What to do when followers use (overwrite) vanilla races?

[Fredas]

During the process of consolidating my many follower mods into one plugin, I encountered the phenomenon of followers which make use of vanilla races (almost always NordRace), after heavily altering the vanilla race itself of course.  Fully 20% of the followers I've elected to scatter across Skyrim use a vanilla race.  Obviously this practice carries the double whammy of not only promoting issues with the race itself but also being thoroughly incompatible with other follower mods which do the same thing.

 

My approach to this conundrum was to go into CK and duplicate the modified NordRace as a new custom race and swapping the follower NPC's race to that new entry.  This quickly snowballed, thanks to the fact that face morph / texture / etc. references then need somewhere else to live, plus the unexpected (and unsolvable by me) complication of face .tri files not possessing references to the newly-created race, generally resulting in an invisible face.

 

I am wondering if there is any kind of reasonably straightforward solution to this kind of problem, or at least whether there's a series of steps which will ultimately render a usable in-game result.  Thoughts appreciated.

 

[Akzyra]

Rant to the mod author for being a bad modder? I mean why replace all stuff that mostly has meaning for the player? Only expression and Phoneme are used by followers from TRIs. (Not sure). And if it is stats....

 

Or take your time and make each follower truly standalone, meaning all faceparts and stuff.

Depending on what the author modified not each body/face/TRI has to standalon-ed.

 

Would be nice to know what mods are doing this, as I guess it can seriously screw something up.

[Fredas]

Or take your time and make each follower truly standalone, meaning all faceparts and stuff.

 

Some of the affected followers are what I would consider must-have, so this is going to have to be the solution one way or another, yeah.  I will do my best with the faceparts, but I anticipate having to come back here for more advice.

 

Would be nice to know what mods are doing this, as I guess it can seriously screw something up.

 

The ones I've discovered include: Ranger Tris, Chinese followers Leila & Camille, Chinese follower Angela, Eileen, Wtds, Luthwen, Cassiopeia, Guaner, Grateril, Clover.  Many of the same mods also have a lot of the kinds of errors that one generally wants to clean with Tes5edit.

[Succuboi]

 

Or take your time and make each follower truly standalone, meaning all faceparts and stuff.

 

Some of the affected followers are what I would consider must-have, so this is going to have to be the solution one way or another, yeah.  I will do my best with the faceparts, but I anticipate having to come back here for more advice.

 

Would be nice to know what mods are doing this, as I guess it can seriously screw something up.

 

The ones I've discovered include: Ranger Tris, Chinese followers Leila & Camille, Chinese follower Angela, Eileen, Wtds, Luthwen, Cassiopeia, Guaner, Grateril, Clover.  Many of the same mods also have a lot of the kinds of errors that one generally wants to clean with Tes5edit.

 

 

Was there a compelling reason you decided to merge plugins? I'm convinced that's the culprit, If it was all fine previously to doing that.

 

[Fredas]

Was there a compelling reason you decided to merge plugins? I'm convinced that's the culprit, If it was all fine previously to doing that.

 

Hmm.  Well there is no "culprit" here, per se.  I wasn't getting CTDs or something.  This is all about the discovery that 1/5th of all follower mods modify a vanilla race, engendering incompatibility between themselves and with the vanilla game and other mods.  Having discovered this, it would be foolhardy for me to use one of the offending mods without first having undertaken to prevent the mod from needlessly taking over a critical vanilla asset.

 

As to why?  I plan to use over 60 followers.  Not necessarily to "use" individually so much as to pretty up the game with their presence.  That's 1/4th of all the plugins I can install.  Given that followers are theoretically one of the most transparent types of mod to merge, it's an easy choice.