Prettier Bandits

[Stormfrost2]

Im very new to modding, can you suggest how to do it ?

Im using MO 2

[Heroine HoneyCrotch]

10 minutes ago, Stormfrost2 said:

Im very new to modding, can you suggest how to do it ?

Im using MO 2

Use Quote icon at bottom of user post to identify who ur talking to.

 

If you asking about xedit look up gopher or gamer poets videos on how to install xedit with mo/mo2

[Stormfrost2]

29 minutes ago, Heroine of the Night said:

Use Quote icon at bottom of user post to identify who ur talking to.

 

If you asking about xedit look up gopher or gamer poets videos on how to install xedit with mo/mo2

This is following output for redguard race

 

 

[Grey Cloud]

PB doesn't touch races it only alters the generics such as EncBanditxxxyyyzzz.

 

My guess would be something amiss in MO2. Look in T5E to see what if anything is overwriting PB then go to MO2 and diddle with it so that PB wins.

[Stormfrost2]

28 minutes ago, Grey Cloud said:

PB doesn't touch races it only alters the generics such as EncBanditxxxyyyzzz.

 

 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

 

 

 

 

My guess would be something amiss in MO2. Look in T5E to see what if anything is overwriting PB then go to MO2 and diddle with it so that PB wins.

I did a test, loaded in a different profile with only prettierbandits and its dependencies and loaded in my save. When I went to look at the exact same bandit, the problem was still there. Maybe my testing method was wrong, i need to load a fresh cell but what  gives ? 

[Grey Cloud]

9 minutes ago, Stormfrost2 said:

what  gives

Did you look at PB in T5E?

Did you check if MO2 is saying that something is overwriting PB?

[Heroine HoneyCrotch]

7 hours ago, Stormfrost2 said:

This is following output for redguard race

 

 

Check in skyrim.esm with all mods loaded things that change redguard hairs which would be in headparts. 

 

Hairfemaleredguard

 

Hairlinefemaleredguard

[Heroine HoneyCrotch]

Also, take a picture of a bandit in game, open console and click on bandit and upload pic. 

 

 

[EinarrTheRed]

High Level Enemies Merge appears to be trying to overwrite the hair, hair color and outfit for that NPC.  Simple fix would be to drag the edits for hair over into the other mod.  Hair color won't matter since its baked into the facegen data.  Outfit doesn't really matter unless you just want to use the PB outfit which is still standard bandit gear.  I made the female bandit outfits separate to allow people to easily be able to replace female bandits only with "slooty" armor if they wish by just editing those outfit leveled lists.

[Grey Cloud]

4 minutes ago, EinarrTheRed said:

High Level Enemies Merge appears to be trying to overwrite the hair, hair color and outfit for that NPC.

That's my screenshot. I was only using it for illustrative purposes.

[EinarrTheRed]

Ah, sorry, got mixed up as to who was asking what.

[ShadowWolff]

Thanks for all the hard work  and time that  went into making the mod .

Was reading a post and in one you was talking about how much work you wanted to do . If you are willing maybe you could ask Ponderable on nexus  if she would be willing to make a few face gens for you .There is a few others you can ask like HogsMaws' Kaillie's  they all three make some great npc' am sure you know that thought . If you want to make them your self then racemenu . Maybe finds some presets you can use to work off   .To keep it lore friendly maybe add a few of the npc that look sexy but between 30 and 40 ish looking if posable. Have a few that are really sexy even in Skyrim  there is at least one sexy women someplace . I like the idea of having sexy boss types . Would be much needed brake from all the other boss types in the game. You could always add  few  of the groups around the map in places and have them  just be  female and let the player find them on there own . 

Cant wait for the update I know it will be awhile But thank you again for all the work and time you put into the mod hope some stuff' gave you some ideas and help in someway.

 

[EinarrTheRed]

Thank you for the compliment.

 

I actually had thought about doing what you suggest but the problem is a lil more complex than that.  I'll try to explain, since I'm in a bit of a quandary here and as to which way to go and am open to feedback and suggestions.

 

There are basically two ways to generate better looking faces for NPCs.  One is to do it entirely in Creation Kit, which is what I do now, and the other is to use Racemenu which is what people like Pandorable do.  There are pros and cons to each method.

 

Creation Kit

Pros

• Its quick, I spend about 5-10 min per NPC
• Its broadly compatible, it uses only morphs built into CK so it works with everything.
• Its re-exportable, if you the player need to re-export the face gen data, you can.  Just select the NPCs in CK and do Cntrl+F4 and it will rebuild the facegen for those NPCs which has been useful
• Its easy to export to SE, because it uses just basic CK stuff

Cons

• The quality of the results is limited, they'll never look as good as Racemenu
• The options for hair color, skin tone, warpaint, etc. are limited

 

Racemenu

Pros

• The quality of the results can be much higher
• More options in hair color, skin tone, war paint
• More options in extras

Cons

• Takes longer, Pandorable says she spends anywhere from a half hour to several hours on each face sculpt
• Its not re-exportable, if you need to rebuild the face gen, you can't.
• May not always be fully compatible
• May require extra steps to export to SE

 

For me personally the extra time factor is a big issue, but I also know that various players being able to re-export the face gen data was something that has been handy in the past.  Its enabled players to solve some of their own issues.  Compatiblity although at the moment I don't know of any direct conflict that would be caused by this.  And finally, export to SE.  Everyone moving over to that (except me, I'm just a stubborn old mule... LOL)  @Loostrok recently converted the current version of PB to SE with my permission and @Pfiffy had also asked and was also working on one.  I'm not sure what issues using Racemenu built faces would cause in converting to SE, I've no experience with that so if either of them wants to jump in here with advice, it'd be appreciated.

 

I had thought I was going to be able to build a system where, essentially, I could build a few hundred base NPCs, and then use scripting to add hair and force change the voice type.  Had that worked it would have allowed me to turn about 400 base NPCs into about 40,000 NPCs.  If it had worked, you'd likely have never seen the same female witch or bandit twice in one game.  Unfortunately Bethesda hard coded certain limitations into how NPC records work and I couldn't get around it, well... I sorta did but the results were broken.

 

So I'm back to having to create a few thousand NPCs in order to have a few thousand NPCs and you'll never see this mod produce 40k NPC (the amount of face gen would take up around 20-30 GB!!!!), been kind a bummed about that.  That means time to create each one is back to being a serious factor.  As a result my current thinking is trending towards most NPCs being made in CK, and maybe doing some custom faces for the unique boss types I've recently started upgrading (The Caller, Minorne, etc.)

 

I am looking at some other major structural changes to the mod, I just haven't gotten to them yet.

[Pfiffy]

43 minutes ago, EinarrTheRed said:

 

 

There are basically two ways to generate better looking faces for NPCs.  One is to do it entirely in Creation Kit, which is what I do now, and the other is to use Racemenu which is what people like Pandorable do.  There are pros and cons to each method.

 

Creation Kit

Pros

• Its quick, I spend about 5-10 min per NPC
• Its broadly compatible, it uses only morphs built into CK so it works with everything.
• Its re-exportable, if you the player need to re-export the face gen data, you can.  Just select the NPCs in CK and do Cntrl+F4 and it will rebuild the facegen for those NPCs which has been useful
• Its easy to export to SE, because it uses just basic CK stuff

Cons

• The quality of the results is limited, they'll never look as good as Racemenu
• The options for hair color, skin tone, warpaint, etc. are limited

 

 

 

Isn't it posiible to add warpaints and such to the options in the CK? I never made any chars...  

[EinarrTheRed]

Only by outright replacing existing warpaint, then... export the face gen at which point it gets baked into the facetint data and the change to the warpaint can be removed because its no longer used... unless someone wants to re-export the facegen in which case they're screwed.

 

Put another way...

 

• In CK you have a specific number of warpaint "slots" which are connected to / reference specific vanilla warpaint options.
• When you select one what's actually happening is the game looks for the warpaint mask (think masking in a paint program, that's pretty much exactly what it is) and you set the color and the transparency... from 0 which is fully transparent so you don't see it to 1 which is fully opaque and tends to have hard edges (so I used a lot of .5 or .6 or .7 because I thought aesthetically it blended better, sometimes even lower if I wanted it to look like an old and faded option or if I was combining a couple options and I wanted the 2nd option to be a more subtle accent, I did this a lot with the Forsworn)
• When you export the facegen, part of what it does is create a "tintmask" graphic which is all the lipstick, eyeshadow, blush, and warpaints baked into a single transmap graphic that gets applied to the face.  At that point the info in the actor record isn't even being used anymore, its what's in the tintmask that counts.

 

Now you can change those options by finding the original tintmasks used by CK to create the vanilla warpaints and replacing them with custom options.  But you're limited to the existing number of slots and unless you include all that in the download then if someone re-exports the data they lose the custom warpaints, because their CK will have the default warpaints and will replace what you did with that... probably for some ugly and undesirable results.  Also, it means manually swapping things out every time you want to use a different custom warpaint for another NPC... its a pain in the ass, especially if you're making hundreds of NPCs.  Finally, just to add to the fun, CK warpaints are limited in resolution, most are only 512x512 so they tend to look a lil blocky and sometimes kinda pixelated with rough edges.  Anything too high resolution (which is most of the warpaint mods out there which start at 2k and go up from there) won't even show up in CK, so you can't see it to see how it looks while working... you get to guess.

 

This is not true in Racemenu where you can have 2k and 4k custom warpaint options that do show up on the face while doing character creation, and there's no limit on slots, if you have 5000 warpaint options installed then you have 5000 warpaint options to pick from.  In CK you'll have 10 to 16 depending on race.  That's why on the Forsworn I experimented with taking the default options and enabling 2 or even 3 warpaints on the same NPC to create combined effects... it added much needed variety and I think some of them turned out quite nice.  But it was still sticking to just what's possible in CK and it also means those warpaint WILL re-export if you rebuild the facegen from just the actor record data in CK.

 

Coincedentally, you can very much alter the appearance of an NPC by just finding the facetint mask for one NPC and copying it over to another.  They're all identified by the NPCs RefID so you'll have to find that, then search for the tintmask you want to copy by that number, copy it, rename it with the RefID of the NPC you want to copy it too... but it'll work.  Its also tedious especially if you want to do it with more than a couple NPCs.

 

If you REALLY want to go nuts, you can import the headmesh from Skyrim into something like Blender 3D, set up your tint mask layer and paint your own custom eyeshadow, lipstick, blush, and warpaint/tattoos, save that as the tintmask and use the trick I mentioned above to apply it to the NPC skipping CK and Racemenu entirely.  But its even more work doing that so... not going to happen in this mod.  But you can do it and I've seen some spectacular results by people who did.

 

Part of what concerns me is that if I build NPCs in Racemenu, to convert those to SE, you'd probably need a lot of additional files from me to do it or else you'll have to hold my hand (and probably stand behind me with a pitch fork and shove) while I figure out how to convert to SE myself... which I'm not at all excited about (hence the need for a pitch fork, which you'll probably blunt on my hard head).  So I'm strongly leaning towards sticking mostly to doing this stuff in CK because then people like you can apparently convert it with little to no trouble.

[Pfiffy]

Well, for the most parts you don't even need to convert the Headmeshes....The old ones work fine in SE. I only do it, because there are always ppl who will try to convert them and wreck them on the way, like they did it with the markers in ZAZ...It is the same trouble that ppl get themselves into, if the resave esp's blindly.... Or some stupid Modmanger or checking tool will complain about that. I don't know if you followed the discussions in the SE section about that. My problem now is that I don't have the time to do the testing, because I'm struggleing with SOS and a clothingrplacer.

[EinarrTheRed]

Okay so if the headmesh / facegen data can just be re-used then there's no issue at all there with using either.  Good to know.  Facegen consist of two files for each NPC.  One is the packed headmesh and hair mesh in the meshes folder and the other is the above mentioned facetint mask in the textures folder.  Even if you had to convert the headmesh part, if SE still uses the same tintmask you could just save that and copy it over and that part should be okay.

 

An no I haven't followed the discussions.  Honestly, I gave up on SE... went from being very excited about it when it was announced to a point of having completely lost any interest in it.  So in addition to not having converted over because I'm in the middle of a big project with Whiterun (and converting in the middle of a big project is more insanity than I can stand right now)... I just don't have any desire to convert over.  I'll wait for TES 6 and pray that Bethesda (probably in vain) fixes a lot of the issues and limitations I'm struggling with in TES 5.

 

 

 

[karlpaws]

7 hours ago, EinarrTheRed said:

 I'll wait for TES 6 and pray that Bethesda (probably in vain) fixes a lot of the issues and limitations I'm struggling with in TES 5.

There were news reports a few days ago that Microsoft purchased Bethesda and its associated offshoots, though TES6 should still be in the "prior commitments" category of "supported platforms."  One speculation was that MS could throw money and hours at some of the other projects to reap a quick profit and let Beth get TES 6 out the door faster.

 

but at this point, who really knows.

[kohlteth]

Ayone know of an SSE version as seems to be nothing like the MOD and my bandits etc are ugerly. and really need this on SE for PAH  

 

 

NVM I found answer is earlier post, pity loverslab search sucks so bad

[Verivy77]

Welcher Link zum download es ist nur ESP?

[MaDBoY06]

Hi everyone! Help fix the texture mismatch, as in the screenshot, this only happens for an NPC out of fashion. How to make the mod only change hairstyles and not affect textures?

ScreenShot22.bmp

[Grey Cloud]

12 minutes ago, MaDBoY06 said:

How to make the mod only change hairstyles and not affect textures

Did you run LOOT or otherwise sort the load order? Something is overwriting this mod. Move this mod below any mods which change the appearance of bandits etc.

 

FYI save screenshots as jpgs and post them directly into the post using the paperclip icon below and put them in spoiler tags.

[MaDBoY06]

45 minutes ago, Grey Cloud said:

Did you run LOOT or otherwise sort the load order? Something is overwriting this mod. Move this mod below any mods which change the appearance of bandits etc.

 

FYI save screenshots as jpgs and post them directly into the post using the paperclip icon below and put them in spoiler tags.

LOOT used. I disassembled everything, there are no conflicts. Mod dragged both up and down, the problem remained. How to remove all textures and leave only hairstyles in fashion? so that nothing replaces the texture of the face. Is it possible to do this? If so, how? Tell me please.

[Grey Cloud]

43 minutes ago, MaDBoY06 said:

How to remove all textures and leave only hairstyles in fashion? so that nothing replaces the texture of the face. Is it possible to do this?

If you want to do that then you may as well just install a hair mod.

 

You must be doing something wrong as the mod works for everyone else.

 

You have downloaded the correct files haven't you? The ones you need are: Prettier Bandits v0.9.1 - this is the main file and weighs in at over 1GB. You will also need Prettier Bandits v0.9.2  - is a patch and so just an esp.

[EinarrTheRed]

It may be the ENB but that face does not look like one I made.

 

The mod does not change skin texture of the face, it uses whatever skin texture you have installed for both the face or the body.  I personally use Bijin's skin texture but it should work with just about any of them out there.  It does change the face tint mask, which is the additional layer that adds the make up (eye shadow, lip color, etc) and tattoos (if any) and dirt (which I generally removed).  It looks to me as if something has replaced the tintmask and face geometry data and that's causing the mismatch.

 

Find that bandit, open console and in the lower left corner find where it says ID and BaseID.  Write down and let me know what that BaseID is.  That will tell me exactly which bandit that is and I will look up the corresponding facegendata and tintmask and explain where to find those and you can delete them, that should eliminate the problem.

 

If I'm correct and that is the problem then you had something install some loose facegen data for bandits and that data is still there and causing the conflict.  The simplest solution for that would be to re-export the facegen data from Prettier Bandits so that it overwrites whatever errant data has been left in your game files, that will require using CK and about 30 min of time but is otherwise easy to do.

 

Here's how:

• Open the mod in Creation Kit
• In the Object Window in the box next to Filter input PB_
• Now look in the Actor folder in the Object Window, this will filter the list so that you just see all the PB actors (NPCs)
• Select all of them.
• Press Control+F4
• Wait 15-30 min (depending on how fast your computer is) for it to process all the files.
• When it is finished you will get a popup msg box that says Done.  Click the Ok button.
• Close CK, you do not need to save before closing.
• You have re-exported all the facegen data in loose form and that will overwrite any conflicting data, this will most likely solve your problem.

 

If I am correct and it is conflicting loose facegen data, moving the mod up or down in your load order won't fix the problem because its not anything to do with when the esp loads.  Its the actual geometry data.  Currently Prettier Bandits packs everything into a bsa.  The good thing about that is that if everyone did that there would be no loose data and you actually could solve the problem just by moving things up or down in your load order.  But unfortunately many mods don't pack their data into a bsa, they leave it loose and the TES 5 engine always uses loose files in priority over bsa data, regardless of load order.  By re-exporting all the facedata, it will all now be loose data in your game folder and that should take care of the problem.  Because of this, I'm seriously thinking of just not doing a bsa anymore in the future.  Besides which the loose files zipped up with 7zip is actually a smaller archive to download than the bsa.

 

Hope that helped and also hopefully helped you understand some how things work.