nuska

The head/body colour mismatch is a common issue, you can probably fix it by firing up the console, selecting the affected NPC and typing setNPCweight 50.

You should post up your entire mod list, it's impossible to say what could be conflicting or causing the issue without seeing the whole bunch.

Skyrim in itself is pretty graphics heavy. Skyrim + ENB shader + mods with high resolution textures is very taxing on any system - I run a beastly rig with double the strength of yours and I still get severe framerate drops when I fire up a pretty ENB. Depth of Field and Ambient Occlusion are the worst offenders, you should start with disabling those from the ENBseries text file.

I'm pretty sure unauthorized game rips aren't supported on this site. :/

People are trying to find a fix for this, but Bethesda hasn't released the necessary script sources yet. :( I've been consistently recommending my users not to play Dawnguard content with my race, period. But some seem to have good results using the workaround to manually changing to vampire through the console before accepting the vampire lord state. I tested it briefly and it seemed to work.

That's only the polish stage. :D So far, the entire mod creation process has been: -remodeling racial head morphs for both genders and 3 races -exporting and processing said morphs, importing to Zbrush for sculpting -sculpting new facial features in high poly in Zbrush for each headshape, baking onto game model to produce normal maps -fixing normals afterwards in photoshop, adding extra hires skin detail -painting warpaints and tint masks from scratch -remodeling most nose and lip morphs for both genders to fit new facial features -enabling new facial features in CK, disabling inhuman looking noses -adding all the new tintmasks and paints in the CK manually for each race and gender, assigning tint colours -rerouting texture and mesh paths to new normal maps and morphs -building new chargen presets with new appearance features -remodeling all 60+ beard morphs for the 3 male races, totaling at roughly 180 individual morphs - this is still in progress and the most tedious thing I've ever willingly done -remodeling scar mask morphs TLDR there is an absolute TON of "invisible" work that goes into making this, but it's all critical for producing consistent quality results with no clipping or floating bits. It's not immediately evident in the end result, but when you take up comparisons to the original models you see an absolutely massive difference. That's why it's not immediately done either - every step of the way requires testing, tweaking, testing again and tweaking more until it looks JUST right. Almost isn't good enough. :) I can also perfectly see why no one before me has taken up a project like this. It's stupidly complicated in some parts and just consumes a lot of time with repetitive tasks like morph processing. It's not very glamorous. 80% of the work in terms of time consumption has been just pulling vertices around in Blender. I lost count a few weeks ago but I must've clocked in around 70 hours on this already at an average of 3-4 hours per working session several times a week and a number of all-day-all-nighter weekends. My boyfriend probably hates the sight of elves now as he must subconsciously equate them with neglect. http://i.imgur.com/N90U6.jpg http://i.imgur.com/ueGEB.jpg http://i.imgur.com/gX6yX.jpg

Well, after I get the remaining 10-something beards done, this goes into polishing stages and NPC restyling. Polishing in and on itself involves: -implementing higher resolution tintmasks -cleaning up normal maps -going through all the individual assets in the CK and perfecting tintmask colours -preparing vampires so they use roughly identical assets and colours to the main races -putting together complexions -adding skin tones and hair colours -refining noses and lips to tackle stray uneven vertices .-generally making sure everything works I'm putting out a beta build for testing to a sample size of around 10 people when polishing is at a reasonable stage. :)

http://static.skyrim.nexusmods.com/images/675468-1347398636.jpg Still continuing the slow trudge onwards! I spent this evening shaping scar masks for the new headshapes and refining noses. Male noses still need an absolute ton of work to look perfect. Here's some more sugar with 2048 textures.

Beards and scars and hunky wood elves. http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ma5mcvFzS51r3e7wgo1_1280.jpg

I'm making gradual but steady progress fitting the beards to the new male head shapes. http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ma5fzfhI4R1r3e7wgo1_1280.jpg Around 10 left to go out of 64 - I'm on the winning side now. :) Progress will pick up a lot after that mark!

It's just a quality thing for me. I seriously cringe whenever I find specular maps consisting of 2048x2048 white pixels, but that goes for a lot more than just porny mods - it's just more prevalent in them. Another personal gripe is advertising a mod as HD when it's just a blown-out and blurred vanilla normal map. That's not how it works and it's a waste of performance impact. >:I

My biggest gripe with them is that most are rather poorly done in terms of technical and artistic execution and a lot of them eschew basic rules of anatomy and physics. Usually I just find them funny and rather sad - it's no skin off my nose if someone wants to use them, but it does dishearten me a little to see well done quality armors get far less recognition than T&A outfits of much lower technical and creative skill level.

You guys do realise that going "I don't have any skills but someone can make it!" after throwing down a complex as hell mod (rule of thumb: if it has the word 'overhaul' in it, it's going to be a huge project) idea isn't a great start? Everyone started somewhere, grab the CK and Blender and get practicing :P Everyone's got ideas, but it takes a whole another level of dedication to actually bring that idea to fruition and make a working, fun mod out of it. Actually getting your hands dirty with the tools is also a really great way to learn the capabilities and possibilities of the game engine and what can be reasonably done with it, and it gives great perspective on how much effort even seemingly small things actually take.

I'm revamping the elves! It turned out to be much more laborous than I expected (I've learned to hate beards with a passion), but it's a very rewarding mod to work with as the difference it makes is like night and day. I'll be ready to roll out a semi-open beta test in a couple of weeks, so now's a great time to chime in if you want to help :) http://static.skyrim.nexusmods.com/images/675468-1346616785.jpg

A few new shots http://static.skyrim.nexusmods.com/images/675468-1346616785.jpg http://static.skyrim.nexusmods.com/images/675468-1346616715.jpg http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m9qo90RBnK1r3e7wgo3_1280.jpg Roughly half of the male beards are done. It's going to be a crazy week for me so my work with elves will be stalled a bit again. :(

Wood elf blokes were actually the first I did. :) http://static.skyrim.nexusmods.com/images/675468-1345496477.jpg Face textures and morphs are now in place for all males and females, I'm now working the beards into order to fit the new male heads and going back to tweak the facial feature morphs.

http://i.imgur.com/Tmt0P.jpg Skin details REALLY up close, shown with DIMON's UNP face texture and specular. Base install will have 1024x textures for performance, but I'll also be providing an optional 2048x normal map set that will look this clear. Great for intense screenshots, horrible for low to mid-grade machines.

First test with High Elf males http://i.imgur.com/qOX44.jpg Normal needs adjusting and beards don't fit, but the skin and facial features are looking quite good. :) As an aside - I'm getting increasing amounts of PMs from people asking me to release this or put a demo out, PLEASE STOP SENDING ME THESE MESSAGES. It's not going to make me finish this faster. It's really nice when people are enthusiastic to get to use my stuff but it's going to take the time it takes and I can't spend my every waking hour slaving away at it. What you're seeing here is just the best bits of what the current functional scope can reach. The customisation features aren't anywhere near complete yet.

I'm more concerned with players wanting to use beards on their own rather than ingame characters. :) My development policy is that whatever the player has access to has to be in a useable condition comparable to or better than what shipped with the game.

I haven't gotten to even see snow elves ingame yet so I have no idea how drastic the required measures will be to modify them. It should certainly be possible to make a separate add-on ESP of it, but if they use beards that's a big concern. They've turned out to be the biggest headache in making this mod. I'll need to experiment and see if I could hook them to use the head shape morph and beards of, say, High Elves, and just sculpt unique normal maps for them - see if they would also pick up the beards assigned to the morph race. That would relieve massive amounts of headaches for me.

Guild Wars 2 was better than I expected so this is on the backburner for a few weeks. :)

It's a bug in the CK, warpaints don't show on NPCs. There really isn't a workaround for it, though some people have been using the external NPC editor available on the Nexus. I personally never got it to load up my ESPs.

Making standalone replacers poses a major problem with the beard models, I've found. The way racial beard morphs are handled, they're all pulled from one morph file for each beard model - which contain race specific variations for each race. This makes a total of 60+ beard morph files which need to be manually edited to fit the newly shaped male elf heads. It's not possible to split them in any sensible way, and it's not feasible to have separate versions for individual races. Keep in mind there are over 60 of these spanning all beard models and ALL need to be edited to fit the new facial shapes of the Ethereal elven males. In order to functionally split the replacer into individual pieces while retaining the vital face morphs, I would need to make copies of each beard, position them in a separate folder from vanilla beards, assign them to elven races alone and after splitting the race mod into 3 different entries for each elven type I would need to reassign the file paths of each beard type and alter the existing ones to not apply to elves. We are talking about separately assigning over 60 beard model entries in the CK for 3 standalone races and one all-encompassing mod. Over 200 manually applied entries in addition to separately modeling every morph. This is unfeasible for my scope and capabilities and would extend my working time with the mod by a huge stretch. With my schedule this is several weeks of nothing but working with beards. That goes way too far into the territory of me not having fun anymore. That means standalone replacers won't be happening for now, possibly not ever. It's unfortunate but I would never ever get this mod out of the door if I would do the huge amounts of necessary work to get the standalone replacers running as they should. :/ It's going to be all or nothing. Still, I'm leaving the NPC appearances mostly untouched aside from the new race morphs, and leaving the option of having the vanilla normal maps under the complexion slider.

I know - just that I see an increasing trend of the userbase demanding everything here and now, without acknowleging I'm a person with a real life just like them, and that I'll make this and that if I deem it necessary once I get around to it. I love making this stuff but demanding it rushed does not produce faster or better results, only a stressed and upset modder who does not feel her efforts are really valued.

I understand that you really want this mod, but I also need you to understand - this isn't my job. I'm not getting paid a dime to make these race alterations. I have a 9-5 job, a relationship, a rent and bills to pay and real life responsibilities that take precendence over hurrying the release of a mod that takes LOTS of work (like seriously, I'm spending most of my spare time on this) to make in order to deliver something that lives up to a good quality standard. In other words, I'm a real human being and I do this for fun, not for work, and these things take time to make. You do not know me or my life, and statements like "you are not that busy" are horrendously rude, dismissive and inconsiderate. Do you have ANY grasp of the amount of expertise and effort that goes into making something like this? I could choose not to do any of this, to spend my free time playing games and catching up with housework that I've skipped, but instead I choose to pursue my creative desires on top of my day job making games - to give you something for FREE. If you can't appreciate that, well - tough luck, it certainly won't make me rush anything, it only makes me feel my time and effort is UNAPPRECIATED and undervalued and certainly does not make me want to hurry things up.