Clothes for a bodyslide -- possible?

[Danest]

Right now, as far as I know, a payer's unique body needs to either be naked, or wearing clothes that no one else will wear; if another npc wears those clothes meant for the player's unique body, they will also suddenly adopt that normally unique body.
Is this a hopeless situation, and I should stop thinking about it?  Or is there maybe hope that just maybe one day some dedicated modder will find a way around this?

[AWP3RATOR]

If, by unique body, you mean the shape of the clothing (i.e. bodyslide body preset) then yes - mostly.  By default, there is only a single NIF exported by BodySlide for a given clothing/armor.  When any NPC wears that piece, the body shape displayed in game is the one that was slid in BS.  Roughly speaking, they are all mostly the same.  The NPC's weight triangle stats affect how the outfit looks on them.  If they are heavier, the outfit will morph somewhat to their weight.  Lighter, the outfit will appear slimmer, etc.

 

The game engine does this - but if the outfit had exaggerated features, so will the npc wearing it - regardless of how they might look naked.

 

One way around this is a mod called Diverse Bodies which alters the npcs morph values, when encountering them for the first time.  This works even if you have already encountered them - the mod will scan local npcs and morph them, if not already done once before.

 

In my experience Diverse Bodies works rather well to provide diversity in the characters encountered - you should check it out.

 

 

[Danest]

Does it solve the problem of the player's unique clothes being impractical for anyone other than the player character?  That's the biggest problem that I have, that the unique player has to use specific clothes that aren't used by anyone else with a different body.

[AWP3RATOR]

Impractical meaning customized for the player's body type/preset?   For example. your Unique Player body has huge breasts, but the base nps do not?  Then no, it doesn't really solve for that, out of the box.  

 

However... Diverse Bodies and LooksMenu combined can do that for you.  What I ended up doing was create a nice preset base for my female npcs (not player). and export that, along with all of the outfits and morph files from bodyslide.  Then allow Diverse Bodies to make further adjustments in game.

 

I then copied that femalebody.nif and femalebody.tri in to the Unique Player folder, so that they are identical.  When in game, I used LooksMenu mophs to re-adjust the player's body to a different shape.  Doing it this way, Unique Player is really only necessary if you wanted custom body textures (like I have).  LooksMenu is taking care of the player's slider variations.

 

So the result is, when wearing an armor that an otherwise plain/thin npc is wearing, when viewed sideby side - they are wearing it correctly and so is my character.

 

See screen shot below for the result.  My char (on right) and this npc are wearing the same outfit.  The NPC has a lower weight and different body scaling from Diverse Bodies.

 

They will mostly have the same overall shape - it's not perfect, but it's better than cloned bodies with different faces!