Editing Custom Followers with Custom Races

[TeflonBilly]

I'm trying to prep a bunch of simple custom follower mods (custom followers with no custom scripts) to be merged using MatortheEternals Merge Plugins script.

 

But I would also like to go through and clean-up/consolidate all of the custom body meshes and custom textures to reduce disc space and in game VRAM usage.

 

Does anyone have any advice on what and how I should go about doing this?

 

So far, I've been going through and examining the Body meshes first to try and identify what body the follower is using (and remove/replace non-nude body meshes when necessary). It'd have been very helpful if NIF files had a title header that identified what they were inside the meta data (CBBE, or UNPB TBBP, etc... but such is life).

 

So far I've noticed some body meshes when loaded into NIFSkope have a default grayscale skin, while others are just flat white with no 3D effect, is this showing me the basic difference between a T/BBP body mesh vs a non-T/BBP mesh (the non, having the grayscale skin)?

 

What I'm having difficulty currently with is figuring out how I can make all followers with custom races all use the default installed Skeleton (so I only have to keep an up to date XPMSE installed).

I'd like to keep the custom textures overall, but consolidate them all so they only point to the same installed version (all SG texture followers point to a single install that I set up at "textures/customfollowers/SG", and "textures/customfollowers/RealGirls" for others, etc... for example. I presume I have to go through and change all of the current references in the texture sets, headpart, ArmorAA records, but is there a quicker way in CK maybe? I am really not a confident CK user at the moment, TES5Edit so far has been more to my speed.

 

I've also noticed the few times I have tried examining custom followers in CK, that for some of them their custom faces don't show up at all in CK, only the vanilla default faces (which I presume is what they originally used as their baseline before editing). While other followers show their custom face in CK. Is there a way of making these custom faces show up in CK? Or is there a way to regenerate whatever files that weren't packaged with the follower from just using the FaceGen meshes?

 

Will I have to regenerate the facegen textures for every one of these edited followers (CK CTR-F4)? Why do some followers get the gray face bug when I swap their Apachii hair to vanilla hair, but others do not? Sofia is a good example of this, if I try to just straight swap her hair out with a vanilla Nord hair, her custom face disappears.

 

How do I safely strip out extraneous Hairs, Outfits, equipment? I swear some of these custom followers include half of Apachii Hair and Immersive Armors in their ESPs.

 

Any advice on streamlining this process would be wonderful.

 

I really like the look of many of these custom followers and would like to have them all running around in my game, I just need to reduce their resource footprint.

If someone could point me to a current guide to making custom race followers that includes topics such as HDT, T/BBP, custom textures, etc.. That would be great.

[LordNecris]

To consolidate Skeleton paths, check the 'Race' entry in the respective mod, using TES5Edit, then change it to the default XPMSE path, away from the normal one.

HOWEVER! Sometimes, Mod creators modify the Skeleton, to get different scaling. Example: the 'Lamae' Mod on Nexus. Uses a modified skeleton to get the x117 race proportions (child race) and size.

Then, if you go and load the normal XPMSE on her, she enlarges to 'adult size'. 

Texture/Body replacements? TES5Edit again, first in the 'Armor' mod (for the nude 'outfit'), then in the 'Armor Addon' section for bodyparts.

One thing is important, however: Don't try to consolidate head meshes and so on. Keep those apart in your own interest.

[TeflonBilly]

When looking at a skeleton in NIFSkope is there anyway to tell if the scale has been adjusted from the adult norm?

 

Are there any other free NIF editing/manipulating tools out there that might be better suited for this?