, but I've never really found a good solution for it. Part of the problem is that I was only considering a mesh-based approach; specifically, taking an existing 'bodysuit' mesh and modifying it to work with the cyborg bodies, like I have with the outfits in the Extras pack. I even did some experiments to that end some months back, but never got very far with them because it seemed like it would be rather a lot of effort for fairly spotty results. Compatibility with the Gynoid set in particular was problematic, as it's very closely-fitted and has very tight tolerances on its 'cut' lines. And moving to the Variable Limb concept expanded the problems, since I would have to provide multiple versions of the bodysuit to cover all the different limb options. Nothing impossible, but again, more effort than I really wanted to put into it.

But then I came across that skin texture override for armors that I used to apply the 'burned Astrid' skins down-blog, and decided to play around with that approach instead. 

As you can see above, it works! The new texture is applied to the entire body at the body mesh level, so it uses the same cuts for the cyborg parts and there's no fitment issues to worry about. It doesn't require any work in Bodyslide at all, just building the new texture set in the Creation Kit and making a version of the armor entires pointing to it instead of the default skin texture. Don't even need to build new meshes for it, since it just reuses the existing one. But it's not without its problems.

My initial thought was that I could just use assets from stuff like the old Bodysuits mod and just swap them in for the skin textures, but this is Skyrim so of course that's not going to work. The primary textures themselves transfer just fine, but using a normal map made for an armor as a skin texture component has Weird Results that didn't seem to get alleviated by messing around with any of the settings in the texture set's CK properties, and since the stuff that gives some of the Bodysuits chainmail effects is all on the normal maps, those were a no-go. I'm pretty sure I know how to get them to work, but it would require changing some settings for the body mesh itself, which would defeat the entire point of doing things this way.

So I'm stuck using existing skin normals. And I'd actually like to leave that at default, since there's a lot of options for those and I know I find it a bit annoying when something comes in and hijacks them. Unfortunately, when I attempted to do a 'rubber coated' look instead of the chainmail and simply swapped the primary texture to a solid black on my current skin settings, it just looked terrible. Black, yes, but also completely flat and un-reflective. It took me a while to realize that it was doing that because I like un-reflective skin, when it's skin, and had used a bronze shine-killing mod ages ago to replace the default specular layer. I didn't want to give that up, but I needed a new specular layer to sub in to make this variant skin look like an actual coating on the body.  Some Googling brought me to the Demoniac set, which is all about the specular layers. Copy one of those out, plug it into the texture set, and boom, one shockproof rubberized cyborg trooper. 

It's not a perfect solution. I understand that there's some ENB settings that can screw with stuff like this, and I'm going to have to do some digging around to see if there's still a way to do a chainmail suit with this method. But it gets me right about the look that I wanted with a minimal amount of overhead, so I'm definitely planning on implementing it in some way. Have a pretty good idea of how I'm going to do it, even, along with the burned body. It'll have to wait until I get the Edhildil Variable set done, though. 

I still might end up doing some mesh-based bodysuits, too. The Ripped Bodysuit is damned near perfectly on-theme for this stuff, as far as I'm concerned, and revisiting Naked Ekans' cyborg follower reminded me of the Skyrim conversions for the Pampas suits from FO4. Even if I don't do anything with the fuller bodysuits there, a couple of the leotards and such would be ideal for my purposes, with maybe some light recoloring. But that's all for the future.

The squeaky future. 

Do you really need pants when you've been hermetically sealed?