SSE Noob needs help

[Reefor]

I'm learning how to create NPCs. I tried to make a High Poly head and failed. First one had a mouth that didn't move, 2nd one had a mouth floating above her head.

So now I'm trying to learn to walk before I run. I got a hold of a copy of the "make a follower kit" and I'm trying to follow a tutorial so I can learn some of the basics. (making a vanilla NPC from the RaceMenu)

I'm trying to find assets right now and I'm stuck on the mouth. For the eyes & brows I was able to download a mod so I didn't need to find the vanilla assets. But for the mouth I can't find a stand alone mod to use so I can use a different mouth, and I can't find the vanilla assets for the mouth, or any other vanilla assets.

The "make a follower kit" comes with the file structure so you can just copy and past it in, and the asset files are all "place holders", I'm guessing so you can follow along and understand what each folder needs. So I'm not sure what's going to happen if I try to use "place holders" for the mouth assets.

So in short, can anyone tell me where to find the vanilla assets for skyrim?

Also, I did a search and some programs do have the mouth assets like FairSkinComplexion2, LeyendaSkin, & DiamondSkin. Can I use these if I don't have access to the vanilla, or will that cause problems?

Thanks for any help in advance.

Edited April 15, 2022 by Reefor

[Reefor]

First try was a fail. I ended up with eyes and a mouth over a red triangle. I did better with the High Poly head. lol

So since no one is answering I'm going to try again and use the assets from FairSkin2 & see if that works.

[ocloki]

For the vanilla assets. You need a BSA extractor. Get it here.

 

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/1756/

 

And this explains how.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnehBsaG-I

 

Make sure to make a copy of the BSA files somewhere. I just made a skyrim assets folder on my desktop. Do not mess with the originals in the skyrim se data folder of course.

[Reefor]

Thanks for your help Ocloki. It was easy to use and the tutorial was easy to understand. The hardest part was weeding through everything to find what I needed. If it's OK I have a follow up question or two...

The "Build an NPC" kit comes with a female body mesh that opens in NifSkope 5, but it has underwear on. (Didn't realize it till after I wrote that question)
CBBE also has a body mesh that opens in NifSkope 5 but has underwear on.
CBBE also has a folder named "Unique" that has a body mesh that's nude but opens only in NifSkope 6 (Missing the head mesh)
Caliente's also has a body mesh that's nude (Barbie Doll Style) that only opens in NifSKope 6 (Missing the head mesh)
And the one I just got from Skyrim has underwear and only opens in NifSkope 6

So the first question is if the underwear or "Barbie Doll" style makes a difference or if that's sorted out in the texture if I want her functional in a body that's not nevernude?
The 2nd question, if I use a body mesh that only opens in NifSkope 6 and a head mesh that only opens in Nifskope 5, will that cause a mismatch that will cause problems?

Main Question:
Is the best way to go using the NifSkope 6 Body, Hands, & Feet mesh from the CBBE "Unique" folder and adding the Nifskope 6 head from the Skyrim BSA extraction?

[Reefor]

I should also add that the feet & hand mesh from the CBBE "Unique" folder also have .tri files for each. I don't know what that means but none of the other meshes have it

[ocloki]

Here is one of the better guides. Its long and kind of a pain to try to explain it on the forum.

 

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/49954

 

Also this guy explains the process pretty well.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=th0IV7BJkEk

[Reefor]

Ocloki,

Thanks, I was trying to follow one of those "follow me blindly" videos on youtube and trying to figure things out from there. I think this well be a lot more help.

[Reefor]

I ran into another problem not covered by the tutorial.

First of all I'm to the point of doing the nifmerge and I think I have it this time. Unfortunately the body looks like it's made of wood probably because I used the wrong body Meshes and/or textures and I am interested to see if my skin mods take over once I'm in game. I'm also still wondering which meshes & textures I need to use. But first the bigger problem.

Nifmerge stopped working for me. It requires the 32 bit version of C++ which I forgot all about. The tutorial suggested that I install Loot so I did and that requires the 64bit version of C++ which I installed. So I'm thinking the 64 bit version of C++ overwrote the 32 bit version and that might be causing Nifmerge to not work. When I put the Nifs into it I see the paths in the small windows above the main windows, but nothing happens in the main windows.

The tutorial suggests using both Nifmerge and Loot so there has to be a way to do it, to run both versions of C++. Can someone help me out and let me know how it's done, or if maybe I might be having a different problem?

Thanks in advance.

[Reefor]

OK, well if no one can explain to me how to run the 16 & 32 bit versions of C++ at the same time I'll have to uninstall the program I installed yesterday (Loot I think) and reinstall the 16 bit version so I can run Nifskope.

But before I run Nifskope I want to play a little and figure out why my character looks like she's carved of wood with no nipples. I can't remember if I used the Vanilla or the CBBE body textures. But I just replaced the .dds & the msn.dds body textures from Fairskin2 (that's the only 2 they have) and see what happens. Since they have the same name I don't think I have to do any repathing. I'll know for sure soon.

After replacing those 2 textures I went into CK. I was able to load the file and open the NPC, but when I clicked on preview CK crashed. I'm thinking maybe the export I did is conflicting so I'm going to resave and export again with the new textures and see what happens. - I tried to export in CK and it crashed, then I tried to save in CK and it crashed. Maybe I have to save the path to the new textures in CK first. - That didn't work, after I repathed to the 2 new textures I tried to export again and CK crashed. So now I'm going back to the beginning and doing the nifskope paths to the 2 new textures.

I did the texture paths again in Nifskope for the body and feet, they look a lot more normal now. So now I'll go into CK and repath the body & feet again and see what happens. I went through everything, the feet & hands were set to male skin for some reason, fixed. I went through everything and when I tried to save CK crashed. I reopened CK and none of the changes were saved, so now I'm going to physically delete my facegen export then try to open it again and reset the paths again. Nope, after repathing the textures I tried to save again and CK crashed. I must be doing something wrong but I'm not ready to give up yet.

Next I'm going to get the vanilla textures and replace the 2 Fairskin textures, repath the body & feet in Nifskope, then try CK again.
When I put the 2 vanilla textures back in and put it in Nifskope and did the repathing I got the weird wooden body back. Maybe it's the Mesh I used from CBBE's "Unique" folder. I give up on this, I'm just going to do a nifmerge now just to see what happens.

First I put those 2 meshes back in and did the nifskope pathing. I figured since these were the 2 textures I started with and since CK never saved anything I tried to change I could just go back into CK and everything would function, but when I loaded and opened her file and tried to get a full preview CK crashed again. So one more try, I'm going back into CK, I'm going to redo the texture pathing and see what happens. If it crashes again I'm just going to do the Nifmerge and see what she looks like in game after running her through SSEedit. Aaaaaaand CK crashed again. lol, and since I deleted the export I can't do the Nifmerge. One more thing to try. I'm going to put the Fairskin Meshes back, repath them in nifskope, copy & past the .esp file into my data folder from the make a follower kit, rename it Test2, open in in CK, try to do the paths again, and see what happens.

And that worked. Wholly Cow, something I tried finally worked. lol

There's a skin tone mismatch between the body and the head and there's an underwear outline of sorts, sort of a reverse tan line where the underwear outline is darker. We'll see if things fix themselves after the nifmerge, but I'm guessing the underwear outline thing is from using one of the wrong textures which is a problem I might have to sort out when choosing resources in the beginning.

Now to figure out why Nifmerge stopped working. I installed VC_redist.x64 yesterday which as it turns out is the one I installed when I first got Nifmerge. And when I search for the 32 bit version every link leads me back to it, so I'm guessing it's the 32 bit version. I have 10 Visual C++ Redistrutable's running including the 2012

I downloaded the Visual C++ Redistrutable from MS Visual Studios again and ran it. The only 2 options were uninstall & repair so I tried repair to see if that works, and now I have to reboot. Wish me luck

[Reefor]

OK, figured out what was wrong with Nifmerge. I was watching an old how to video so he never went through using Nif Optimiser to turn the Nifs into LE before the merge, and I didn't remember that part from my attempts at a high poly head. My bad. lol

I did the Nifmerge and now she has no head and her hand color doesn't match her body, plus she still has that underwear mark. I must have did something wrong with the nifmerge or nifoptimizer to make her head dissapear. Maybe I didn't turn the right file(s) back to SE after the merge, I tried to make sure I got them all but the video didn't really go into it so I may have made a mistake there.

The body color not matching and underwear mark I think is from trying to use 2 body meshes from Fairskin2 and the rest from Vanilla. I could really use some help there.

I'm going to take a shower then start working on improving my racemenu with mods and working on a better head. So it may be a day or two before I'm ready to try to build my next body. In the mean time if someone could answer any of these questions for me I'd really appreciate it.

1. It doesn't seem like this NPC was allowing my body mod to replace the body in game. Is there anyway to make the NPC to allow the body mods to take over in game and replace the body like with all the other NPCs in the game? (is there a setting that I need to set?)

2. Where can I find a nude female texture body? (Vanilla & CBBE are the only full sets I could find and they have underwear on)

3. I prefer Fair Skin Complexion 2, Diamond Skin, or Leyenda (body/skin mods). If there's no way to let these mods replace the body in game, is there a way to use their meshes when building the NPC? (They only provide 2 of the body meshes and are all missing the head mesh)

4. If the body mod takes over in game and replaces the body, then would it matter if she has on underwear when I build her?

5. Does the body texture need to have a VJ for her to have one in game?

I think my biggest problems were when putting together the resources. So if anyone could help me with these questions I think I can figure out the missing head problem.

Thanks in advance and sorry for the novel.