Skin / Head color question

[LordEmm]

You are completely right about that. The googly eyes is probably one of the easier problems to solve (unless you had your standard eye meshes replaced by something like BP). I am still fairly new to the whole idea of modding and i am learning as i go along. Some things though don't even seem to be a modding problem but a game engine problem and that is also something one has to find out.

 

I think for that reason these forums are a gold mine. Other people have the same problems new people have and may have found a solution before. That is why i always do an extensive search befoe actually posting a new quetion, so that i am not that big of a bother.

 

Many thanks in answering my questions so patiently. I will take a look at your eye compilations, but as you know i am a bit leery now that my game is actually running in some resemblance of ideal ;)

 

And while i am around to bother people, do you know how one can change what files are actually referenced in the .esp or .esm? That way many problems could be avoided too (like you could make them look for different than default meshes and textures in it's own folder, so you can delete the things more easily if they make too many problems and such).

[LordEmm]

Oh i forgot. I finally figured out what caused the ear problem. Pretty simple. There are TWO versions of Rens Mystic Elf here to download. I was foolish to think the second was an update when in effect it is a race onto it's own. The problem comes from the new one using a different color texture for the ears than the old one. Pretty easy once you know it. The new one has more elaborate meshes for the eyes and ears and so on, so all i had to do was find out where the ear textures sat, make a copy of the light skinned ones and overwrite the new dark skinned ones (the original Rens had light skin for all Mystic elves.)

 

One could also just swap out the .esp file, but since i wanted to use the ears with rings in them, that seemed to be the easier solution :)

 

This is Rens original http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=4431

 

And the "new remake not Necs" http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=24585

 

The second one has a dark skinned tattooed version (which is not tattooed strangely) in them which overwrites the old light skinned one and points to different ear files. And that is where the problems came from, because all body replacers like HGEC expect Rens light skinned elves for the tattooed version as well. Actually as i said the fix is fairly easy, you can still use the new esp, you just have to replace the darkelfears.dds files with the standard ones and get light skinned textures for the rest of the body (like from HGEC or Rens original pack).

[SavageArtistry]

Removed. Link is dead. Edited April 2, 2012 by SavageArtistry

[LordEmm]

Savage, you have been a godsend to my quest in learning all the tools of the trade. I just found out about the TES CS (or rather what it actually does), and have been trying to get the hang of it. My first order of the day will be eliminating all those extra races that always show up when you add another CM Companion and with several other mods. I had 4 Necs Mystic Dark Elves, and a few Bretons, etc... Now i will check everything i download first in TES CS and modify the most superficial things like paths to nifs and textures if needed so that it won't cause problems from the start.

 

I will not dare to do much more experimenting until i have mastered the easy stuff though. Thankfully i have this time thought to make a copy of my working Data folder, so when something does go wrong (and i am pretty sure it will ;) i can at least revert to how it is now :)

 

One last question for now. It seems that hairs do not have the same problems as eyes have with meshes and textures, right? So it should be safe to add hair at least to the options for the races, right?

And eye conversion should not be too difficult. It seems it is all how the textures are placed, right? One is single eye, one is diagonal, and one is on top of the other. At least as i have seen so far. So wouldn't it be simple to just copy the eye (using Photoshop) into the right alignment?

 

That's just theory though, before i dare do that i will have to read a lot more :) Maybe experiment with the meshes a little.

 

Many thanks once more for your patience.