Halp getting started

[IkeCoast]

About the H-Cup Stock, I dunno, Striker is the specialist in those things.

 

About the HGEC Khajiit fix, you shouldn't need it when using OCO, but most likely something in your bashed patch is still redirecting the textures in the wrong direction. OCO redirects female Khajiit textures to the Female folder, but before OCO came out, it was needed the Khajiit fix for HGEC because...

 

...

 

you see, in vanilla game, each body part (upperbody, lowerbody, hands and feet) has its own texture. But with Robert Male and Robert female, each body part use only ONE texture, footmale.dds and footfemale.dds, for all the body.

 

This is not true for HGEC: HGEC bodies still use a separate texture for the hands, and they need all the asset paths to be properly set (with Roberts all you need to set is the foot texture, and all will show ok).

 

Right now, do your male and female Khajiit show properly, and all the rest of your characters too? Then I suggest not to meddle further with your installation and enjoy it as is.

 

Yep, both Striker and I still get amazed with hour synchronicity. Some of it is caused because we chase each other across the Forums and try to post BEFORE the other (if we have something useful, or at leas distastefully funny, to say), but more often than once it's just co-incicence.

 

Cheers!

Edited March 28, 2015 by IkeCoast

[Striker879]

Nah ... Ike doesn't want to admit it but we were identical twins joined at the head in a previous life. Because we were joined at the head we couldn't see eye to eye, but were always of one mind in all matters.

 

Had to make another "shuttle pilot" run for the granddaughter (home from work) ... the van can't get fixed soon enough I think.

 

To be honest I haven't used Luna's Khajiit female (I've been happy enough with my EVE + OCO v2 kitties right out of the box ... looks like I don't need to go trying out Luna's version, other than maybe as an FYI for myself). That will give you some hands on with the uninstall features of BAIN.

 

It's getting a bit later here at the Striker Mansion ... I'll try to get those H-cup replacer links in a post first thing tomorrow. I have another big travel day ahead of me though, so if I can't get to it first thing it'll get pushed to Sunday (will be the wee hours of the morning when I get back to the Manor ... this trip's a quick down to the big city and back the same night, but the big city is a 4 hour drive ... this grandpa job is a lot bigger than it looks from the outside).

[Rangaros]

Yeah, actually everything's working as intended right now. Non-beast races are all seamless, male Khajiit are also seamless, females all have the proper body with BBB, and female clothing, while a different size, still works fine and also has BBB working.

 

Now I gotta see what patches I can find for MOO, I've been holding back on it till I got all the rest fixed. I'm most likely not gonna find BBB for MOO added armor, but that's okay. I believe MOO already has HGEC integration in itself, from what I read, and you can even choose sizes through the ini file. But I know there's a Seamless patch for it. Honestly I'm not even sure what Seamless is supposed to do to clothing and armor, at least to the majority of it since normally you can't even see the neck seam anyway. But what the heck, might as well get everything :P

[IkeCoast]

For what I have understood, additionally to giving seam-mended body meshes (not just the necks, also the rest of mesh and texture connectors), the Seamless patches also give some non-BBB meshes BBB integration.

 

Now that the situation I had in another place is more or less solved (and my interlocutor accidentally zapped with a taser gun, but that wasn't my fault), I go to bed.

 

Happy that you managed to solve your installation too. And without being zapped.

 

'Nights!

 

Cheers!

 

Edit: Just reminded myself of that Jeremy Irons movie, Dead Ringers. Dunno why. Would that make Rangaros Genevieve Bujold?

Edited March 28, 2015 by IkeCoast

[Striker879]

Ayleid and Silverlight is BBBed, but the ones that aren't exactly designed as something that should bounce don't ... and you'll have H-cup bliss (that is all in the MOO Seamless ... can't say about MOO vanilla as I haven't extracted it's BSA to look).

 

- Edit - Seamless isn't just about the neckseam ... it's all the seams. You'll find those two MOO armors I mentioned show a lot of "neckseam".

 

- Edit 2 - G'night Mary Ellen ...

Edited March 28, 2015 by Striker879

[Rangaros]

Huh, interesting. Well I'm kinda weird in that regard, cause I'm not detail-oriented, but I'm pretty perfectionist. It's sort of a contradiction. What I mean is, I'm perfectionist enough to want everything working perfectly as it should, even if I don't care that much about all the details, but on the other hand I'm not too strict in regards of those little details. So while I do wanna have everything working perfectly and, over all, consistently, I also don't even notice things like seams and imperfections half of the time. So while I do appreciate the smooth connections, I don't really NEED them that much cause most of the time I'm probably barely gonna notice.

 

So I guess what I'm trying to say is, I do all this mostly cause I'm pretty obsessive-compulsive about everything being perfect, and not so much cause I'm actually gonna appreciate it as much as someone else who does all this, probably. Sounds kinda sad when I say it like that, lol, but oh well, 'tis who I am.

 

What I'm getting at is, I don't really mind if some armor or clothing aren't perfectly seamless and whatnot, as long as overall I get nice looking bodies and textures.

 

I'm glad to hear MOO with Seamless already has some BBB integration in it, didn't really expect that. I guess I've been thinking of BBB as sort of a "patch" that goes on top of normal meshes and "adds" a BBB effect to them, when it actually IS meshes in itself and could pretty much be standalone if it contained every mesh and texture necessary. Is that correct? Just trying to understand better how things work.

 

Anyway, again, thanks for all your help so far guys, and don't worry Striker, whenever you can is fine. I don't need it right now anyway, now that I have a better grasp of how things work I can probably remove one thing and install the other whenever I wanted to. I'll be installing some other stuff meanwhile, hoping nothing breaks, and maybe I'll be able to start playing one of these days xP

 

It's kinda scary to think this is STILL appropriately called "help getting started", at 11 pages, considering I didn't start playing yet.

Edited March 28, 2015 by Rangaros

[Striker879]

Hmm ... maybe it was you and I that were co-joined twins then Rangaros. I always have my patented "Selective Vision" at the ready, and yet I put quite a bit of time and effort into getting the Seamless tool for fixing those meshes that I wanted fixed figured out.

 

And once I figured out how to work the tool I stopped using it.

 

If you look at the history of BBB it may help understand it.

 

Used to be nothing moved on female chests in the game. Tons and tons of skimpy armors were created, where single petals from the tiniest flowers on the planet protected nubile manga warrior chicks far better than the most robust, up to the chin and down to the ankles high grade steel/ebony/et al of vanilla. Yet not one of the petals moved one millimeter even during the most arduous of the Amazing Jumps.

 

The earliest "moving breast" efforts were quickly supplanted by the skeleton that rocked the world (or at the very least took the world by storm). Soon you couldn't find a skimpy armor's mod comments that wasn't inundated with pleas to BBB this. A few modders took up that torch and quite a few "armors" were BBBed. Almost every single one of those "retrofitted" BBB versions required the original mod, not just for textures and boots, greaves and gaunlets, but also for the ESPs that put the armor into the game.

 

Soon things branched out into vanilla armor replacements, and while no ESP was required to get them into the game (archive invalidation was all that was needed) the replacements still used the vanilla game textures. To BBB a non-BBBed mesh you just weight paint the parts that need to move and then rig those parts to the new bones of the BBBed skeleton.nif ... either the original Coronerra's or the later variations of that same basic BBBing method (like the Ragdoll skeleton).

 

You could use the same Coronerra's tutorial that Saaya and others used to learn how to do it (and/or Saaya's tutorial that built on the original).

 

The replacement meshes created the need for replacement animations ... and that same foundation remains today. BBBed skeleton.nif, meshes and animations all need to be used. Most modern standalone (i.e. non-replacer original flower petal styled armor) is created as BBBed right from the start, so there is no previous non-BBBed version (some exceptions still appear, generally geared toward the screenshotter crowd ... BBB doesn't show in screenshots).

 

So just 11 pages ... gee, you got shortchanged on the help. What did you say ... we're supposed to "play" the game too ???

[Rangaros]

Huh, I didn't even know Coronerra's skeleton was special because of BBB, I figured it was just cause it was high-compatibility. But I guess it makes sense given I saw the original "Better Bouncing Boobs" was indeed by him. Sounds like he was quite a pioneer.

 

But what did that do on its own before there were any actual animation mods created for it?

 

Also, I've seen people suggest that "just do it yourself" thing when they ask for this or that. Is it actually realistic to think just anyone could learn and take armors or clothing meshes from some other mod and adapt them to the BBB personally? With blender, is it? I mean, not like have a clue on how to use it, but if it's some 3d-animation program or some such, it should be possible to learn it just following tutorials and whatnot. What generally sets apart "modders" from "non-modders" with this huge, impassable barrier of "I can't" is when there's coding involved, that's a tad more complex, lol.

 

And, wut? What do you mean doesn't show on screenshots? o_o Sounds like there's gonna be this black hole in the middle of the chest... I gotta check now.

 

You know, I have a tendency to "overadjust" games to the point that modifying the game BECOMES the game, and then I might spend less time playing it than modifying it. There's some weird meta stuff going on in here...

[Striker879]

Have a look at Bben46's signature some time (he's one of the moderators ... name shows in green).

 

So I was maybe a tiny bit misleading when I said it "doesn't show" in screenshots. BBB does show, if you time when you capture the shot at just the right moment during mid step/mid hit/mid stagger you'd have the boobs off in weird positions. Shot's like that are generally not at the top of a screenshotter's priority list for taking the shot. BBB is very popular with many of the screenshotter's cousins, the videographers. Movement is lost in static screenshots.

 

Coronerra wasn't alone in pioneering BBB. As is usually the case BBB was built on the idea from the earlier moving breast system and some work done by others that lead to what we have today. It all came together because more than one individual got interested, and some of those working on it had talents in different areas (fore with NoMaaM for example ... before NoMaaM there weren't very many of the vanilla animations BBBed). The system we have today always needed the three components.

 

Yes you could "just do it yourself". I've looked through the tutorials ... even tried using Saaya's once. So far the score is Blender 1, Striker 0. Perhaps if I really set my mind to it I'll manage to fit my head around it ... Blender was designed by people who already were accomplished modellers/animators etc. Unfortunately what was an intuitive way to do certain tasks for them isn't on the Striker roadmap. I've run into the same or similar situation with other things ... I'll never be a computer programmer, it's unlikely I'll be an accomplished scripter and there is a possibility I won't be a BBB modeller.

 

I'm really really good at renaming files for use with Blockhead though!!

 

Last night (I do spend an inordinate amount of time mulling things over instead of actually going to sleep) I came up with your "win/win". SetBody Reloaded Blockhead Edition includes every single body that any of the old HGEC versions included ... all in seamless. It also includes a vast number of other seamless bodies. I use it as my resource for seamless bodies in my quest for "Infinite Variety ... Blockhead Edition". If you download it to a folder and extract it we can find the right one to replace your current H-cup, either with the exact same only seamless or one of the other H-cup variations it has (would you prefer a pair that gravity has more "say" in things, or perhaps different nips).

 

I use NifSkope to check out the various options, but you could also simply install it and use the spells to check out the different bodies it includes (installing it doesn't overwrite or change your current body ... the new bodies are worn as "clothes" and to revert back you simply choose Reset from the spell menu). When you find the one you want to use it's just a matter of copying the files from it's Bombshell folder to your game's Character\_male folder. We could also set you up with a different body for your player character than anybody else in your game ... Blockhead rocks.

 

So the best H-cup clothes replacer is BBB H-cup Stock, but it isn't 100% complete (only 1/3 of lower class is done, and a couple of upper class are also missing). The missing lower class stuff is covered by the original that Pyramidhead123 used as a base, but that all uses to older moving breast system. I have used it in the past ... it's the HGEC Bouncing Stock Clothing Project. If you decide to use it for lower class 5 through 14 either install manually using just those or install the older one and then overwrite with the Pyramidhead123 version (mind your package order in the BAIN Installers tab).

 

Armor is a bit more problematic unless you ascribe to the "less protects better" school of thought. As I'm sure you know, there are plenty that give almost infinite protection when using that formula (what is it ... the inverse square law ... half the coverage gives four times the protection). When I have more time I'll root through my Oblivion_Downloads folder and see if I have much that is more normal coverage.

Edited March 28, 2015 by Striker879

[Rangaros]

Hm, but that HGEC Bouncing Stock Project actually says "standard normal", and he specifically says how "nor would everybody be walking around with A nor H cup breasts". Sounds like it's not actually for H-Cup but rather something middle ground. And I already have EVE for that anyway.

 

About SetBody, that'd be to replace my current body with a seamless similar one then, right? And I'd still need HGEC Better Bouncing Boobs on top? Wouldn't there be a problem if the body isn't exactly the same? I really dunno how that mod BBB-ifies the body exactly, given it actually needs a base body mod first.

 

Honestly I'm not sure if I wanna bother with that. Like I said I don't even notice seams most of the time. The most obvious ones are in the neck (since you don't normally go looking down into people's feet, or specifically their hands or somethinig), and I have pretty much all of that covered. One interesting thing I saw though is the "beast body" legs, that's kinda cool, but I imagine it's gonna be a nightmare if I gotta make new lower bodies match with upper ones...

 

The only slight problem I DO have is with female Khajiit, and I think that's because of the fix I need, since it actually does contain textures (which were optional, but apparently I need them to fix the issue). I guess they don't match too well. I'd really like to figure out why I need that fix. It's just like the problem I had at first because of file dates. Without it there's huge seams in arms, legs and the back, and overall it looks like someone took the texture and twisted it around the body or something, lol.

 

Edit: Well, I've been testing around and apparently all my problem is with my textures/characters/khajiit/female/footfemale.dds. That Khajiit fix replaces it, but also adds an esp, but I realized I don't even need the esp, or any of the other textures. Just replacing footfemale.dds fixes my problem. I also tried with Luna's, and it also fixes the problem, since it also has a footfemale.dds (and the rest of the textures to match, so it's a better option I suppose). Not a fan of the specific textures Luna's has, but at least it all looks nice and matching.

 

The previous footfemale.dds that they are all replacing is from OCO, and at the same time that one's overwriting the one from HGEC. Interestingly, the original one from HGEC looks like the ones I'm using to "fix" what OCO changes; they all have a full body texture, while OCO apparently only has actual feet in it. For some reason that's causing an issue.

 

Edit 2: Yeah, I tried replacing the OCO footfemale.dds with the original from HGEC, and that also fixes the problem. So dunno why but for some reason OCO's system of NOT having the entire body on the foot texture, messes things up. I don't think it should be like that, dunno what's causing it.

 

The problem with this solution is that it's overriding the Seamless for female Khajiit. And while before I said I normally don't notice seams too much, now I understand why: most races have relatively smooth skin, so it's not as noticeable. But I just realized I do kinda have a problem with seams specifically in Khajiit and possibly Argonian, since their textures are very uneven and any seam is quite noticeable.

 

So I dunno if it's specifically because of OCO's footfemale.dds, or simply that there's ANOTHER problem with previous body textures, and OCO simply doesn't cover it up, like other mods with a footfemale.dds do.

 

Edit 3: I tried using the OCO footfemale.dds and adding extra upper and lower body textures (legfemale and upperbodyfemale, I just realized I don't have any like that on almost any race, guess they just use the foot texture for the whole body), to see if the problem was there, but no, it's still messed up and it looks like the extra textures are either getting covered by the mess, or just not being used.

 

I'm quire frankly at a loss here. I have a few alternatives to "cover it up", but I really can't seem to figure out what is the core of the problem.

Edited March 28, 2015 by Rangaros