The [mis]Adventures of Learning Bodyslide Outfit Studio

[Adonsa]

Greetings,

 

Over time I downloaded mods where the requirements include Bodyslide Outfit Studio. Okay, all good, I have it. It's in the CalienteTools directory. It's there, requirement met.

Next I made sure other requirements are installed, yep, all good. Downloaded mods that require BodySlide. Some worked, some didn't Oh well. At least I had downloaded and installed all the requirements.

Time passed, and I ran across a mod that requires that I need to "use" bodyslide outfit studio! Huh? What? But, I met all the developer's requirements, it's downloaded and in a directory. Isn't bodyslide strictly for mod developers? Uh oh. As a lowly gamer, am I'm supposed to be USING bodyslide? Yikes!!!

But the mod websites don't reveal "how" to use Bodyslide!

Off I go to Youtube and find a popular tutorial. At last I'll learn "The Ways of Bodyslide." I didn't have the exact body preset file that's in the youtube video, so I decided to just pick another at random and learn off of it.

And so there was Nevernude. So I'll just learn off it, what could possibly go wrong?

After completing about 2/3 of the tutorial, I decided to take a break and play some SkyrimSE. Shock! My character appeared with the vanilla underwear and bra and no longer my preset!!! How can this be? I'm just learning to use Bodyslide! The game's not even running. My "reckless learning" infused into the game, and caused big time damage!

No worries, I'll just go to racemenu, find my preset, and fix it back. The CBBE Morphs menu was disabled, and my character looks horrible. No matter what I tried, it stayed disabled. Websites give lengthy instructions how to re-enable CBBE Morphs, nothing worked.

My only recourse was to restore from backup. So I selectively restored the Skyrim Special Edition directory and the directory that Vortex uses. EaseUS backs up fast enough but selective restore of 200 gigs uncompressed backup filz took almost all night. After that, everything was normal again. EaseUS got the job done, but took hours.

I should have come to this discussion forum before even thinking about learning Bodyslide Outfit Studio.

Thanks for indulging all this.

Obviously, by now, I can certainly use your advice, as to how, as a novice, I can safely learn "The Ways of" Bodyslide Outfit Studio.

[anjenthedog]

Warning: Please don't be daunted by the length of my post. I'm wordy. The actual process I'm describing, once you "get it", is like riding a bicycle or making a pot of coffee or cooking chicken...or using spices in cooking... it becomes second nature. (I haven't used a real recipe in 15 years and the only thing I ever look up is cooking time, because I forget if chicken thighs need a half hour ~350F or an hour...that sort of thing)

 

While I'm sure that devs use it too, Bodyslide & Outfit Studio is a tool for players in my book. It allows us to customize bodies and fit clothing & armor (as long as the clothing armor has bodyslide content available and uses the same reference body as we use of our player/follower/etc)

 

As for outfit studio, that's another ball of wax, (one I'm not familiar with honestly) but I guess it's useful for swapping reference bodies and updating or fixing armor issues.

 

If the application is installed and configured correctly, so that input objects (all the various body types, presets, and armor/clothing and accessories are available for use in the application), and output files are placed into the correct folder(s) for use in the game, then the process of using Bodyslide is pretty simple (even if it doesn't look like it at first)

 

(for instance, Bodyslide needs to be installed prior to installing stuff that uses it, ie presets, downloaded armor packs, etc. install them first and at least in my experience, they won't show up in Bodyslide, since the folders into which they are to be deposited won't exist for depositon)

 

Anyway, here's how to use Bodyslide in a nutshell (outfit studio is a bit beyond me. I've never used it other than to "look around")

1. choose your body model from the body/outfit entry in Bodyslide (ex: SE ygNord 3BBB Body Amazing)
2. choose a preset that supports your body type (ie, CBBE bodies need a CBBE preset, BHUNP bodies need BHUNP presets, etc)
3. if you plan to use racemenu with the body later (refinement or otherwise) check the "build morphs" checkbox. This generates the "tri" files necessary to interact with racemenu
4. click the Preview button so you can view the model and tweak your preset according to your whims using the sliders.
5. save your tweaked preset to a new name ex: "my_player_nude_body" so you can refer to it later. When saving, you'll be presented with a list of packages (armors, clothing, amulets, etc) that might apply to that player preset. check any that apply. This confines suggested Body/Outfit entries in the associated dropdown to those you selected for use with the preset
6. click the Build button to build the body
7. now, build the hands and feet. Use the same model for selecting those (ie, if you chose a CBBE body, use the CBBE hands and feet, if the SE ygNord 3BBB Body Amazing, use the associated SE ygnord 3BBB hands and feet, etc, etc). And make sure that "build morphs" checkbox is still checked (for racemenu support)
   
   So now, all that's left to do is fit armor and clothing (and any other wearables)
   
8. for heavy clothing, or padded armor, many of us take the original node preset and modify it to suppress nipples, squish and widen breasts, sometimes including a pushup, to better simulate how they would behave with real clothing armor. Obviously a skimpy bathing suit or lingerei doesn't likely need that. A nobles garment or something like steel or ebony armor? well those are ones you might consider.
9. anyway, what we do then is save that one as a variant "my_player_in_heavy_clothing" (or similar)
10. then select your clothing, fit it (ie make sure that check box is still checked, and click the build button) using whichever preset you've created that's appropriate for the armor or your taste (maybe you like ebony armor with nipple extensions, idk., I don't).

 

I'll leave batching and outfit studio and for that matter racemenu face sculpting to someone else. Not a real fan of batching, but whatever. (I screwed the pooch early on by accidentally batching everything to my player, resulting in identical females everywhere. Took me over a year to sort that out) And I've never used the sculpting portion of racemenu, so I'm out on that one as well.

 

opinion: I see Bodyslide as a primary build tool for supported characters (the player, any follower or NPC that comes with a Bodyslide preset, clothing, armor, etc) That is,. racemenu work (for me) is for refinement or outright replacement (using presets). Bodyslide establishes a "base" and racemenu refines that base. (IME, doing the front end work in Bodyslide also results in a little less of that "I fiddled with my player body in racemenu and now my armor doesn't fit any more" stuff. My speculative theory is that armors can only "stretch" so much in racemenu, so fitting them in bodyslide establishes a range of expansion they might not otherwise enjoy. could be actual BS but it *seems that way from my eyes

 

good luck!

 

PS> Bodyslide and Outfit studio has additional learning resources available via their mod page. fyi

 

edited for content and spelling.