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[Illustrated tips & guidelines] Making beautiful female characters


qtpie

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gF1Rd50.jpg

(With new illustrations and links!)

 

Let me preface this by saying that this post has OPINIONS EVERYWHERE.

It is not my intention to act as the authority on waifu beauty; I just want to help those who are less comfortable with sliders.

You may also want to be aware that this was written by someone who favors pornstar barbies over cute girls; which probably influences the tips and guidelines listed here.

 

This is not a step-by-step guide. This is a list of guidelines and facial features you can try out if you're going for a certain look.

Here's what happens if you use this as a step-by-step guide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKJ4atlC2fA

 

Slider-fu

 

General tips & guidelines

  • If you can't get the jaw right, or can't get enough forehead, you can move the entire face up or down on the head. This means moving eye-height, brow-height, nose-height and mouth-height up or down together. When you're not happy with your character, but don't know what else to do, try this.
  • Keeping the mouth and nose pretty close together usually looks very nice.
  • [illustration] Some downward tilt in the inner eye-corners can help most faces. (dont overdo this)
  • [illustration] Add a lot of neck slope
  • Avoid underbites
  • Avoid pointy chins
  • [illustration] Avoid convex nose-bridges
  • [illustration] Avoid downward tilted nosetips
  • Some mouths are impossible to fit on some faces.
  • tilting the head forward (upper half of the head further out when seen from the side than the bottom half) sometimes helps give a younger and more feminine look.
  • Maintain a smooth contour on the face, without making the chin and jaw too round. This means don't make the cheekbones too wide, else the bones will stick out and the frame of your face gets jagged. Also, adjust the jawbone up/down, in/out and back/forward to avoid bumps in the frame.
  • [illustration] Semi-transparent fairly dark blue is a good eyeliner-colour that goes well with most faces. Try to avoid full black
  • [illustration] Try to avoid very dark eyeshadow; a little touch up is fine. i recommend very little alpha for eye-shadows.
  • Don't use bald hairstyles while editing. Find a ponytail or something that doesnt add a lot of hair to the face, but is still similar to a hairstyle you like.
  • Avoid very wide lips
  • [illustration] Try to avoid bright eyebrows. You can never go wrong with very dark ones. If you want blonde hair, dark brown eyebrows sometimes look more natural than black.
  • [illustration] Avoid dark lips -- I like bright pinks with little alpha, or pinks/reds that are close to pale skincolours.
  • I like to choose eyecolour, haircolour, brows and hairstyles when im close to wrapping up.
  • My favourite place to use the racemenu is inside the temple of kynareth in whiterun during daytime. (coc whiteruntempleofkynareth).
  • When you don't know what else to change, but you're still not happy; try moving the face up/down, add some eye-tilt, work on the jaw, or change the eyebrows, and see what happens.

 

Cheatcodes to use when you can't get it right and you just want to play the game

Only use the following tips when short on time. They are cheap shortcuts that are only to be used as a last resort.

  • [illustration] Ponytails, or hairstyles that cover some of the face. This is very subjective, though; so try different things!
  • A lot of dark eyeliner can be used as a last resort. It is an easy way to help a face, but I recommend avoiding it if you can.
  • White eyeshadow
  • Try different eyebrows
  • Don't forget to check the view from an angle. It can sometimes give you some pointers about what's what.
  • [illustration] Try different colours and details
  • [illustration] Adjust tilts in both corners of the eyebrows to put on an expression.
  • [illustration] Athena/Aphrodite hair. Everyone looks good with this. Its in a couple hairpacks, but Apachii is the most popular.
  • Smoother skins are easier to get pretty with than very detailed high-resolution ones. Get a skin with the porcelain/anime -look, for example SG Textures.

 

Archetype features

If you're going for a certain look but you're not quite there yet, try out some of these facial features.
Don't apply all of them, just try some of them out to see if that helps get you closer to what you're going for.

 

Babyface features (Cute looks with childish traits, think Selena Gomez or Delta White)

  • a lot of forehead. You can get this by moving the brows and eyes downwards.
  • some upward tilt on the nosetip
  • Nose a little higher above the mouth than usual
  • Short noses
  • a hairstyle with a slightly shiny texture
  • Innocent expressions: high brows with upward tilts in the inner corners
  • round cheeks or broad face in general
  • small jaw
  • reduced brow depth
  • large eyes
  • bigger distance between eyes than average.

 

Strong adult features (What you think of when imagining female warriors, or think Olivia Wilde/Jennifer Garner)

  • Eyes positioned mid/high in the face
  • Strong cheekbones
  • Strong jaws sometimes help
  • long noses close to the mouth (Not long as in pointy, long as in stretching far vertically in the face)
  • wide eyebrows
  • increased brow depth
  • matte hair-texture
  • thin noses

 

Barbie pornstar features

  • Symmetrical faces. Kind of the middle-ground between babyface/strong faces, with a slight edge to babyface.
  • Tall, pouting lips. Be careful with the mouth forwardness-slider when trying to add pouting. a little bit is fine, but too much will make your character look like she is deliberately pressing her lips outwards.
  • Avoid lips that are pressed tightly together. (Using the pouting-slider from ECE can help with this, but trying to change a set of lips too much from how they were modeled usually does not come out well.)
  • making barbie-faces is sometimes easier if you start with babyface-features, and then shift some features slightly to be more adult.
  • If you started with a cute/juvenile face, the jaw and mouth are good places to continue with making the face more barbie/pornstar than cute.

Recommended mods, mod-opinions and mod-info

 

Character Creation Menus

You're going to want a replacement for the default character creation-menu.

The ones I know of are:

  • RaceMenu
  • Enhanced Character Edit
  • I Recommend RaceMenu. It has many more features than ECE, but is a little harder to work with.
  • Even though the meshes added by ECE makes creating a cute waifu fairly easy; it has become deprecated. It is old and sluggish compared to RaceMenu, which is a little more complicated, but works faster and sports many more features.

Body replacers

Bodyreplacers are very much up to your preference. They replace the blocky vanilla female body with (usually) more feminine ones.

These are the ones i think are most relevant. The notes behind each of them here is what I think of the bodyreplacer. Your opinions will not necessarily match mine, so check pictures before you decide.

  • UNP - A pretty slim body. The boobs tend to get a little pointy at higher weight-levels (especially on armors), and the butt, hip and waist get a little too big for my tastes. UNP has a huge selection of armors and armor-replacers, and is very popular.
  • SeveNBase - The supermodel-version of UNP. Its a lean body which has a weight-slider that mostly affects boob-size. Some people complain the body has fake looking boobs. I like SeveNBase a lot, but the UV is not perfect, meaning textures look like they have been stretched in some places. Decent armor-replacer availability.
  • CBBE - A very curvy body that a lot of people like. The weight-slider yields a fairly big butt and boobs. It makes your character a little too fat looking for my tastes. UNP skins do not work with CBBE, but there are many skins available. Huge armor-replacer selection, and comes with the very handy BodySlide tool which lets you tweak the body to your own tastes.
  • BodySlide CB Plus Plus - BodySlide mentioned above is a tool that lets you use many sliders to make the CBBE body match your preference perfectly (there's a slider for ankle-size, several boob-sizes, hip-width, etc) BodySlide CB++ is very much recommended if you're going to use BodySlide. It adds more sliders so you can be more precise, and lets you get even bigger boobs... Pretty good armor-replacer availability.

 

Skin Textures

Skin-replacers change the texture of your skin. Here are some things that are important to know about skin-textures:

  • The body and face textures are not in the same file, meaning you can mix/match face/body textures. Though doing so might lead to neckseams, this is something you can fix yourself with photoshop.
  • There are 3 categories of skin-textures:
    • Diffuse - The colour and texture of the skin. These are the *.dds files in your skin-folder 
    • Normalmaps - The geometry of the skin. Wrinkles, muscle-definition etc. These are the  *_msn.dds files in your skin-folder. 
    • Speculars - The glossiness of the skin. Good to simulate sweat, shine, and makeup-reflections. These are the *_s.dds files in your skin-folder  
  • What this means for you is that you can mix and match different parts of skin-packages. If you like the realistic look of Mature Skin for example, but hate how wrinkly it makes you, you can take the normalmaps from a skin-package that doesnt have wrinkles and still use the diffuse-textures from mature skin.
  • Not all skins work for all bodyreplacers. They are mostly separated into CBBE or UNP, as a lot of bodyreplacers are based off these two.

 

There is a huge selection of skins. Here are some noteworthy ones

  • Mature Skin A skin-texture made for realism. It has imperfections such as moles and large pores, to look more realistic. The normalmaps have a bit of wrinkles in the forehead, that i recommend replacing. (goes well with New lips.)
  • SG skin Easily one of the best skins right now. Very smooth and clear skin without blemishes. Good blend of realism and perfection, but maybe not for you if you want a waifu that looks like she has ever done any manual labour.
  • Real Girls skin A WIP that never seems to finish. has VERY detailed skin, with face-textures up to 8192px resolution. I dont recommend this texture. I think the normals are too blocky, and the diffuse-textures are too messy and have squares. Worth checking out for those of you who want even more detail than Mature Skin, but it is definitely not for everyone.
  • Coverwomen Face-textures only. This has very nice speculars for makeup and lips. Be wary of neckseams, unless you're using the UNP body. The full package includes some eyebrows. It's all in all a pretty good package that can make getting a pretty character easy, but the skin is not very detailed or realistic. I recommend grabbing just the speculars from here.
  • Better Females by Bella A fairly popular beauty-package. Easy to make pretty faces with, but not very detailed. I do not recommend the entirety of Bella's, because its poorly blended and doesnt transition nicely. What this means is that there will be a lot of contrast between lips and skin for example, which makes your character look like plastic (not in the plastic bimbo way, but literally a plastic doll). Bella's has very nice eyebrows that I do recommend, though! They are very dark, and can be good to have if you find that using blonde haircolor turns other eyebrows too bright. There is a link to an "eyebrows-only" pack at the bottom of the guide.
  • Women of Skyrim Face only. Just normalmaps (they are very smooth).
  • There are MANY more options, these are just some I thought i should mention. There is a list further down with some links. My favourite combination is Mature Skin diffuse with Coverwomen glittery speculars, and Fitness Body Normals

Miscellaneous recommended beauty-mods

 

Index of beauty-mods

Not all of these are recommended. Its just a handy list of links you can check out. If i fucked up some links, or you're pissed I linked directly to a file instead of your mod-page, let me know.

Click the spoiler-button to see the list.

 

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  • A good colour for eyeliner that matches most eyes, hairs and faces is a semi-transparent fairly dark blue. Try to avoid full black
  • Try to avoid very dark eyeshadow; a little touch up is fine. i recommend very little alpha for eye-shadows.

 

Try to avoid full black

 

avoid full black

Why would you say that? D:

 

I'm really not mutch into make-up when it comes to women but if it must be it always should be darkest black avilaible.

 

Well...could be because I love metal and goth chicks x)

 

Other than that it is a really useful guide.

 

I don't use most of it because I play on a laptop and overdetailed chars in a medium-setting skyrimworld look kinda...off.

Also it is kinda easy to get a decent looking female in skyrim (with just a few mods).

It's way harder in Fallout I think.

 

Link to comment

 

 

  • A good colour for eyeliner that matches most eyes, hairs and faces is a semi-transparent fairly dark blue. Try to avoid full black
  • Try to avoid very dark eyeshadow; a little touch up is fine. i recommend very little alpha for eye-shadows.

 

Try to avoid full black

 

avoid full black

Why would you say that? D:

 

I'm really not mutch into make-up when it comes to women but if it must be it always should be darkest black avilaible.

 

Well...could be because I love metal and goth chicks x)

 

Other than that it is a really useful guide.

 

I don't use most of it because I play on a laptop and overdetailed chars in a medium-setting skyrimworld look kinda...off.

Also it is kinda easy to get a decent looking female in skyrim (with just a few mods).

It's way harder in Fallout I think.

 

 

xhv3pdz.jpg

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If you don't mind me asking, with mixing and matching different parts of the skin packages how would you do this properly? Do you just go and download each skin texture mod via NMM and then delete what you don't want, or would it be better to download each manually and put in a specific folder? I would like to know how to go about this.

 

Would you have to have to do this for NPCs as well or does it not work like that since it alters all females?

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If you don't mind me asking, with mixing and matching different parts of the skin packages how would you do this properly? Do you just go and download each skin texture mod via NMM and then delete what you don't want, or would it be better to download each manually and put in a specific folder? I would like to know how to go about this.

 

Would you have to have to do this for NPCs as well or does it not work like that since it alters all females?

 

if you want to change individual files, then it is better to do that manually. with the body textures will change the texture of all the NPC, unless you use a mod that prevents the. I know that there is such a mod gives, but do not know where.

 

german \ deutsch !

 

wenn du einzelne dateien ändern möchtest , dann ist es besser das manuell zu tun . bei den körper texturen ändert sich die textur aller NPC , es sei denn du verwendest eine mod die daß verhindert . ich weiß das es so eine mod giebt , weiß aber nicht wo .

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If you don't mind me asking, with mixing and matching different parts of the skin packages how would you do this properly? Do you just go and download each skin texture mod via NMM and then delete what you don't want, or would it be better to download each manually and put in a specific folder? I would like to know how to go about this.

 

Would you have to have to do this for NPCs as well or does it not work like that since it alters all females?

 

Remember what the OP said about filenames:

  • The files for normals end with _msn.dds.
  • The files for speculars end with _s.dds
  • The files for diffuse end with just .dds

So for example my files are

  • _msn.dds (normals) files from Women Of Skyrim
  • _s.dds (speculars) files from Coverwomen
  • .dds (diffuse) files from Mature skin

To install textures from multiple packages, you either download all the packages you want to mix manually and take the files with the right names from each of them, or you download with NMM and pay extra attention to whether you're overwriting _s.dds, _msn.dds or .dds when the overwrite-prompt comes.

 

For example if you only want the glittery speculars from coverwomen, you would only press Yes to overwrite if the filename being overwritten ends with _s.dds

 

Also, changing skin-files will alter female NPCs aswell.

Good luck!

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I am working on making my primary character now thanks to your help.

Sometimes I feel like character creation is more fun then the actual game.

 

I've added some points, so if you're not done yet you might want to refresh the post.

have fun!

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Its all about taste and prefference offcorse....

 

Saying how face is ruined is becouse you like bright instead of dark others hate bright and like dark its all matter of taste and prefference.

 

 

But it can't hurt having a topic like this, with many usefull links to choose from, its always helpfull topic like this.

 

Leave the prefference and taste to others maybe, better give open suggestions:)

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Its all about taste and prefference offcorse....

 

Saying how face is ruined is becouse you like bright instead of dark others hate bright and like dark its all matter of taste and prefference.

 

 

But it can't hurt having a topic like this, with many usefull links to choose from, its always helpfull topic like this.

 

Leave the prefference and taste to others maybe, better give open suggestions:)

 

I suppose you're right. I've changed the wording in some illustrations. Thank you.

 

I will leave opinions in the post though. I think that if your slider-fu is not very good, you can use these opinions as a starting-point.

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Its all about taste and prefference offcorse....

 

Saying how face is ruined is becouse you like bright instead of dark others hate bright and like dark its all matter of taste and prefference.

 

 

But it can't hurt having a topic like this, with many usefull links to choose from, its always helpfull topic like this.

 

Leave the prefference and taste to others maybe, better give open suggestions:)

 

I suppose you're right. I've changed the wording in some illustrations. Thank you.

 

I will leave opinions in the post though. I think that if your slider-fu is not very good, you can use these opinions as a starting-point.

 

 

Some like some don't:Combo of sweat, scars and simple warpaint also how light is suited is offcorse importend.

 

Just my prefference:)

 

 

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I've finally made some progress, I used the Mature Skin as a texture for the body with the Sporty Sexy Map mod and LiTH's Face Enhancement. I think it looks wonderful, plus the Brows mod from Hvergelmir is excellent. Thanks to those that helped me figure this stuff out! Just gotta download some other mods like Better Makeup, XCE - Warpaint and Dirt, Coverkhajiits, and EEO.

 

Now I'm looking for a nice skin texture for CBBE for the beast races of Skyrim. I found one for Argonians http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/27469//? but I can't find many options for Khajiit, only this one so far by Kisa http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/4962//? but I just wanted to find out if there are some other mods I can check out for this.

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  • A good colour for eyeliner that matches most eyes, hairs and faces is a semi-transparent fairly dark blue. Try to avoid full black
  • Try to avoid very dark eyeshadow; a little touch up is fine. i recommend very little alpha for eye-shadows.

 

Try to avoid full black

 

avoid full black

Why would you say that? D:

 

I'm really not mutch into make-up when it comes to women but if it must be it always should be darkest black avilaible.

 

Well...could be because I love metal and goth chicks x)

 

Other than that it is a really useful guide.

 

I don't use most of it because I play on a laptop and overdetailed chars in a medium-setting skyrimworld look kinda...off.

Also it is kinda easy to get a decent looking female in skyrim (with just a few mods).

It's way harder in Fallout I think.

 

 

xhv3pdz.jpg

 

 

If you ask me, the lips are what ruins her face in the first place. Looks like she overdose on lipstick.

 

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I've finally made some progress, I used the Mature Skin as a texture for the body with the Sporty Sexy Map mod and LiTH's Face Enhancement. I think it looks wonderful, plus the Brows mod from Hvergelmir is excellent. Thanks to those that helped me figure this stuff out! Just gotta download some other mods like Better Makeup, XCE - Warpaint and Dirt, Coverkhajiits, and EEO.

 

Now I'm looking for a nice skin texture for CBBE for the beast races of Skyrim. I found one for Argonians http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/27469//? but I can't find many options for Khajiit, only this one so far by Kisa http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/4962//? but I just wanted to find out if there are some other mods I can check out for this.

 

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/5941

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/39278

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/7712

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/6192

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  • A good colour for eyeliner that matches most eyes, hairs and faces is a semi-transparent fairly dark blue. Try to avoid full black
  • Try to avoid very dark eyeshadow; a little touch up is fine. i recommend very little alpha for eye-shadows.

 

Try to avoid full black

 

avoid full black

Why would you say that? D:

 

I'm really not mutch into make-up when it comes to women but if it must be it always should be darkest black avilaible.

 

Well...could be because I love metal and goth chicks x)

 

Other than that it is a really useful guide.

 

I don't use most of it because I play on a laptop and overdetailed chars in a medium-setting skyrimworld look kinda...off.

Also it is kinda easy to get a decent looking female in skyrim (with just a few mods).

It's way harder in Fallout I think.

 

 

xhv3pdz.jpg

 

 

Well...i still think the right one looks better ;)

 

Well that is a matter of opinion I guess.

What ruins this picture is the lipstick btw.

 

EDIT: Oh MikeMetal already said that. Haven't read the second page before posting.

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