Modding Help - Changing a custom race into a pre-existing race

[Gundalypse]

I am looking for some tutorial assistance or guidance from someone. I have two issues, first one is I have a custom race NPC that I want to revert into one of the default races, let's say Breton for example, so nude mods and animations would work with it. The second issue is I am trying to convert a bunch of the creation club monsters, the goblins, zombies and skeletal dogs into using the riekling, draugr and wolf races so that the animations from MNC and HC work with them.

 

Thank you in advance for any help.

[Seijin8]

1 hour ago, Gundalypse said:

first one is I have a custom race NPC that I want to revert into one of the default races, let's say Breton for example

 

Using xEdit (or the CK), change the race to whatever you need and make sure all of the NPC's head parts are looking at the relevant race lists.  In xEdit, a headpart entry would need to look like this at the bottom to show up for your NPC correctly after changing the race.

Spoiler

 

 

1 hour ago, Gundalypse said:

so nude mods and animations would work with it

 

If you want to stick with keeping the custom race as it is then by default animations will already work with them (this is for all non-creatures).  Nude mods can be solved by adding an "armor morph" race to the custom race (last line in xEdit) that reflects another vanilla race.

 

The choice to switch to a vanilla race or keep a custom race should be determined by the NPC's body.  If it is uniquely scaled (taller for instance) then it should be a custom race, otherwise make it a vanilla race.

 

1 hour ago, Gundalypse said:

The second issue is I am trying to convert a bunch of the creation club monsters, the goblins, zombies and skeletal dogs into using the riekling, draugr and wolf races so that the animations from MNC and HC work with them.

 

Many separate pieces here.

 

Most of these creatures should already work with MNC in terms of animating.  They won't have appropriate male parts though, and switching their race won't fix that.  They would need their own meshes for arousal to be registered with Creature Framework.  This is not a trivial task; all the pieces are fairly straightforward if you are used to working with the internals of mods, but there are a lot of steps to doing this.  A quick (and likely incomplete) list:

 

1) Make the new body with aroused state.  This can be done in outfit studio by setting the reference skeleton, using the penis of the intended creature as the reference, importing the new creature body and exporting with reference to a new nif file.  (Alternately, if the creature is just a simple retexture of an existing creature, you may be able to just get an existing body mesh and apply the new creature's textures to it.)

 

1B) Optional step, but if you want it to look right, may need to retexture the penis mesh (+sheath + balls if these are also needed) to match up better with the body.

 

2) In the creature's esp (or a master patch for this) create an armor and armor addon record for this new body, point them at the right things (armor -> armor addon -> nif you made in step one)

 

3) Create a new json file for referencing this with CF.  The existing files are set up right, so just use one as a template.  Note this step is very picky and a missing comma or something can tank the result.

 

4) Open game and see in console if CF saw the new json, and if so, does the creature respond to CF's targeted commands.

 

So, none of this is particularly difficult by itself, but it represents four different skill sets and associated programs.

 

It is possible that someone has already done this with the mods you are looking for.  May be worth searching around.

[Gundalypse]

You are awesome. I really appreciate you taking the time to share this.

 

The custom race is smaller than normal, around 75% of the normal body height. All of it reference Nord body parts, face parts, etc. If I understand you correctly. I can essentially change this section:

Spoiler

 

If I change this to NordRace then it should work, right?

 

The part with the creatures is outside my skillset currently by the sound of it. Since August I started really getting into the CK and xEdit trying to make a quest mod. My xEdit skills have come a long way, a lot of the stuff is still is alien to me.  I will look around more, I only really wanted it because the CC monsters look really stiff compared to like Rieklings, Draugr and wolves. I dunno if that is just me. I have a mode that adds those three CC monsters to the random encounters around the map. I thought by changing the race to other races would make them less stiff. Having them work with the creature framework would just have everything mesh together real well for my current game.

 

[Seijin8]

4 hours ago, Gundalypse said:

If I change this to NordRace then it should work, right?

Yes.  It will then use the same items/gear that Nords use.

 

4 hours ago, Gundalypse said:

I thought by changing the race to other races would make them less stiff. Having them work with the creature framework would just have everything mesh together real well for my current game.

 

Regarding "stiff", one of the longstanding issues with Skyrim is that adding new races with new animation sets is insanely difficult to do.  So much so that nobody has really done it completely, and there would be a heap of compatibility issues if they managed to.  It just isn't worth the over-large effort required.

 

Accordingly, every "new" creature in the game is just an existing creature with a reskin and maybe a skeletal edit to change their proportions a bit.  Under the hood, they're still a vanilla creature in terms of movement.

 

"Stiff" movements may result from skeletal edits shrinking or altering some parts of the model to make them look different.

 

In the case of skeletal edits, those will very likely make all sex animations with them misaligned.  Different people have different tolerances for how bad misalignment can get and still be worth doing it anyway.  In bad cases, none of the parts align and there is odd clipping everywhere.

 

Anyway, there's a workflow to getting "new" creatures fully functional in the game (what I listed in previous post), but it isn't quick and isn't for beginners.  And it would appear that few enough people want to do it that there are very few creatures out there that have been worked up in this way.  The biggest such effort that I know of was Bad Dog's conversion of everything in Skyrim Immersive Creatures.  Sadly, it is no longer current and the provided parts often need to be reweighted to match up with the most recent animations and rigs.

 

So tl;dr version: Probably skeletal edits making the creatures move oddly, and if that's the case, they may not be very compatible with sex animations anyway, with no real remedy.

[Gundalypse]

I want to say thank you for your help. I really appreciate it. I followed your instructions on the race edit and got it working. I will pass on the monster stuff for now.