Standalone Follower Creation

[LivingDragon]

My girlfriend and I spend several hours a day either playing Skyrim, refining our load order or browsing for new and interesting mods. Lately, she has really been having fun taking screenshots and is happy with the feedback that she has received on her uploaded images. Now we would like to take our created characters and turn them into followers so that we can take screenshots of them all side by side and adventure alongside them.

 

I've been watching tutorials on creating followers for the last two days (most of which pertain to using the Creation Kit in general and the rest of which were recorded back in early 2012 and don't explain importing facegen data or using weapons/armor/hairs/normal maps/textures, etc.. from other mods) and searching the Nexus forums for relevant topics. Not only have the tutorials not seemed relevant to what we are trying to achieve, but the topics seem to be scattered and contain bits and pieces of the information that we actually need. Also, it's worth noting that we would like to upload these followers to Skyrim Nexus as standalone followers who don't rely on other mods to be used so that others can download and enjoy them as well. That is something that needs to be considered when posting in this thread. We aren't looking for workarounds or anything of the sort. We are looking for advice and conversation on this matter from individuals who are either experienced in this or who share an interest in our end result.

We have no former experience with the Creation Kit (or much of anything for that matter) but I know my way around TESVEdit enough to clean dirty edits and I've played around in the CK a bit over the last few days, but it's safer just to assume that I won't understand much of what is being said so that you can word things delicately and be thorough with any advice that you have. If it helps to know, we are using Mod Organizer and both TESVEdit and the CK are already set up to be launched from within MO. We know how to save our characters as a preset from within the RaceMenu (1.slot, 2.slot, etc..) and we know where those .slot files are located within our Skyrim directory. Thanks in advance for any assistance that you have to offer.

[Oubliette]

For your purposes you might want to check out the mod Familiar Faces, it allows for the creation of companions based on your player character that can be shared around. Packaging the Familiar Faces character assets as standalone companions that don't require Familiar Faces to run might require a bit more work however. If you're still married to the idea of standalone companions there are tutorials available on the Skyrim Nexus for that purpose, if those still don't seem like enough you can always open up someone elses standalone companion to see how they did it and try to replicate the process.

[LivingDragon]

Thank you for the reply. I'm going to check out Familiar Faces and look a bit harder to find the tutorials that you mentioned. Do you have links to the tutorials that you mentioned by any chance?

EDIT: I took the time to check out Familiar Faces (thank you for telling me about that mod, by the way), and I'll be installing it tomorrow to test it out. I read a decent amount of the comments found there, and everything seems to be simple enough to use. I'm excited to try it out, and after telling my girlfriend about it, she's excited too. As far as the tutorials on how to create a standalone follower are concerned, I PM'd a few mod authors and one was nice enough to share a few links with me. They seem fairly consistent so far but I haven't had the time to delve too deep into them or follow along with the author yet. If things seem accurate enough and the author's instructions work as intended, then I'll post a link to the tutorials here for others to see.

If anyone else has something to add to the topic, please feel free to do so. I honestly feel that creating followers is something that a lot of people want to do but are afraid to learn. Posting advice here could help someone get started and give beginning modders a friendly push in the right direction.

Edited November 2, 2014 by LivingDragon