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Is the latest RaceMenu version able to replace ECE?


NNS10

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As pointed out though Racemenu is still being updated, ECE has stopped updating since October of 2013.

 

 

After spending a bunch more time with Race Menu I can tell you that it's only because NEEDS to be updated! :lol: But seriously, though, I can't think of any reason to update ECE until RM actually catches up. Add the overlay system to ECE and RM would be sunk. Then there would be no reason at all to even consider Race Menu as an alternative.

 

I will continue to play with it. Give it a fair shake and all. But after 3 hours of nothing but using it I still don't see where it's superior other than the overlays. I really do like that feature. I think that if one was to add the easy to use skeleton morphs and vertices editor from ECE while removing the unnecessary sliders it would be perfect.

 

Here's the product of hours of messing with RM.

 

post-243307-0-48840400-1401159917_thumb.jpgpost-243307-0-78713300-1401159918_thumb.jpgpost-243307-0-86360700-1401159919_thumb.jpg

 

It works I guess. Perhaps after spending more time with it I will change my mind. I have been known to do that from time to time. :P

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Outside of ECE's Vertex Editor, I think RaceMenu is more difficult to use, as the sliders start at less than stellar attractiveness(opinion) yo.

 

It's pretty damn hard to screw up a face using ECE, though at the cost of having faces look so much alike even across users - the difficulty is set on achieving uniqueness at that point. Too often do you see follower package mods and user created images(on the Nexus for example), where everyone's characters look of kin to one another. 

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Speaking of, all this reminded me to update my RM mod i've been using V2.1 for a while now.

Honestly, i'd say just go with what you like the most, there's no point in forcing yourself to use a system that may be inferior to your needs if your perfectly happy with what you had before. I stick with RM because it's the first character creator i used and it was simple enough for what i wanted it for. After lurking the show your character thread i can say some of the creations people here make are true works of art and most of them use ECE to get those results. For me though it's just too much work for something i rarely look at ingame, afterall, i almost always wear a mask and keep well covered so it's kind of a moot point considering my play style.

That's the thing, though. ECE is quicker when making a new character, even from scratch. And it has save slot options, so that would fit you perfectly. You can start a whole new charater then !BAM! load the face and body settings you had saved instantly.

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Speaking of, all this reminded me to update my RM mod i've been using V2.1 for a while now.

Honestly, i'd say just go with what you like the most, there's no point in forcing yourself to use a system that may be inferior to your needs if your perfectly happy with what you had before. I stick with RM because it's the first character creator i used and it was simple enough for what i wanted it for. After lurking the show your character thread i can say some of the creations people here make are true works of art and most of them use ECE to get those results. For me though it's just too much work for something i rarely look at ingame, afterall, i almost always wear a mask and keep well covered so it's kind of a moot point considering my play style.

That's the thing, though. ECE is quicker when making a new character, even from scratch. And it has save slot options, so that would fit you perfectly. You can start a whole new charater then !BAM! load the face and body settings you had saved instantly.

 

 

RaceMenu you can save like 50 some slots now, and load them. I don't know about ECE loading body settings, as if I recall it doesn't even have them to begin with.

 

RaceMenu attempts to load so many sliders from various plugins though, sometimes it just doesn't load them all. It's best to always check back, even when opening the race menu again through the console.

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RaceMenu you can save like 50 some slots now, and load them. I don't know about ECE loading body settings, as if I recall it doesn't even have them to begin with.

 

RaceMenu attempts to load so many sliders from various plugins though, sometimes it just doesn't load them all. It's best to always check back, even when opening the race menu again through the console.

YIKES! That's good to know. Thanks for the heads up.

 

ECE always works and nothing ever reverts. It only has 24 save slots, but you can move them to another folder and fill it back up again. When you do a slot save in ECE it saves EVERYTHING, right down to hair/eye color, body weight, even butt scale! :lol:

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RaceMenu you can save like 50 some slots now, and load them. I don't know about ECE loading body settings, as if I recall it doesn't even have them to begin with.

 

RaceMenu attempts to load so many sliders from various plugins though, sometimes it just doesn't load them all. It's best to always check back, even when opening the race menu again through the console.

YIKES! That's good to know. Thanks for the heads up.

 

ECE always works and nothing ever reverts. It only has 24 save slots, but you can move them to another folder and fill it back up again. When you do a slot save in ECE it saves EVERYTHING, right down to hair/eye color, body weight, even butt scale! :lol:

 

 

For the slots, i've allredy told you in this thread before. Actually, it's 56 slots (from 0 to 55 usable). And it saves all you params too.

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I did just update from RM2.1 to the latest 2.7 so i made some minor adjustments to the chin. But that's one of the parts that really gets to me using RM, the chin is so blocky. Sometimes it makes the character look like something from minecraft.

You can get that with ECE, too, but if you use the vertices editor you can tweak that out.

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ECE doesn't need anymore updates, that's why there aren't any. I tried RaceMenu over and over again but I'm always going back to ECE. I don't know if RM now has the racial sliders or not, but those are really cool to play with in ECE. For example, you can give you character a negative value in the high elf slider to get a more rounder and shorter face. Or a longer and sharper face if you up the slider a bit. With the extended XPMS skelly you have sliders for just about anything and everything that isn't covered by sliders can be modified with nifskope - since ECE comes with it's own little custom duplicate nord race, you can switch around meshes, textures and skeletons freely without messing up anything but this one race which has no NPCs that use this race.

 

With ECE you can make just about any face you want. Mature, young, anime-ish, realistic, you name it. I deeply respect expired for his continued work on RaceMenu but I can't see myself using it until it's basically everything that ECE is + some more.

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I think RM does have the racial sliders now, I should play around with it.

Also what exactly is the difference between breast and breast curve? They just seems to make them bigger or smaller, but seems to multiply with each other.

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I think RM does have the racial sliders now, I should play around with it.

Also what exactly is the difference between breast and breast curve? They just seems to make them bigger or smaller, but seems to multiply with each other.

Yeah, the newest RM has the racial sliders, but when I tried them they had hideous results! :lol: Really, really bad. Try it and see what it does for you. In ECE you could add a little dark elf to a Nord and you'd get what looked like a hybrid. I tried it with RM and it looked like a mutant. Then I tried going negative with the high elf slider and it was WIERD looking. Ghastly in fact. :o

 

Breast slider adds size and breast curve moves the nipples by adjusting the shape.

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RaceMenu you can save like 50 some slots now, and load them. I don't know about ECE loading body settings, as if I recall it doesn't even have them to begin with.

 

RaceMenu attempts to load so many sliders from various plugins though, sometimes it just doesn't load them all. It's best to always check back, even when opening the race menu again through the console.

YIKES! That's good to know. Thanks for the heads up.

 

ECE always works and nothing ever reverts. It only has 24 save slots, but you can move them to another folder and fill it back up again. When you do a slot save in ECE it saves EVERYTHING, right down to hair/eye color, body weight, even butt scale! :lol:

 

 

It's more than likely due to slight bugs with the various plugins RaceMenu has. I'm not going to just blame RaceMenu, because Expired is damn good about making sure the mod works as best as possible - and I used to be a hater at one point when the mod made the jump to a new infrastructure or whatever . There's just slight annoyances, but I feel that RaceMenu has less issues and compatibility problems to deal with than ECE.

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 With the extended XPMS skelly you have sliders for just about anything and everything that isn't covered by sliders can be modified with nifskope - since ECE comes with it's own little custom duplicate nord race, you can switch around meshes, textures and skeletons freely without messing up anything but this one race which has no NPCs that use this race.

 

 

RaceMenu also allows you to make many changes with XPMS but it does it with an optional plugin. And  I use Custom Races which does exactly the same thing as yngnord but covers all of the vanilla races.

 

 

 

 

 

It's more than likely due to slight bugs with the various plugins RaceMenu has. I'm not going to just blame RaceMenu, because Expired is damn good about making sure the mod works as best as possible - and I used to be a hater at one point when the mod made the jump to a new infrastructure or whatever . There's just slight annoyances, but I feel that RaceMenu has less issues and compatibility problems to deal with than ECE.

 

I agree. I moved to RaceMenu initially because of problems I was having with ECE (ironically one of those was it not retaining my tweaks) . Immediately RM seemed to run a lot better with my heavily modded game and so I stuck with it. Then I started using mods that I now wouldn't ever play without, like EEO, plus a few race mods that are just  a giant pain in the ass to get working with ECE. And the list of incompatibilities seems to be getting longer too.
 
So it's really a matter of personal priority. If I were regularly taking screenshots that were downsampled super hi res I might worry a bit more about exact placement of the odd vertex here and there and then ECE might be worth losing out on the features that I love about Race Menu. But I manage to make characters that satisfy me at least, so I'm more than happy to wait for RM's own implementation of it. 
 
Here's what expired had to say about that back in Nov:
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I think ECE is near perfection and has little to no need for an update, besides overlays and custom race compatibility of course.

 

And it's odd because ECE has a racial compatibility package built right in. I recently installed a new version of SkyKids. And that is part of why I decided to give RM a run. Well, I needed an extra mod in my load order for racial compatibility and a couple plugins for Race Menu. Yet I tried ECE with SkyKids and it worked surprisingly well, considering it was supposedly incompatible with the mod. It let me use fewer sliders, but it also gave me access to the eye, brow and hair mods that RM didn't.

 

I hope nobody thinks I'm a "hater" here. :lol: I have both and have used both. Heck, I used Race Menu for quite a while before discovering ECE and I didn't even like ECE at first mostly because of it's vanilla-ish interface.

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With my third reinstall.. I decided to use the RM mod Instead of ECE... In trueth, RM is so buggy and laggy that i'm constantly moving between pages and ive always had that problem with RM...ECE also has the weapon placement that I miss... with all respect to both mods...they each have there fan favs but, ECE is the better mod... no question about it.... hands down winner!!! if It wasnt for the newest update giving me a character I like, I was going to make the switch back to my beloved ECE... I only switched to use the overlays anyway... and Im not even using that feature.... Like someone already pointed out, ECE doesnt need any updates" and its still about a year ahead of RM.  Sorry RM lovers.

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RM & CME / ECE are not really cross compatible

 

I tried the latest version of racemenu just recently, and I use a CME femalehead.nif with vanilla eyesfemale.nif (which is buggy), so the latest version of RM destroyed the settings and I had to revert to the previous version of racemenu to get the face back to how it was...

 

 

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[...]

 

 

I never really had any problem with ECE and compatibility with other mods. But then again I don't use any custom races except the ygnord race - because there is no need for it. I can change the ygnord into anything I want with copy-pasting a few meshes and textures and maybe firing up the CK. I know that I had a TON of custom races for Oblivion, but only one for Skyrim. I think that ECE is more for people who like to tinker with their game, it certainly is not a fire and forget mod. To get custom races compatible with it you need to add a few lines to an .ini file I believe, and that's more than most people are willing to do. Or switching textures and meshes for the body, some people seem to be terribly afraid of doing that.

 

The only thing that won't work in any way with ECE are racial overhaul mods that change the perks and whatnot of the vanilla races. Well you can still use the ygnord race to get the character you want to create but your character won't have the same balancing changes or cool new features that some of these mods introduce. But I have never felt the need to change much about how the different races work, tbh. Is RaceMenu compatible with racial overhauls? I don't really know but that would be a big point for RM.

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Is RaceMenu compatible with racial overhauls? I don't really know but that would be a big point for RM.

 

 

RaceMenu by itself has always been. However, CharGen wasn't and needed compatibility patches, but the new update for RaceMenu works with everything.

 

Also, with ECE making changes to race records and everything, if you're using an overhaul you can just console in the changes like add the race perks manually ingame.

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This is interesting.

 

http://www.loverslab.com/topic/22562-racemenu-or-ece/page-3?do=findComment&comment=582843

Morphs created with RaceMenu despite being labeled the same as ECE may appear slightly different, this is due to the CME morphs prefixed with 'base'. RaceMenu doesn't make use of any of these files because they are presumably not additive morphs, they are replacement morphs. Using those morphs as additive results in really weird behavior and major clipping in areas, using them as replacers defeats the purpose of the whole no replacements goal. By replacers I mean they overwrite memory, not actually replace a file. 

 

If I'm understanding that correctly, even if RaceMenu has the ECE morphs, because the morphs are applied differently, the morphs will look different than in ECE.

 

Is this what people have experienced?

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I had switched to ECE once all the extra sliders were added. I had tried later versions of RM that added the extra sliders but they were all added to a separate page at the end, I have not really looked at it since. I had been using several different race mods before that as well but never really needed them afterwards. The XP32 Maximum Skeleton Extended adds a number of sliders to ECE including 2 for breasts, several for hands and a number of them for weapon positions.

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RM3 is getting a Morph Editor rather than a plain vertex editor:

http://i.imgur.com/dSFWAZ2.jpg

 

The wireframe on the left you will be able to interact with using brushes ingame. I've been told I should add push/pull, smooth, and freeze. The brushes should work similar to Outfit Studio. The reason it's taking so long is essentially I'm making an Outfit Studio for the face from scratch, using DirectX INSIDE of Skyrim. DirectX is beyond my expertise so it's more of a learning process, working with meshes and shaders low-level, Skyrim isn't assisting with the rendering of the mesh in this case, it's all rendered manually.

 

The UV panel on the right will be removed, it consumes quite a lot of GFx memory when it's in use and frankly isn't very useful when you can actually interact with the 3d mesh.

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RM3 is getting a Morph Editor rather than a plain vertex editor:

http://i.imgur.com/dSFWAZ2.jpg

 

The wireframe on the left you will be able to interact with using brushes ingame. I've been told I should add push/pull, smooth, and freeze. The brushes should work similar to Outfit Studio. The reason it's taking so long is essentially I'm making an Outfit Studio for the face from scratch, using DirectX INSIDE of Skyrim. DirectX is beyond my expertise so it's more of a learning process, working with meshes and shaders low-level, Skyrim isn't assisting with the rendering of the mesh in this case, it's all rendered manually.

 

The UV panel on the right will be removed, it consumes quite a lot of GFx memory when it's in use and frankly isn't very useful when you can actually interact with the 3d mesh.

 

Very cool and look forward to it, but since you're here. I do have a request for Racemenu. Can you add more tattoo slots? There is more and more tattoo's coming out that work with RM overlays and I would love to use more tattoo;s that there is currently slots for.

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Very cool and look forward to it, but since you're here. I do have a request for Racemenu. Can you add more tattoo slots? There is more and more tattoo's coming out that work with RM overlays and I would love to use more tattoo;s that there is currently slots for.

The number of slots are configurable in NiOverride.ini. They are kept low for performance reasons. The game cant render layered textures with shaders in between so the overlay concept is based around rendering a shadow copy of the original mesh, so you are essentially rendering the whole body mesh X amount of times, which can consume quite a lot of memory.

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Very cool and look forward to it, but since you're here. I do have a request for Racemenu. Can you add more tattoo slots? There is more and more tattoo's coming out that work with RM overlays and I would love to use more tattoo;s that there is currently slots for.

The number of slots are configurable in NiOverride.ini. They are kept low for performance reasons. The game cant render layered textures with shaders in between so the overlay concept is based around rendering a shadow copy of the original mesh, so you are essentially rendering the whole body mesh X amount of times, which can consume quite a lot of memory.

 

Oh I didn't know that, I thought it was just adding the one tat in that one spot not the whole body again.

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I had switched to ECE once all the extra sliders were added. I had tried later versions of RM that added the extra sliders but they were all added to a separate page at the end, I have not really looked at it since. I had been using several different race mods before that as well but never really needed them afterwards. The XP32 Maximum Skeleton Extended adds a number of sliders to ECE including 2 for breasts, several for hands and a number of them for weapon positions.

http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/45235/?

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