Prettier Bandits

[EinarrTheRed]

Oh, nice, I'll probably check that out when I come along.

 

One of the things that somewhat annoys me is when I use PAH, I tend to collect the stronger bandits as slaves - but I have a lot of "duplicates" and right now I have about 4 identical nord quadruplets, all with the same face paint and mohawks...

 

So I was hoping there might be a mod that also mixes up more appearances into the bandits etc.

Yeah I tend to do the same thing.  If I add any additional variations to it Prettier Bandits it would probably be to the "hostile adventurer" encounters which draws from the adventurer encounter actors (so they can be friendly, arrogant snots who call you a milk drinker or they just attack you, but all drawn from the same actor types and right now there's just one of each racial type).  Since the adventurer encounters are always 110% of your level, they'll always be some of the highest "vanilla" encounters in the game.  It wouldn't be too hard to add say 2-3 additional actors of each race.  Plus who doesn't want to "collect" some jerk who tried to kill you?    Now if only we had display cases to put them in.

 

No promises but I won't rule out adding that if I get a chance.

 

 

 

ahh ok, thx for replying and this is already good and i cant wait for the Smexy ver

 

 

Thanks, glad you're enjoying it.  I think you'll enjoy Smexy Bandits as well, its going to take awhile to get those face sculpts done and right now I have a friend who is better at it teaching me some on that.  Plus I'm working on some other aspects to make the bandits a bit more interesting as opponents without making them uber, and keeping it generally lore friendly.   But for now Prettier Bandits gives us better looking bandits and so forth without anything that might break your game (no scripting or anything else) which is exactly what it was intended to be.

 

Hi EinarrTheRed,

 

I thought this might help with the archive size. Using 7-Zip on maximum compression, you can get the archive size down from 402MB to 129MB.

 

I have a question about the Smexy version the you're working on, will it be changing the NPCs facial features? A lot of the poor girls can't be saved from the Bethesda ugly stick with hair alone.   But thankfully Zaz gave us bags to put over their heads 

Thanks, I hadn't looked at the compression with that but I will, the file size is definitely and issue and it'd be great to get it down further.

 

Yes it will be changing the facial features completely.  Right now I'm looking at about 320-360 unique appearances archtypes done as custom facial sculpts in ECE or Racemenu.  The last 40 might be orcs if I can ever figure out how to make a "smexy" orc that still looks like an orc.     Its kind of a challenge but I'll see what I can come up with.   I might also attempt to do something with khajiit (which would bring the total up to 400), I'd like to but they're even harder to work with.  Argonians...

 

PS - I did mod some of the orcs in Prettier Bandits, you guys let me know what you think and if you think any of it was "in the right direction" or not, I'll use that to help guide what I attempt in Smexy Bandits.   I've tried to mix the aesthetics up in what I did because we all like different things so that way there's something for everyone.

 

But its gonna take awhile to get all that done, I still have some things to learn about tweaking their behaviors and a lot of testing to do on seeing how much I can re-balance their levels without breaking game balance.  Plus the sheer time it takes to do all those original face sculpts (want to give you guys something new to look at and not a rehash of Sansuka's excellent work).

 

An I've also got five other mods in the works I want to get finished up and released first plus some stuff I'm working on for... errrrkk... better hush before Clifton smacks me.

 

Thanks for the feedback, cheers

[Soulbound]

Thanks for the reply to my question about Smexy, that's a mammoth task you're undertaking 

 

I have some more feedback, I found 2 NPC's that don't have a NIF and DDS file associated with them, but the ESP shows changes to their hair.

 

000457FF = treascorpsecommonerbretonfemale

00045802  = treascorpsecommonerimperialfemale

 

The image is of Karan, who is found dead at a small camp between Old Hroldan Inn and Soljund's Sinkhole. She uses 000457FF as a template and this is her vanilla look and is not related to your mod.

 

 

 

 

 

I thought I'd add a couple of other screenshots I've taken, interesting choice in hair colours btw 

 

 

 

 

 

Edit: Screenshots were taken with Quick light on, too dark with my ENB LOL

[EinarrTheRed]

Thanks for the reply to my question about Smexy, that's a mammoth task you're undertaking 

 

I have some more feedback, I found 2 NPC's that don't have a NIF and DDS file associated with them, but the ESP shows changes to their hair.

 

000457FF = treascorpsecommonerbretonfemale

00045802  = treascorpsecommonerimperialfemale

 

I thought I'd add a couple of other screenshots I've taken, interesting choice in hair colours btw 

 

Yeah, Smexy Bandits is going to take a long time to do if I really try to do it properly.  That's why I went ahead with Prettier Bandits, gives us something to play with and use with PAHE that has no compatibility issues (other than the auto-renamer thing).

 

I'll check those two and re-export them, probably just forgot to when I was doing all the others.  I forgot I updated a few of the corpses as well.  Good catch!

 

I had fun with the hair colors.  I thought a lot of the original hair colors looked a bit faded and flat, so I made 21 new hair colors for Prettier Bandits and tried to make them richer and more lustrous.  Its hard to gauge though because I use default lighting and some ENBs will alter the shading.  Hopefully it looks good for most.  I might have added a few too many redheads... course I'm Irish so...

 

Oh an I decided to go ahead an add in some more female adventurers to the encounter lists.  There were 11 originally, when I'm done there will be 33, so that's another 22 new unique females you can chase after!   If you don't know what the adventurer actor types are, you encounter them wandering the roads.  Sometimes they are friendly and might mention trouble nearby.  Sometimes they call you a milk drinker and you can get in a brawl with them.  And sometimes they are hostile and will just flat out attack you on sight.  The same actors are used for all three encounter types.  Adventurers are always 110% of whatever level you are.  I'm giving some of them some extra perks so they'll be better in a fight (and make better combat slaves).  They already get leveled armor and weapons (up to ebony), so should make for some fun encounters.

 

Might see a 0.7 by this weekend.

 

EDIT:  Checked Karan in CK and she isn't flagged to use the traits of the template so she won't inherit the appearance.

 

[Soulbound]

 

Thanks for the reply to my question about Smexy, that's a mammoth task you're undertaking 

 

I have some more feedback, I found 2 NPC's that don't have a NIF and DDS file associated with them, but the ESP shows changes to their hair.

 

000457FF = treascorpsecommonerbretonfemale

00045802  = treascorpsecommonerimperialfemale

 

I thought I'd add a couple of other screenshots I've taken, interesting choice in hair colours btw 

 

Yeah, Smexy Bandits is going to take a long time to do if I really try to do it properly.  That's why I went ahead with Prettier Bandits, gives us something to play with and use with PAHE that has no compatibility issues (other than the auto-renamer thing).

 

I'll check those two and re-export them, probably just forgot to when I was doing all the others.  I forgot I updated a few of the corpses as well.  Good catch!

 

I had fun with the hair colors.  I thought a lot of the original hair colors looked a bit faded and flat, so I made 21 new hair colors for Prettier Bandits and tried to make them richer and more lustrous.  Its hard to gauge though because I use default lighting and some ENBs will alter the shading.  Hopefully it looks good for most.  I might have added a few too many redheads... course I'm Irish so...

 

Oh an I decided to go ahead an add in some more female adventurers to the encounter lists.  There were 11 originally, when I'm done there will be 33, so that's another 22 new unique females you can chase after!   If you don't know what the adventurer actor types are, you encounter them wandering the roads.  Sometimes they are friendly and might mention trouble nearby.  Sometimes they call you a milk drinker and you can get in a brawl with them.  And sometimes they are hostile and will just flat out attack you on sight.  The same actors are used for all three encounter types.  Adventurers are always 110% of whatever level you are.  I'm giving some of them some extra perks so they'll be better in a fight (and make better combat slaves).  They already get leveled armor and weapons (up to ebony), so should make for some fun encounters.

 

Might see a 0.7 by this weekend.

 

 

 

I did notice some combat changes to Hags and the additional Vaermina Devotees too, they look like they could be a bit of a handful now   Looking forward to the next update and have my whip at the ready 

[EinarrTheRed]

Yup, made witches and hags have a level range more like what you see with bandits and warlocks, hags now cap at level 48 instead of 16, so a bit tougher.  Its not exactly the same because bandits and warlocks are divided into 6 different level groups which then get used in the leveled encounter markers.  For whatever reason Bethesda only gave witches two groups.  I thought about making them proper leveled groups but it was more time than I felt was worth it to spend on this project.  Now in Smexy Bandits...

 

An I completely forgot I updated the Vaermina Devotees!  LOL   I'll have to add that to the mod description.  Give yourself a gold star.

 

Watch out for a wood elf adventurer with a bow in the next release, I made one a ranger and gave her quite a few of the bow perks.  If she's got an ebony bow that's gonna hurt a bit!

[EinarrTheRed]

After giving the "more variety" idea some thought, I'm going to try an experiment.  For the next release I'm going to try an use some of the existing High Elves appearances to create some additional top level Thalmor.  That will let me add variety by re-using existing face data sets, so it won't increase the file size any either.  As far as I know this should work... course that doesn't mean it will.     Probably be Sat or Sun before I post the next update, kind of busy with other things today... life and such.

[EinarrTheRed]

Uploaded the latest release, v0.7.  I'm experimenting with adding more variety to the top end encounters by re-using existing PB appearance data.  Mostly I'm trying to re-use level 1 and 4 (lowest tier groups) actor appearances in PB as templates for some of the top end encounters.  For now I'm experimenting with only the Thalmor female wizard / justicar which is level 44.  The current version increases the possible actor types from 1 for this encounter to 6.  If it works and there are not issues I'll look into doing this for the top end bandits and warlocks as well.  It should work okay, it seemed to in what testing I was able to get done.

 

Also, of interest to those using PAHE.  The adventurers you encounter in addition to having more variety now, many of them also have more perks so they'll be better in a fight.  But of particular interest was something I'd discovered about even the vanilla adventurer.  They are set to be 110% of whatever level your character is with no level cap.  They also will continue to gain levels, maintaining that ratio even after enslavement.  So if you grab one at say level 6 and keep them, then when you are level 30 they will be level 33; when you are level 70 they'll be 77 and so on.  This is also true of the roadside thief encounters.

 

So there you are, enjoy.

[Soulbound]

Uploaded the latest release, v0.7.  I'm experimenting with adding more variety to the top end encounters by re-using existing PB appearance data.  Mostly I'm trying to re-use level 1 and 4 (lowest tier groups) actor appearances in PB as templates for some of the top end encounters.  For now I'm experimenting with only the Thalmor female wizard / justicar which is level 44.  The current version increases the possible actor types from 1 for this encounter to 6.  If it works and there are not issues I'll look into doing this for the top end bandits and warlocks as well.  It should work okay, it seemed to in what testing I was able to get done.

 

Also, of interest to those using PAHE.  The adventurers you encounter in addition to having more variety now, many of them also have more perks so they'll be better in a fight.  But of particular interest was something I'd discovered about even the vanilla adventurer.  They are set to be 110% of whatever level your character is with no level cap.  They also will continue to gain levels, maintaining that ratio even after enslavement.  So if you grab one at say level 6 and keep them, then when you are level 30 they will be level 33; when you are level 70 they'll be 77 and so on.  This is also true of the roadside thief encounters.

 

So there you are, enjoy.

 

I don't fancy being on the receiving end of a Thalmor female or an Adventurer with the perks and spells you've blessed them with   I could end up being the one being dominated... actually that doesn't sound too bad 

 

Just some honest feedback, i'm not overly keen on some of the hair colors, mainly the ones outside the natural color range, but that's my own personal taste and easily fixed with Tes5Edit. Having said that, I do use Female Cicero, but her hair is such a nice red and goes well with the jester outfit.

 

I use a lot of NPC Overhaul mods to get some variety and still have an older Generic NPC mod that I've merged with yours, but it only replaces the first two of each class, about 107 in total. Here's an example of an Apprentice Necromancer and you'll understand why.

 

 

 

 

 

I have kept the stat changes you've made to each of them, don't want to miss out on any of your tweaks! I really like your work on the Fellglow Slaver Camp NPCs and hope to see something similar again in the future 

[EinarrTheRed]

 

I don't fancy being on the receiving end of a Thalmor female or an Adventurer with the perks and spells you've blessed them with   I could end up being the one being dominated... actually that doesn't sound too bad 

 

Just some honest feedback, i'm not overly keen on some of the hair colors, mainly the ones outside the natural color range, but that's my own personal taste and easily fixed with Tes5Edit. Having said that, I do use Female Cicero, but her hair is such a nice red and goes well with the jester outfit.

 

 

Yeah, I wanted to make Thalmor and Adventurers a bit more challenging at least up through mid game.  At least mid game for me which is around level 60-70 (I tend to level fast) and late game is level 100+ (last character before I accidentally deleted him was level 148 which is the highest I've gotten one).

 

Honest feedback is the best kind.    Not going to hurt my feelings.  Hair color and make up are two areas that have given me some trouble so I view Prettier Bandits as good practice for both Smexy Bandits and some follower mods I'm working on (If you think those adventurers are nasty, wait til you meet Aislin... she's short, she's cute, she's sweet... until you piss her off; she's a dandy support follower).  Anyway, if you wouldn't mind posting some screen shots of hair colors you think are off and comment which way you think they ought to go I can make note of it and tweak them a bit.  Also note I did make a few that were deliberately outside the norm, for example some wood elves have green or greenish hair (kind taking the woon nymph thing a bit literally), some dark elves have a pinkish or purple hair.  I was just trying to add a lil racial "color" to them, make them a lil more unique.  But if the colors are too strong or too bright or something I can try toning it down, its a simple thing to edit.  Actually changing the base hair color isn't that hard, its figuring out how to tweak it so it looks good.  Plus I don't run any ENBs so things a look a bit different in my game and that complicates it as well.  But I don't mind giving it a try if you're patient enough to keep giving feed back on the results.

 

Cheers

 

PS - I am working on some new location mods of my own (3 in the works right now) that also add some NPCs with custom appearance mods as well as some bonus content for PAHE users.  Also, there might be some new stuff for PAHE from me in the future, more on that later.  Good stuff in the works, just takes time.

[valcon767]

like what you have done so far

 

just saw the update (will get in morning) but on version 0.5 I found something out

 

your mod works great but does have some minor issues with the wenches series (easy fix though)

 

for it to work right (for me at least) I just have to make sure it loads BEFORE any of the wenches series and then they both work great.

 

for some reason I get a lot of bandits with mohawks (will test on new version when I update it in the next day or so) 

 

overall great work and can't wait to see what else you do with it

 

[EinarrTheRed]

Glad you like it.  I didn't design Prettier Bandits to work with Immersive Wenches or Deadlier Wenches, basically because those mods give you much prettier bandits already, but it also makes them kind of super powered and not at all lore friendly.  So my goal was to fill a different niche, more lore friendly and less powerful but still better looking bandits.  Plus, the Wenches mods can have issues with PAHE and I wanted to provide something that was as compatible as possible.  Other than Auto-renamer not working on PB, its entirely compatible with PAHE (or likely any other similar slavery mod such as S3 and so forth).

 

That said, if you put other bandit / NPC mods after Prettier Bandits in your load order it will allow them to overwrite it and that should allow things to work the way you wish.  The reverse is also true, if Prettier Bandits comes last, it will overwrite things.  I'm trying to keep a complete list of what types of encounters it updates so users know what to expect.

 

Mohawks aye?  I didn't include that many of them in Prettier Bandits, not something I'm personally partial too.  But there are some, I figured some would like them and I tried to include a mix of everything so there would be something for almost anyone (at least so far as that was possible, there are practical limits).

[Soulbound]

 

I have some more feedback, I found 2 NPC's that don't have a NIF and DDS file associated with them, but the ESP shows changes to their hair.

 

000457FF = treascorpsecommonerbretonfemale

00045802  = treascorpsecommonerimperialfemale

 

The image is of Karan, who is found dead at a small camp between Old Hroldan Inn and Soljund's Sinkhole. She uses 000457FF as a template and this is her vanilla look and is not related to your mod.

 

 

TESV 2016-05-18 20-57-25-46.jpg

 

 

 

Just a note about this problem I had with Karan, this was caused by USLEEP removing all the Head Parts and changing tint layers. I left it alone because Karan only spawns once and despawns when you enter a new cell after you find the camp. On the subject of USLEEP, there are no major conflicts with PB only some Inventory and Stat changes to a few NPCs.

 

Another mod conflict I had was with ELFX and NightcallerTemple01 "Nightcaller Temple" [CELL:0009AA4A]. This is just a change to the mist FX and can easily be fix by placing PB before ELFX in the load order. ELFX has also added NightcallerTempleLocation "Nightcaller Temple" [LCTN:000192B9] to the Location Reference you added for the additional Vaermina Devotees, so they still spawn correctly.

 

 

 

Honest feedback is the best kind.    Not going to hurt my feelings.  Hair color and make up are two areas that have given me some trouble so I view Prettier Bandits as good practice for both Smexy Bandits and some follower mods I'm working on (If you think those adventurers are nasty, wait til you meet Aislin... she's short, she's cute, she's sweet... until you piss her off; she's a dandy support follower).  Anyway, if you wouldn't mind posting some screen shots of hair colors you think are off and comment which way you think they ought to go I can make note of it and tweak them a bit.  Also note I did make a few that were deliberately outside the norm, for example some wood elves have green or greenish hair (kind taking the woon nymph thing a bit literally), some dark elves have a pinkish or purple hair.  I was just trying to add a lil racial "color" to them, make them a lil more unique.  But if the colors are too strong or too bright or something I can try toning it down, its a simple thing to edit.  Actually changing the base hair color isn't that hard, its figuring out how to tweak it so it looks good.  Plus I don't run any ENBs so things a look a bit different in my game and that complicates it as well.  But I don't mind giving it a try if you're patient enough to keep giving feed back on the results.

 

 

I'm doing an experiment with different hair styles to see if the colors look better and will post the results.

[valcon767]

updated to 0.7

 

mohawks still there but not nearly as many as I was seeing before.

 

as for the wenches series - I use it and several other mods to increase difficulty without actually changing game settings (just posted what worked for me for information purposes)

 

as near as I can figure out what happened that caused them to show like that previously was a combination of things:

a higher than normal run on them to begin with combined with other mods changing most of the ones without that hairstyle so all I ended up seeing were mohawks.

as stated they are still there just not the massive amount I was seeing for some reason.

 

a few looks I did not care for personally but even those were a major improvement in looks.

 

overall a great eye candy mod.

 

keep up the good work please.

 

 

 

[Kaz Aanh]

Word pretty is "pretty" confusing.

[Soulbound]

Word pretty is "pretty" confusing.

 

pretty

[prit-ee]

 

adjective, prettier, prettiest.

 

Pleasing or attractive to the eye

 

To make pretty; improve the appearance of 

 

 

Hope this helps 

[RockMic]

Not that I mind, but I'm having bandits also modified, written by other mod.  
Fine thanks.

[Soulbound]

Hi EinarrTheRed,

 

After looking through all the NPCs I have some more feedback on the hair and colors. This focuses on a particular hair style that looks difficult to match with a color without looking like plastic.

 

 

 

The hair is ELF17 and the 3 subjects are all Altmer.

 

RefID 000E0FF2

 

This is what I consider an Altmer look, with medium to light colors that help the style look more natural.

 

RefID 00045CED

 

The hair and eyes look like a Dunmer. Dark Pink isn't bad in some lighting, but looks odd on an Altmer.

 

 

Edited version. I only changed the eyes and hair color.

 

RefID 000F9612

 

I think the darker the hair color on this style the more plastic the look.

 

 

All together outside

 

 

 

 

Hope this is useful 

[EinarrTheRed]

I'll keep it in mind.  I have been thinking of working out an actual list of hair colors and maybe even order it according to how frequent they appear according to race.  I somewhat tried doing that in PB, but mostly on the basis of "that seems about right" wasn't any deep thought to the process though, might be something to do in the future.

 

Also a heads up.  I won't be able to work further on my projects for a couple weeks.  I appear to have made one to many installs and uninstalls and finally screwed up my Skyrim installation beyond my ability to repair it.  So this week I'm working on backing up all my projects to make sure I have everything and then I'll be doing a full clean re-install. 

[Soulbound]

I'll keep it in mind.  I have been thinking of working out an actual list of hair colors and maybe even order it according to how frequent they appear according to race.  I somewhat tried doing that in PB, but mostly on the basis of "that seems about right" wasn't any deep thought to the process though, might be something to do in the future.

 

Also a heads up.  I won't be able to work further on my projects for a couple weeks.  I appear to have made one to many installs and uninstalls and finally screwed up my Skyrim installation beyond my ability to repair it.  So this week I'm working on backing up all my projects to make sure I have everything and then I'll be doing a full clean re-install. 

 

Sorry to hear about your problems with Skyrim, I've done that a few times myself 

 

Hope the re-install doesn't give you too much of a headache.

[Banana Banana]

Hey, love the mod, but I would like to keep the hair colors more natural. I tried changing it with TES5Edit myself, but I do not seem to get it right. I open the prettierbandits.esp, go to colors, replace the color values of the neon colors with the values found in the natural colors and exit/save with TES5Edit.

 

But ingame everyone still has green hair. But if I then load the prettierbandits.esp in TES5Edit again, it shows that changed hair color values were saved after all. I honestly do not understand what I am doing wrong at this point.

 

(I am using Mod Organizer and opening TES5Edit using MO, have no real clue about modding, mostly just pressing buttons)

 

 

 

[bhodorbox]

Does this work without Apache hair? I don't like the anime look of Apache hair.

[terrorofmorrowind]

 

I'll keep it in mind.  I have been thinking of working out an actual list of hair colors and maybe even order it according to how frequent they appear according to race.  I somewhat tried doing that in PB, but mostly on the basis of "that seems about right" wasn't any deep thought to the process though, might be something to do in the future.

 

Also a heads up.  I won't be able to work further on my projects for a couple weeks.  I appear to have made one to many installs and uninstalls and finally screwed up my Skyrim installation beyond my ability to repair it.  So this week I'm working on backing up all my projects to make sure I have everything and then I'll be doing a full clean re-install. 

 

Sorry to hear about your problems with Skyrim, I've done that a few times myself 

 

Hope the re-install doesn't give you too much of a headache.

 

 

Me not yet but it's close, way to close then i'd like to admit. But somehow i'm still capapble of ducktaping the broken pieces together, somehow...

 

[CliftonJD]

Hey, love the mod, but I would like to keep the hair colors more natural. I tried changing it with TES5Edit myself, but I do not seem to get it right. I open the prettierbandits.esp, go to colors, replace the color values of the neon colors with the values found in the natural colors and exit/save with TES5Edit.

 

But ingame everyone still has green hair. But if I then load the prettierbandits.esp in TES5Edit again, it shows that changed hair color values were saved after all. I honestly do not understand what I am doing wrong at this point.

 

(I am using Mod Organizer and opening TES5Edit using MO, have no real clue about modding, mostly just pressing buttons)

 

ya, you can't change hair color from tesedit, without assigning it to use different meshes (hair color is in the meshes)

 

[CliftonJD]

couple mercenarys with greyface bug:

[EinarrTheRed]

Okay gang, kinda back.  I took a bit of a break from Skyrim (also had a short vacation) and I still need to go back and reinstall everything, but I'm catching up.

 

To answer some questions, no Prettier Bandits will not work without Apachii Hair.  Its a necessary dependency as it adds the various hair models to all the various NPC actors it mods.  Before I get asked, I didn't use KS hairs because of the way its set up.  Its not a master file so I'd either had to make a bash file or import all the hair models into PB which would have massively increased the file size.  I really wish the author of KS hair would make it a proper master which would make it much easier for modders to use... but oh well.

 

Changing hair colors is a multi step process in CK which is probably why you can't do it in TES.  Which isn't to say there isn't a way to do it in TES but it might help to understand how its done in CK first.

 

To create a hair color first you have to make a color file which contains the RGB value.  This is a bit of a pain because there's no preview in CK.  The only way to get a preview is to bring up RaceMenu and set the custom hair color there, write down the RGB value and then go into CK and copy that there.  But what you see in RaceMenu tends not to always be what you see in game, sometimes its a bit lighter or brighter than what you see in actual play and that makes getting the hair color just right a bit of a guessing game.  One you have your hair color you need to set it up in the Race files for each race.  Each race has two lists, one for men and one for women.  If this is not done the hair color will not be available for that race/gender which may be why your change in TES isn't showing up in game (if the hair color you changed to in TES isn't on the that Race's list, it won't work).  You could try finding the race files in TES, then find the hair list for that race and add the hair color there and then change it for the actor and that *might* work.   But honestly, its just way easier to change it in CK.

 

Strange its only giving the name "breton"  If its from Prettier bandits it ought to have a name with bandit or warlock or something in it.  When i get things reinstalled I double check though, I'm going from memory here.