Is it possible to replace the stock races

[MrFlesh]

Hi,

 

 

I've done a search and nothing is coming up. The one thing that bothered me about Oblivion is that the elves look like humans with point ears. What I am looking to do is change the high elves, wood elves, and dark elves with the ice elves, chocolate elves, and night elves respectively. I just want to replace the look, not the starting stats or abilities. The reason I want to do this instead of just adding the races to the game are three fold.

 

1 When you use a custom race you are usually the only one of your kind unless you've added companion mods, being able to swap them out will populate the world with your kind.

 

2. Custom races are usually over powered. The moon elf race with it's paralyze for 10 seconds allowed me to walk through 90% of the game (with FCOM)

 

3. I want to take advantage of the race rebalancing project and it doesn't include those races.

 

I imagine it would just be a matter of swapping out some textures and a few ear meshes but I can't seem to locate them. Any help would be appreciated.

[LFact]

Hmm.... yes, you can replace stock races with custom ones, however:

- You have to adjust all vanilla NPCs' faces to make them look right.

- Also, you cannot change their skin tone via Facegen slider since they use their own pre-generated facial tone texture(you have to replace textures with dummy ones if you're gonna change skin tones).

- The replacement race should not break voices, dialogues, related quests. (There's OBSE function called 'SetRaceAlias' to make the game recognize custom races as any of vanilla races)

[MrFlesh]

Hmmmm........was looking to do this file swaps and mods.

 

- I was hoping to get around the need to change the NPC faces by using another mod such as hotheads and/or natural faces.

- Will installing this automatically change the skin tone to the selected race when I use the OBSE function?

- Not to sound like a total noob but how do I go about doing this? Is it a console command? I'm willing to learn but I'm starting at zero knowledge base with OBSE. Does the OBSE function just use

the textures or does it use stats and abilities as well?

[LFact]

Hmmmm........was looking to do this file swaps and mods.

 

- I was hoping to get around the need to change the NPC faces by using another mod such as hotheads and/or natural faces.

- Will installing this automatically change the skin tone to the selected race when I use the OBSE function?

- Not to sound like a total noob but how do I go about doing this? Is it a console command? I'm willing to learn but I'm starting at zero knowledge base with OBSE. Does the OBSE function just use

the textures or does it use stats and abilities as well?

 

1. No, you have to do all jobs. Natural Faces replaces textures, it does not change facial shape itself. In this game, facial features are determined by head mesh, racial Facegen slider values, and Facegen slider values applied when making character face. If any one of these is changed, character's face shape will be changed as well. So if you replace stock head mesh with custom one... you may see relatively good-looking vanilla NPC becoming quite ugly.

2. OBSE function has nothing to do it(OBSE cannot manipulate Facegen SDK yet). Replacing pre-generated facial texture with dummy ones will allow you to change skin tone of vanilla NPC via Facegen sliders.

3. OBSE function 'SetRaceAlias' simply makes the game think a custom race is one of stock races. Like:

SetRaceAlias MysticElf WoodElf

(The real Mystic Elf race has 4 variants and each has different editor ID)

Then, NPCs will call you 'Wood elf' to your Mystic Elf character, treat you like vanilla Wood Elf. Nothing more. This command can be used in console mode, but using script is better. You can check XEO to find out how this mod handles duplicated races.