Has anyone got the mod Bodychange to work for vampire races?

[Nohrin]

The mod Bodychange is great. Love the mod to death. Freedom of switching body shapes on the fly is great. I recently discovered a fix for the elf races in the Nexusmods forum for Bodychange. I had to edit the .esp in Creation Kit and tes5edit. While I was fixing the elf races, I was also able to enable vampire races. However, while the elf races will now work, the vampire races still will not. The problem seems that the body will switch properly, but the head textures will not change. They default to your default textures. One of my skin textures is a dark tan, and so while changing, its VERY obvious to see a bright pale face (fair skin default) on top of a dark tanned body. Again, this issue is only with the vampire races (which normally are disabled, along with the elf races). I cannot figure out why fixing the elf races worked, but not the vampire races. I will copy/paste the mini guide I followed to fix Bodychange for elf races, if that might help you help me figure out how to get vampire races to work.

 

 

Spoiler

"FIX (unofficial) for Elven Races until author updates:

Requires TESVEdit and Creation Kit:

There are two issues with elven races currently in this mod. For one, the armor "BodyChangeX" (where X is 1-9 depending on which custom slot you are useing) contains a lot of extra armatures, including the torso, feet, and hands for all the elven races, beast races, children, a horse, and even a sabre cat. This is probably due to the way creation kit does certain things.
The fix for this issue is to open BodyChange.esp in TESVEdit, go to Armor, and delete these extra armatures off BodyChangeSkin(1-9), leaveing only BodyChangeFeetX, BodyChangeHandsX, and BodyChangeTorsoX. Exit the program and select save (only save BodyChange.esp, if you made any changes by accident to Skyrim.ESM DO NOT SAVE THEM!

Now if you only do this, its actually made things worse, as now elven races when changed with BodyChange will have no body at all. This is because the armor addons are not enabled for elven races. Now open BodyChange.ESP in creation kit (make sure to make it active!. Go to each armor part (BodyChangeTorsoX, BodyChangeFeetX, and BodyChangeHandsX (Put BodyChange in filter in the object window and click ArmorAddon to find them easier, there are 27 parts to change). Open each and under Additional Races, highlight DarkElfRace, DarkElfRaceVampire, HighElfRace, HighElfRaceVampire, WoodElfRace, WoodElfRaceVampire and click ok. Save and Exit creation kit.

This will fully add BodyChange support for the elven races. If you want to save yourself some work, you can do it only for the Custom Slot you intend to use, but then only it will work with elven races.

Hope this helps until ElPsy fixes it officially."

If anyone could help me get vampires to work with this wonderful mod (I am quite inexperienced when it comes to anything involving tes5edit or creation kit) it would be most appreciated.

[RW311]

Once you switch body as vampire can you go into racemenu and see if just maybe tweaking any tint slider then closing would fix this?

 

 

 

[Nohrin]

1 hour ago, RW311 said:

Once you switch body as vampire can you go into racemenu and see if just maybe tweaking any tint slider then closing would fix this?

 

 

 

I will give this a shot. If I recall correctly, by applying a preset onto my character, it temporarily fixes the head texture. I forget which causes it to get messed up (showracemenu or switching to a different body.

 

Edit: I also remembered that whenever switching bodies, it temporarily (as in a second or two) uses the correct head texture, but then immediately switches to default (the texture that every NPC uses, which I believe is being provided by "All in one HDT Pussy" Fair Skin Complexion). I tried removing all mod related head textures, and it still uses fairskin, which makes me believe it is somehow related to my save file.

[Nohrin]

Okay so changing my characters skin color (is this what you meant by tint slider?) it changes my characters body, and then when I close, it does not effect the head at all.

 

I believe the issue is related to the "reset origin" function of the mod. It captures your characters head and textures whenever you switch races. For some reason it is stuck to the original textures you choose with that "reset origin" button every time you change races. This is not what happens when you play any standard race (non vampire, or even certain custom races like Succubus). I just can't wrap my head around the vampire races not working, when I enabled them just the same as the elf races (in creation kit, you have to highlight them under armormod). 

 

I also edited the head meshes BSLightning thingy in each of my bodychange folders, directing the headmeshes to use "femaleheadvampire" textures that I simply copy/pasted and renamed from texture mods.

 

Edit#1: I also was wrong about presets from Racemenu temporarily fixing the head texture. Applying a preset (even of the correct head texture) did not change the head textures in anyway. The body as always changes perfectly.

[RW311]

That might explain the problem.

Your vampire is not a playable race and the head and head texture sets were actually changed when you tranformed so the tint layer data for the changed head is loaded from the original pc facegen data head and if that is stored different than what your current head body looked like....

 

I don't know if you can edit nonplayable races in racemenu I was just curious if it would force the facegen to update but possibly the mod is preventing it.

 

[Nohrin]

26 minutes ago, RW311 said:

That might explain the problem.

Your vampire is not a playable race and the head and head texture sets were actually changed when you tranformed so the tint layer data for the changed head is loaded from the original pc facegen data head and if that is stored different than what your current head body looked like....

 

I don't know if you can edit nonplayable races in racemenu I was just curious if it would force the facegen to update but possibly the mod is preventing it.

 

Wouldn't editing the head meshes like the mod author tells you to get around this problem? The mod author basically tells us to edit the headmesh's texture paths to link to the CustombodyX texture folder. I did this, and instead of linking to "femalehead.dds" I copy/pasted the femalehead.dds and renamed it "femaleheadvampire.dds". This way the head mesh is linking to the "vampire" texture (which is the exact same as a human texture, just the updated name). 

 

I know you can do this without Bodychange. By copy/pasting human textures and renaming them vampire, that removes the sunken face and vampires will look exactly like humans. So I am not sure why Bodychange is not following the same. 

 

Edit: heading to bed now. If you can think of something I could do to make vampires work, let me know and I will try in the morning. I am willing to dive into the creation kit, if I actually have to edit this mod to be vampire friendly. For personal usage of course.

[RW311]

If you edited the nif but the texture of the head did not change it's likely the vampire race you were turned into uses texture sets to add the textures and this will override whatever instruction is in the nif.

 

If you physically changed the texture but the head did not load those textuers then the problem may be it's still using a texture path saved by that mod using that capture function.

 

So if you know what texture the head is currently loading then back that one up and replace it with one that matches the current body of your character then you can see if tint data was in fact updated, head and body tint should match, this may tell you if you can make the vampires work in this mod and if it will be easy or a pain in the ass.

 

The updating of tint layer data is all I'm really concerned with, if the mod is just loading the wrong texture files this can usually be fixed with some esp edits but if it won't update the tint data of the head after race switch it's another problem that will be harder to solve.