How can I convert a non-HGEC race mod to HGEC?

[CatsfromElsweyr]

Okay, sorry if this is a really obvious question. But, I've downloaded a few (or a lot of) race mods, and I'd love to use them with HGEC. They currently use Robert's Female, and I, as you may have guessed, do not have it installed.

I would have installed Robert's before, but I only recently heard about it and everything in my game (that's applicable) uses HGEC already. //shameless

So, I was wondering how I could convert the race to a different body type. If the answer is something really obvious, I'll feel stupid, but it'll be worth it. The mod I was looking at is Slof's Khajiit (the tabby-Siamese), and I really love the look of them. I do not plan on uploading them to any modding site, as per Slof's request, but I'd like to use them for my personal experience. I do have Robert's Male Bodies installed, so that shouldn't be a problem.

Any tips would be appreciated. :sweat:


Edited for strange and obvious grammar errors and stoopid typos.

Edited April 3, 2014 by CatsfromElsweyr

[DrakeTheDragon]

The only difference should be the skin texture. You'll need to create one fitting the HGEC texture mapping layout.

 

However, how to achieve that from a Robert's Female texture as the base is something I can't really tell you. I may have done the same with my AB textures when I created AB Exnem/HGEC years ago, but all I remember now is it was a nightmare, and I still hate the results. The texture mapping layout for Exnem and HGEC is a nightmare in and off itself, if you aim at creating 'seamless' textures.

 

There isn't a single polygon that isn't stretched or deformed and must receive a similarly stretched or deformed piece in the texture, and the amount of stretch and deformation changes for each neighboring polygon. The resulting complete texture has to look like a mosaic of thousands of differently scaled and warped pieces in order to make the mapped texture look even remotely smoothly distributed on the mesh.

 

This is of no concern when working with a featureless smooth texture like human skin, but if you try to do it with intricately detailed patterns like scales or fur... well, I for one will never go down that route again. One time spending 4 entire weeks of work to yield hardly satisfactory results in the end was more than enough for me. :pinch:

 

But anyways, I'm not a painter or artist myself, so... that could be a reason either.

[CatsfromElsweyr]

Oh, wow. I'll have to start working on it, then! Once I find out how. //prepares to scour the Internet

Even if it fails, it'll be good practice for whenever I have to do it again. Which is hopefully never, but it'll probably happen.