Serana as a vampire lord with shaydows vampire lord overhaul

[shandareth]

Hello everyone!

 

I discovered the amazing Shaydows Vampire lord overhaul for my char and so I thought it would be amazing if also Serana could transform as a vampire lord (and she can with Serana's secret mod or other mods)  and keep that sexy appereance.

The problem is that when she transform she uses the right body but the head and hair is completely messed up (she become ugly and bald). I also use Seranaholic which changes the look of Serana and would like to have that face and hair when she transforms. 

Is it possible to edit some things in creation kit to fix the thing? I just started using creation kit so I don't really know what I need to do to make that possible.

I don't think Shaydows still provides support for his mod as it is a very old mod so I'm writing this here hoping it is the right section can someone help me figure out how to do this kind of thing?

thank you!

[RW311]

Depends how the mod does the transform but it may be possible. In order to help though I need to know what is the mod  you use for transforming her because I need to see how it set it up otherwise no idea what problem to solve for as there can be many reasons why it doesn't work right.

I set this up to work once before with Harkon using the shaydow mod where he retained the human look but used the vampire lord animation/skeleton but it was not that tricky since his transformation is just scripted scenes and so I just had to assign and modify the references and character models that were used.

[shandareth]

16 hours ago, RW311 said:

Depends how the mod does the transform but it may be possible. In order to help though I need to know what is the mod  you use for transforming her because I need to see how it set it up otherwise no idea what problem to solve for as there can be many reasons why it doesn't work right.

I set this up to work once before with Harkon using the shaydow mod where he retained the human look but used the vampire lord animation/skeleton but it was not that tricky since his transformation is just scripted scenes and so I just had to assign and modify the references and character models that were used.

Thanks for replying

So the mod I use for transforming her is Serana Secret:

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/23354/

 

She is supposed to transform when you transform

[RW311]

Ok I looked back through my old mod setup and remember that shaydows mod would not work to transform npc head back from vampire lord, It was a few years ago I was messing with this so I only vaguely remember why, only that I ended up not using the shaydow mod to make it work and just used the animations from that mod because it fixed the vanilla bent head of the vampire lord animation.

 

This mod https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/25321?tab=posts  should make it possible to keep head preset and it should revert back because it looks like the same way I did it. There is some issue with seranaholic mod and any race change mod however there is a patch available on seranaholic to fix it called something like compatibility with vampire lord patch - maybe you already have that?

 

If you still want to use shaydows stuff it would be possible to combine with the better vampire transform mod so you could still have some things like animations and maybe the armors with some file swap and some editing of just file names.

 

 

[shandareth]

Oh yeah that was actually the first vampire lord mod that I tried, I changed to the shaydows mod mainly because of the animations ?

anyway yeah I could switch to that, but I would like to keep animations and the armor from shaydows. 

I'm downloading the mod right now and yes I already have the compatibility patch you mentioned for seranaholic. So with that mod everything is automatically set up for Serana?

But how do I replace animations and armor from shaydows to this one?

 

EDIT: Ok I managed to switch to the Better Vampire Lord mod, and to keep animations and armor from Shaydows, and everything works fine on my character. The problem persist with serana but in a different way: She uses the right body and armor, but she's now missing her Head and Hair, the only things that remain the same are the mouth and eyebrows. So I went in creation kit to see if I could find the problem and I discovered that when I preview her head is actually only mouth and hair! Is a bit strange because  I can see her properly in game but not in the creation kit or when she transforms.

 

Spoiler

this is how her head looks like in creation kit and when she transforms ?

 

 

EDIT 2: Ok apparently all the head parts are located in a single nif file in the facegendata or facegeomdata folder and all the paths in the creation kit are messed up.... and I'm totally lost here ? I really don't know what I need to do

[RW311]

I would recommend if you are going to do anything with modding especially where custom npc is edited to use tes5edit mostly and ck only if you need to create something new (or duplicate) because it is so limited and hard to use for looking at data in comparison and also has some issues where it can break npc data when editing race or custom head parts.

 

Makes sure you don't hit save in ck after opening that render window unless you cancelled out of the npc editing section, if you press ok and then save npc data is likely all screwed up so be careful with that in ck.

 

I will install the serana mod and bvlt mod to see if this custom head can be made to work, hopefully it's just going to need to be added to some formlist or something simple, when doing this before I was using vanilla head and parts so did not have any problem like that.

[shandareth]

thanks for the advice, so far I haven't broke anything yet eheh ? As I saw that all the parts were missing path files I closed the creation kit and didn't save anything.

I actually tried tes5edit today with no avail (I'm a total noob), but I think the problem is something related to the fact that seranaholic uses facegendata in a unique nif file but I couldn't find any correlation with it in the creation kit, and I absolutely don't know how the face it is actually working in game because CK shows missing paths in each of the head parts, but it actually works for the mod.. I think if I could manage to export all the head parts from that unique nif file and set the right paths to the NPC in the CK it would work... maybe

Anyway thank you for your patience and for trying to help me, I really appreciate that

 

[RW311]

I am not seeing any broken file paths in serana holic mod, looks like from seeing all 3 of those mods in tes5edit that they should work right out of the box.. but I have no time to test this yet.

 

Can you share an image of what you see is broken in your esp? And instead of messing with broken file path I would get tes5edit working and verfiy that it is in fact broken and try reinstalling that esp patch instead because breaking file paths or making deleted references is something ck likes to do just to keep you up all night.

 

[shandareth]

You are actually right , there are no path problems with Seranaholic mod itself , apart from that there is no femalehead.nif in actors\character\Serana\femalehead.nif. I discovered that the mod which messed up my paths was the compatibility patch for vampire lord because I didn't notice that It was not updated to the last version of seranaholic , which is 1.8 and the patch replaces directly the Serana.esp.

I tried then to downgrade seranaholic to 1.6 (sadly, because I liked the new one more), installed the compatibility patch again aand the problem when she transform still persist but in a less critical state I guess: she is not bald anymore (she is bald only when she transform outside because of her damn hood, which I intend to remove so not a big deal), she actually have a face now, but is the classic grey ugly face. Plus now she has no hands / feet in vampire lord I confirm that without Seranaholic everything including hands/feet works just fine

 

Spoiler

[RW311]

Is her face brown all the time or only with transform?

 

Some issues with testing npc in game is that changes made to some npc data just won't update and you end up with brown face or neck gap.

I look at the serana patch and you don't need it because you can make the base mod compatible easy enough and that way you can keep the version you had because like you said the patch is not for the latest version of the mod and adding that in maybe causing some of these problems.

 If you can get tes5edit running I can show you how to fix the base serana mod so you don't need that patch, all that has to change is a couple of armor addon records need the first person flags changed to match base game because that is all that was changed, and with the better transfrom mod loaded after serana it already fixes one of them anyway.

[shandareth]

Her face is perfect in normal form, she changes it only when she transform, that is the weird thing. I managed to get tes5edit running , but do you think that could solve the issue? because even with version 1.6 of seranaholic , with no broken paths or records, the transformation is still half-messed up, as you can see in the screenshot above.

 

[RW311]

Im gonna go test if the problem is the worn armor on seranaholic mod because that is what I suspect is breaking the transition for you, seeing that it works fine for vanilla serana that is really the only thing different.

[RW311]

Well that serana secret mod doesn't work for me at all, tried messing around with the quests but the only thing happening is it equips or removes her weapon but I cannot get transform to work...

 

Easy way to test what I'm thinking is causing this problem is open serana esp in tes5edit go to npc and open serana, look for worn armor and remove the reference in that slot and save it then and go back in game and test if you have the problem with transformation.

[shandareth]

OK i'll try that, anyway the last version of serana secret doesn't work for me aswell, I use version 9.0, that seem to work

 

[Varithina]

If you check shaydows vampire replacer there are a ton of errors in it, mostly to do with the race side of it from what I remember things being out of order in it, I gave up using it a while back but still can not find something to replace it with that I actually like.

[shandareth]

14 hours ago, RW311 said:

Well that serana secret mod doesn't work for me at all, tried messing around with the quests but the only thing happening is it equips or removes her weapon but I cannot get transform to work...

 

Easy way to test what I'm thinking is causing this problem is open serana esp in tes5edit go to npc and open serana, look for worn armor and remove the reference in that slot and save it then and go back in game and test if you have the problem with transformation.

Okay I removed the reference in worn armor as you said and it actually fixed the missing hands / feet! Now the only problem remaining is that ugly brown face

EDIT: Could be that the source of all issues with the head is that I don't have any femalehead.tri in actor\character\character assets and femaleheadchargen.tri  and femaleheadraces.tri in actors\character\serana?

Tes5edit clearly points there:

Spoiler

but the mod itself don't install them...

 

 

3 hours ago, Varithina said:

If you check shaydows vampire replacer there are a ton of errors in it, mostly to do with the race side of it from what I remember things being out of order in it, I gave up using it a while back but still can not find something to replace it with that I actually like.

Yes I gave up with that mod, now I'm trying to get Serana (seranaholic appereance) to transform using Better Vampire Lord Transformation instead of shaydows, and it seems like an impossible task ?

[RW311]

You do have those tri files they are vanilla game files so even if you haven't installed some from a mod they are in game, should be in skyrimmeshes.bsa. 

 

I will give the version 9 a try and see what I end up with.

[RW311]

Testing this is proving to be a nightmare because seranasecret mod is so buggy, does work on version 9 but I wish now I had not installed until after she was following me because she goes hostile when taken to the castle or the game just crashes.

 

Anyway, what testing I was able to do shows that with seranaholic installed facgen doesn't load correctly on the transition until you save and reload, so once she has changed to vl you have to save and reload but I don't know if the same issue happens without seranaholic mod because I can't get a reliable vl transition until I redo all these quests again to unbreak her faction state that other mod created. I did load up with and without the seranaholic mod and face was fine so  it is loading her from the facgen like it's supposed to but whether or not it can do it dynamically I have not been able to check. Also you don't need the patch from seranaholic you just need to make sure better vampire transition is loaded after and that you remove the worn armor from serana so her body swap isn't blocked, this can be fixed later also to get working with that worn armor but first to just get the head to swap was all I was looking at.

[shandareth]

Yes the save and reload trick while she is in vl form works , only if you go first in the menu and then reload (buut it is not very playable this way). Is there a way to fix this? Maybe by making the facegen head a fixed model so it would bypass the facegen file ? just an idea, but I'm probably saying nonsense ?

Anyway yeah serana's secret is buggy af , I recently played with it and had some factions problems too, plus serana would istantly teleport to me when I go out of vampire lord form even if she is not my follower , is total crap. I will replace it with another mod that allow her to transform, anyway apart from that buggy mod,

the problem is in the facegen loading then.

[RW311]

Did you have the brown face after transition without seranaholic installed? I am still going to try again to test if that works because if the problem is just with how seranaholic facegen is made that can probably be fixed easy enough.

It's not nonsense, but fixed head is what vampire lord was so you are back to the problem of how to make character and npc use unique head, there are other ways but they are more complicated and probably have much worse bugs to solve.

 

[shandareth]

WIth vanilla face everything is fine, no black face no nothing. The problem arises with Seranaholic AND I guess every kind of mod which alter serana's appereance (I tried other mods too and the black face still appears). So actually Vanilla is the only working normally without having to save and reload.

 

[RW311]

Probably could be fixed with a delay time after the race swap occurs so that npc data can be correctly read. Looks like to me the vanilla works ok but as soon as you modd that it breaks because on race swap the default race data is read first, and since npc data is read only it needs enough time to read that information especially once you have a bunch of new head part references to go look up before sticking that facegen head on that race character.

 

So I think it could be fixed by the spell itself or maybe try to convince some script guru from this site to make something that works better. Possibly reloading npc after race swap or just giving enough time for the head data to load would make this work just fine like it is.

[shandareth]

mmm ok... so basically just need to add a few lines in the script source of the mod that is doing the transformation. I think I could do it, I'll do some research about skyrim's script functions and syntax so maybe I can finally achieve that (aand I will definitely not go with serana secret, I'll find another less-buggy mod ofc). As soon as I manage to do something I will post the results here ?