The Joys of Aradia Kato

[iria2012]

First time poster and I have not really modded any mods in Skyrim before. So, be gentle please.

I decided to fire up Skyrim again and get it tweaked to my liking. I felt like playing my little Akavir rogue waifu. So, I decided to install Aradia Kato outfit mod along with the 7Base and UNPB conversions for it. Interesting. Briefly looking over the mod in the CK, I think I see a couple of issues with it. (Correct me if I am totally wrong.) There are two armor styles at work here in the mod. The first style uses the traditional Skyrim armor framework: head (n/a), body (two pieces one with the corset and skirt and one without the corset and skirt), gloves and boots. These have been converted for UNPB and 7Base. However, that outfit style just has one texture design. Boo. The second style is a collection of all the separate pieces of armor: top, corset, skirt, leggings, panties, boots, gloves, arm bands, etc. I really like the second approach as it has pieces for all of the various texture designs which you can mix and match. The downside is that none of them (aside from the gloves and boots) appear to have been converted. I am debating which approach to use to complete the conversion.

 

Method One

• Delete all the individual pieces of armor except for the gloves and boots that are already converted
• Make a copy of Aradia Kato body and full body armor for each of the various texture designs
• Clean up anything else (the nude body includes with the various armor pieces in the inventory window)
• Export into a new mod

Pros

• No fooking with meshes
• It's quick (kind of)
• No fooking with meshes
• Less clutter
• No fooking with meshes
• It works

 

 

 

Cons

• Not as customizable
• Can't stack armor and enchantments to crazy levels (mainly the latter and is this really a con?)

Method Two

• Open the Aradia Kato full body mesh file (which is already converted) in Outfit Studio or NIFScope
• Delete the all the parts except for the top
• Export the mesh for that part
• Repeat those steps for each piece (corset, skirt, leggings, panties and arm bands)
• Replace the individual armor part mesh files with the new ones
• Delete the traditional armor style Aradia Kato full body outfits
• Clean up anything else (the nude body includes with the various armor pieces in the inventory window)
• Export into a new mod

Pros

• Very customizable
• (Almost) No fooking with meshes - no need to touch the inflate, shrink and smooth tools

Cons

• It doesn't seem to work so far.

Well Method One is kind of a mix of some work in the Creation Kit (and some in NIFScope) and Method Two appears to be a lot of work in NIFScope (and some in the Creation Kit). So, I decided to tackle the second method first. The world item appearance is updated, but the item never shows up on my character when worn. I decided to test dropping it on the ground and it appeared as it should, technically. It just hovered in the air, but the rest of the items in the mod did that. So, I expect that part of the mod was not seen as needed and was not fleshed out. The only way I could kind of see it was if I played around with the weight sliders for my character which created some very off graphic artifacts. Yep, made sure to create the *_0 and *_1 versions. It was very odd as the armor piece appeared as it should in Outfit Studio and the Creation Kit. To check I wasn't being a total idiot I decided to try the first method - create a copy of the meshes I needed, change their textures and alpha properties in NIFScope and then create the armor, armor and constructable objects (recipe and tempering) for them. That worked which was kind of a bummer in a way.     

 

As for just adjusting them with BodySlide, I was having mixed results with it. Even though they looked okay in BodySlide, there would still be some mesh clipping in the game. I was trying to avoid having to play with the mesh at all. Keeping things like pantyhose as smooth and as close to the skin as possible in NIFScope while keeping one's sanity is fun.   

I can't help to wonder if someone has already done all this work and I am just repeating someone's work with an outdated version of this mod. Comments?
 

[dTd]

I'm not sure what you're trying to achieve, I've converted this to DG for myself and it works perfectly. Why all the fuss?

[iria2012]

I am trying to update all the pieces of the Aradia Kato outfit for UNPB. The body and full body outfits were converted and the separate pieces of the outfit were not. I would like it to be as consistent as possible. So that when you switch between the full body and say just the top, you shouldn't notice any changes to the mesh of the body or the mesh of the outfit because I used a slider to make a change where the original modder used a brush and vice versa. I guess I could start over from scratch and just reconvert the whole thing and it would be consistent that way, but the everything I need is so tantalizing close in the full body mesh.

[iria2012]

Never mind. Found the problem. Derp moment.

[iria2012]

And it was a false hope. But it doesn't matter. I found uglykidcid's UNPB thread and he pretty much did everything I had planned to do. Thanks uglykidcid. Thanks very much.