Body textures help!

[cronosnake]

Hey all,

 

I've been looking into using different body mod textures into altering each individual race; for example, Elven races might use one specific body texture, while Redguards use a different one, and so on.

 

My chain of thought is this; races such as Argonians and Khajiit obviously use different textures; these must be specified somewhere in their file in the creation kit. Therefore, shouldn't I be able to specify the texture for each race, and thus have each race use it's own texture and look different? I'm only replacing textures, by the way: not meshes.

 

First of all, if this is certainly possible, confirmation would be great. I'm using other people's body mods. I'm also using this as an opportunity to learn more about the creation kit; if there is a mod out there that might do this, I'd still want advice in how to do this myself, though it would also be helpful seeing an example to model off of.

 

Anyways...

 

In searching through the creation kit, I can pull up the data for races through Character-->Race. However, if I choose a race, such as Breton, I don't know exactly where to specify what body texture to use; the body textures I have are all .dds files, and if I go to BretonRace, then BodyData, the texture is a .egt file. I haven't found anything to reference the .dds files.

 

I'm thinking that if I can find where the races references the skin textures, and see how the creation kit differentiates Argonians/khajiit against the humanoid races, I would be fine from there.

 

My main questions are as follows:

 

1. Is this possible?

2. Am I on the right track?

3. Where would I find what I need to reference the .dds files?

 

Thanks for any help!

 

(As a side note, this is in the right forum, right? I thought that troubleshooting was for getting mods to work, not troubleshooting their builds)

Edited April 30, 2013 by cronosnake

[IsharaMeradin]

It is possible.

 

You can use my mod Unique Races as a starting point. It handles all the Creation Kit work and provides a new directory structure layout. I designed it so that each race can have different underwear. As a result each race can have it's own body mesh and texture. Even if you choose to use the same body mesh you can still apply different body textures. Because you can have different bodies I gave it support for different heads too.

 

If that is too wide of a scope for what you want then I suggest taking a look at how it is built. The main thing that you'd need to do is create Texture Sets for each race. Duplicate the existing shared Armor Addon forms so that you have one per race. Then apply the texture set to the body. If you use the swap list, you can use up to 11 texture sets per race (one per weight slider setting). Otherwise apply it to the appropriate node on the NIF entry (on the armor addon form choose edit to select the nif file and you'll see the nodes listed). When that's done you have to add each of the armor addon forms to the SkinNaked Armor form. Be sure to set up body, hands and feet for each race.

 

The nice thing is that if done correctly you won't even have to modify the race records themselves thereby allowing greater compatibility.

[cronosnake]

The unique races mod looks good, and it's something I'll probably check out. Your advice otherwise was also really helpful; I'm going to finish up my small project (not release it, of course), and this is really helpful for learning more about the functions of the creation kit; I think I'm good from here. Thanks!

[JaBaRouke]

Thank You Ishara Meradin this will help me solve my problem