SSE Making a Standalone Dependent on Mods

[agentyumyums]

Hello,

First time posting here. I am a newbie to modding. Spotted a handful of tutorials online walking through how to create a unique standalone follower. Most of the time they are creating female characters that require CBBE/UNP body meshes, and they show how to port these meshes into your follower package and loading it into the Skyrim Directory. I have a few questions that I was hoping I might be able to get clarified.

 

I am working on a character mod that is reliant on two mods; Ethereal Elves, Starsight Eyes, and Horns A'plenty . Perhaps a bit foolishly I assumed that I would be able to pop the meshes and appropriate textures that I had found using Nifskope into the proper folders (Data>Character>Meshes(or Textures accordingly). This first question is twofold. First, do I need to attach body meshes if they are vanilla? In the case of the face mesh and texture, I have put the Ethereal Elves Male head meshes into the mesh folder, but I cannot find the texture to put in the texture folder. Are these skins considered vanilla?

 

Second is whenever I open the .nif of my characters face in Nifskope, the textures do not render, they display as hot pink. Is this because Nifskope cannot find the skin textures for the face that was exported?

 

Finally, if there is an easier way to achieve this, I would love to know and am absolutely willing to learn. Efficiency is king.

 

All guidance is greatly appreciated! I'm here to learn and this is very much my first foray into mod-making in any capacity, so please be patient with me if I do not understand something that you are referring to.

 

 

 

[IsharaMeradin]

 

 

Second is whenever I open the .nif of my characters face in Nifskope, the textures do not render, they display as hot pink. Is this because Nifskope cannot find the skin textures for the face that was exported?

NifSkope cannot find the textures. This may be because NifSkope has not been directed to look in the game's data folder. This may be because despite being pointed to the data folder, the appropriate textures are packed inside a BSA file. You can use NifSkope to find what texture files are assigned directly to the Nif and ensure that you have loose file access to those and point NifSkope in that direction. That said, keep in mind that the final in-game product may be different should there be a Texture Set record assigned to override the Nif's appearance.

[agentyumyums]

 

 

 

 

 

Second is whenever I open the .nif of my characters face in Nifskope, the textures do not render, they display as hot pink. Is this because Nifskope cannot find the skin textures for the face that was exported?

NifSkope cannot find the textures. This may be because NifSkope has not been directed to look in the game's data folder. This may be because despite being pointed to the data folder, the appropriate textures are packed inside a BSA file. You can use NifSkope to find what texture files are assigned directly to the Nif and ensure that you have loose file access to those and point NifSkope in that direction. That said, keep in mind that the final in-game product may be different should there be a Texture Set record assigned to override the Nif's appearance.

 

 

 

 

Thanks for the quick reply, it is appreciated.

With that in mind, I downloaded a few BSA Unpackers. I did find one that worked for me; The Bethesda Archive Extractor. I was able to successfully locate and extract the BSA Files for KS Hairdo's Lite and Ethereal Elven Overhaul (EEO). KS worked like a charm, was able to locate my files no problem. EEO is still a bit funky. In both the extracted meshes and textures, they all lead to the same point of either Facetint or Facegeom with Skyrim.esm, Dawnguard.esm, and Dragonborn.esm. I was hoping that the skin textures would be located here. If I have the meshes packed without textures, will the game default to vanilla textures or will they be looking like some kind of wireframe monstrosity? Thanks again, the process of learning this sort of thing is fun.