Halp getting started

[IkeCoast]

Rangaros, OCO's footfemale was designed to work with the VANILLA female Khajiit.

 

The HGEC Patch does not include any footfemale.dds file. It comes from the Core package, intended to be used by the vanilla meshes.

 

I don't use the HGEC body replacer, I'm a RobFem user, so I overlooked this issue. In fact, I was even oblivious that OCO HGEC patch did not include the Khajiit female texture. A great deal of all this mess is probably my fault. I mean, I originally knew that, but had completely forgotten until you had this issue. That's why I instructed you to install Luchaire's texture on top of OCO's.

 

Well, at least, your installation survived the ordeal, didn't it?

 

I could give you a Master Class on how the different texturing choices (Vanilla, Robert and HGEC) work, if you want. This would give you ammunition enough to fine-tune even more your current setting, if you want.

 

Just a recommendation: if you find a pretty HGEC Texture Replacer that comes bundled with its own installer, DON'T USE IT. You will most likely ruin your Seamless installation. Do it manually, back-uping firrst your current textures before adding new ones.

 

Cheers!

 

PS: I'm rignt now in the East Coast of Spain. I don't know how it places me in relation to you, in the future or the past. Ohhhhhhhhhh, we are time travellers between us! Cool!

 

*me mouths the TARDIS flying sound*

[Rangaros]

I swear I replied something, then checked half an hour later and there was nothing... Maybe I just left it loading and alt-tabbed and then it failed, who knows.

 

So what I wanted to say was, if that's the case then I don't understand why OCO has a compatibility patch for HGEC, if it actually isn't fully compatible EVEN with the compatibility patch applied. Apparently HGEC Khajiit and OCO will not work together even with the compatibility patch applied, and who knows, maybe there's other things. So why even say it's compatible? I mean, at least make a proper explanation about how to make them work together or something, cause the current instructions there just don't make it work properly.

[Striker879]

The vanilla game females use separate texture files for the upper body, lower body, hands and feet (as do the vanilla males). OCO v2 includes replacement files for vanilla bodies (so it has upper body, lower body, hands and feet).

 

HGEC changes the texture mapping for female bodies. The foot texture covers the entire body except the hands (head textures are always separate ... the head is not part of the body). So to cover the entire body HGEC uses foot and hand textures and that's all.

 

Roberts male (or female) is even more extreme ... it changes the texture mapping to a single file that covers the entire body including the hands.

 

When you installed the OCO v2 HGEC texture compatibility patch it overwrote the vanilla OCO v2 female foot texture (which only covered the foot) with an HGEC compatible footfemale.dds that covers the entire body except for the hands. OCO v2 HGEC compatibility patch does not include any body texture replacement for Khajiit females, so after installing both base OCO v2 and it's HGEC patch you will still only have whatever Khajiit female texture your base HGEC package installed. If you are having trouble with Khajiit females just extract your HGEC base package to a folder, find the footfemale.dds, footfemale_n.dds, handfemale.dds and handfemale_n.dds in the Textures\characters\khajiit\female folder and copy those files to the same folder structure in your game's folders.

 

If you download and install NifSkope you will see I'm not stringing you along ... both those clothing replacers are H-cup.

 

Which HGEC H-cup did you install ... H, HA or HB (they are all included in the seamless package ... there are 84 different HGEC upper bodies in just the "normal" HGEC folder, along with 7 other HGEC compatible variations which bring the total upper body variations to 130 ... and that doesn't include DMRA, AGHGEC etc). I know for a fact that all three of the H-cup variations that come with HGEC are included. They are just body meshes ... to replace your non-seamless ones with the seamless version of the exact same body mesh is four files, femaleupperbody.nif, femalelowerbody.nif, femalehand.nif and femalefoot.nif (and all you need to do is copy them to your Data\meshes\characters\_male folder and do a little renaming, as upper and lower body meshes have identifiers appended to the standard HGEC file names to differentiate them ... download and extract it and you'll see).

[Rangaros]

Yeah, I got that part about some mods having the whole body in the feet texture. Actually in the folder preview (thanks to SageThumbs, I imagine) I can see the image right there, looking more or less like a body, lol. And it's pretty different when I compare it to the OCO one (which just looks like a blur but I assume it's feet, lol).

 

"When you installed the OCO v2 HGEC texture compatibility patch it overwrote the vanilla OCO v2 female foot texture (which only covered the foot) with an HGEC compatible footfemale.dds that covers the entire body except for the hands."

 

Actually, that's the thing. The OCO-HGEC compatibility patch doesn't even HAVE a footfemale.dds for Khajiit, so when all is installed, the last one to prevail is still the original OCO one, with only feet texture. And in the end the female Khajiit body is a mess, dunno exactly what's happening there. Maybe it's trying to use vanilla textures (since the HGEC ones got overwritten... by feet) and they get all messed up, I really dunno, but that's past the point where the problem occurs anyway.

 

Edit: I might have misunderstood though, not too clear on that. You just meant the compatibility patch doesn't have a Khajiit-specific footfemale.dds? And it just uses some generic all-race footfemale.dds or something like that? I mean, first you said it installed a footfemale.dds, which it does, but only for a few races (or at least it only has a few race folders with that). But on the next sentence you say it doesn't include any textures for Khajiit female. So that kinda confused me...

 

Well, if you say those are H-Cup too, all the better I suppose. I just read the description and it pretty much said otherwise, but who knows why. I'll just try it out. So far I tested the other one successfully, so I'll just add any extra ones that it's missing.

 

I only used HGEC bodies from that mod I linked so far, if you're talking about the SetBody stuff I was just starting to check it out, actually. Took a while to figure out how to install it, and still think I didn't get it completely. Not sure if I was meant to install the core and data as separate mods, or merge them into one. I suppose it should make no difference. What I did was basically combine the data folders of both parts, and then install that and the esp. Seemed to work fine, but the textures kinda got messed up. I'm not sure if I was supposed to install it ON TOP of the normal HGEC body, so I just installed alone instead, with vanilla bodies. I think that was the wrong part cause apparently SetBody has pretty much no textures, only meshes. I'll try installing HGEC and then SetBody on top.

 

Edit 2: Yeah, alright, I was supposed to install HGEC first to have textures, lol. Although, I'm not sure how it works, but I do notice the textures changing slightly with different bodies. Maybe it's just cause they get stretched or compressed to match the body, dunno.

 

Edit 3: Say, I was wondering something. I already tried using different cup sizes of body and clothing/armor, and it worked fine, but those are pretty much the same thing with just a slight cup difference. But what would happen if you mix one body replacer with a different clothing/armor replacer? Like, dunno, mixing a Robert's female body with a DMRA clothing/armor? Would it simply change from one body type to the other when equipping and removing clothes, or would it actually cause some clipping or something, if the bodies are different enough?

 

I've heard how clothing and armor sorta "becomes" the body when you equip it, but to what extent? Does each piece of armor only replace a corresponding body part? Does the body "underneath" have no relevance at all? I dunno, it just seems that the body underneath does matter even with stuff equipped over it. I remember that I'd get seamless necks for the H-Cup HGEC body when using the E-Cup Seamless clothing/armor replacer, for example, or something along those lines. And that kinda made no sense to me, lol. Gonna test this further...

 

Edit 4: (last one I swear) So I managed to make my own mod folder in which I merged:

 

EVE HGEC E-Cup equipment

EVE HGEC normal lower body equipment

EVE HGEC E-Cup Seamless equipment

EVE HGEC Seamless normal lower body equipment

EVE HGEC E-CUp Seamless BBB equipment

 

Basically I took all my choices of EVE HGEC equipment, pasted the Seamless versions on top, and then pasted the Seamless BBB versions on top of that. And it seems to be working fine. But I wonder, is this a good idea? I noticed you always suggest installing Seamless Equipment stuff at the end for some reason. So would having it already integrated with the equipment replacers be a bad idea? I was thinking of doing the same with Robert's. I kinda like making things simpler and more efficient when possible, and this would reduce the amount of extra stuff pointlessly overwriting each other when I install mod over mod.

 

(of course I'm then gonna overwrite that merged mod I made with whatever H-Cup equipment I find... but hey at least the base will be neatly organized)

Edited March 29, 2015 by Rangaros

[Striker879]

"Actually, that's the thing. The OCO-HGEC compatibility patch doesn't even HAVE a footfemale.dds for Khajiit, so when all is installed, the last one to prevail is still the original OCO one, with only feet texture. And in the end the female Khajiit body is a mess, dunno exactly what's happening there. Maybe it's trying to use vanilla textures (since the HGEC ones got overwritten... by feet) and they get all messed up, I really dunno, but that's past the point where the problem occurs anyway.

Edit: I might have misunderstood though, not too clear on that. You just meant the compatibility patch doesn't have a Khajiit-specific footfemale.dds? And it just uses some generic all-race footfemale.dds or something like that? I mean, first you said it installed a footfemale.dds, which it does, but only for a few races (or at least it only has a few race folders with that). But on the next sentence you say it doesn't include any textures for Khajiit female. So that kinda confused me..."

Sorry, I realized last night that what I meant in the first part of the footfemale explanation could be misinterpreted, but it was already 2 AM.

OCO v2 only includes body textures for the human and elf races. Because Nuska was trying to fix the "vanilla Khajiit problem" (male and female use the same vanilla body textures) you will find a single footfemale.dds and it's normal map file in Textures\characters\khajiit\female but it is a foot file for vanilla, not HGEC (in other words it only is designed to cover the foot, not the foot, lower body and upper body as HGEC requires). What you had in the way you were trying to fix things was a foot texture spread over an entire body ... not a pretty sight.

If you followed what I said to do to fix it exactly it would be fixed (download and extract your HGEC body replacer to a folder, extract it to that same folder and then copy the Khajiit textures to the proper folder in your game install).

SetBody Reloaded Blockhead Editions install instruction are found in the file SetBody_Blockhead_Readme.rtf (as mentioned in the mod description). As you don't have the special skeleton.nif that is required for the meshes in the data_Buttock BB folder you wouldn't install that folder's contents. To fully install it you install the contents of the Data folder in Core and the contents of the Data folder from the Data pack download and activate the ESP. It doesn't include any of the body textures except some specialty textures that aren't included in any of the normal body texture mods (it only requires those textures for some of the weirder body types included).

I just use it as a mesh source for my own Blockhead overrides, and so it's not installed (just extracted to a folder so I can copy whichever files I want to use).

If you try mixing any other body types replacement armor/clothes with HGEC you will get weird skin on any exposed skin that the outfit shows (so if it covers all exposed skin from neck to toes and fingertips it matters not the slightest if it's for HGEC or not ... if skin is exposed you will have a similar situation to your "Khajiit experiment"). Vanilla uses four texture files to cover the body, hands and feet. HGEC uses two texture files to cover the body, hands and feet. Roberts female uses one texture file to cover body, hands and feet. They are not mutually compatible.

When you create a piece of cloth/armor any exposed skin (even that small sliver of wrist that sticks of the sleeve) is assigned a property called "skin" and a location on the body. When the game engine displays that piece of clothing/armor it looks for whatever texture file is being used (let's say the brown shirt) and for any part that is labelled skin it finds the correct race skin and displays that (so when a Khajiit wears the brown shirt Khajiit skin is displayed and when a Dunmer wears the brown shirt Dark Elf skin is displayed).

If you put a Robert female brown shirt on an HGEC body you will not get the correct part of the body displayed on all parts of the exposed skin (and a vanilla mesh can be an even worse situation). Do some experiments with different pieces of clothing that show varying amounts of skin in different locations (some bare arms, some low at the bust etc) but are designed for a body that you don't have installed. You will see that some aren't too too bad and others are a complete mess.

If you use the HGEC body use HGEC compatible clothes/armor.

In every folder for every mod I've downloaded and installed you will find the extracted download and then another folder named Installed. Inside of each Installed folder is a Data folder and inside it are any and all of that particular mod's required folders and files. After I have everything properly arranged (including any BBB mesh replacements or missing textures I've discovered using NifSkope and then located from whichever mod they originated from etc) it's a simple right click on Data and copy, right click on Oblivion and paste to install. Every single install on my machine is the same, right click Data/copy, right click Oblivion/paste. Impossible to screw up.

Even those few mods I've installed using BAIN have a folder in my Oblivion_Downloads, and that folder has the extracted download and an Installed folder that has exactly what BAIN installed ... no exceptions (even for the UOP).

Yes it takes twice the hard drive space. I have a 1TB drive that is dedicated to stuff like my Oblivion_Downloads folder. I won't live long enough to fill it (currently at 27% filled, and I have downloaded just about anything that exists today that I have any interest in ... the other 73% will certainly hold those few new mods that come along that I may decide to download). A 1TB drive isn't much money these days ... you can even go with an external drive if your gaming machine is a laptop or you don't want to crack open your case (though installing a new drive in a desktop computer is as simple as four screws, two connections on a single cable, one power cable from your power supply, boot your machine and format the new drive).

[Rangaros]

Alright, so it was as I thought. But then I was right about this: if you install HGEC, then OCO and then the HGEC-OCO compatibility patch, you WILL have messed up female Khajiit textures because there's a foot texture trying to cover the whole body. And you NEED to manually replace the footfemale.dds with something else. So how it that called "compatible", and why does nowhere in the instructions mention that extra step?

 

Also, I don't get something. What IS that foot texture you're overwriting? OCO is supposedly for heads, right? So what is it, a vanilla version of the foot texture?

 

 

I researched a bit and found what that buttocks folder was, so yeah, I didn't include it in the install. Don't worry, I got it working fine. So what you said before was that I can check inside the SetBody folder and find the body that I liked, and take it out to use it as a replacer?

 

 

I see, so it's not like armor and clothing are a whole new body part, the exposed skin is actually taken from somewhere else. So what if one were to mix HGEC with DMRA? Like, HGEC body and DMRA clothing, or the other way around. From what I read DMRA is like a different version of HGEC or something, would that make them compatible for mixing up? Just curious, really.

 

 

Regarding your "installed" folders. I pretty much do that on the Bash Installers folder. I download the mods to a personal folder and check it out, then copy an install-ready version on the Bash Installers folder.

 

 

Lastly, not sure if that was meant to be a reply to it, but I didn't exactly get it if it was, so I'll ask again. Is the combining of mods I did fine? Will it mess things up because it essentially changes "install order"? I mean, in the install order back then you said I should install HGEC body and clothing first, then Robert's, then OCO, then all the compatibility stuff, then Seamless for OCO and only THEN seamless and BBB for HGEC clothing. What I'm doing by merging is installing HGEC clothing, seamless and BBB, all together. So I can't really install clothing near the beginning and seamless/BBB at the end anymore.

 

On that regard, does the order I install Seamless patches matter? Cause I noticed for bodies and clothing you went HGEC > Robert's > OCO, but then for Seamless you went OCO > HGEC > Robert's. Was that very specific order for a reason? All I know is that I should install the base OCO after any body replacers, but the rest sounds like it would be inter-exchangeable, dunno.

Edited March 29, 2015 by Rangaros

[IkeCoast]

Hey, Rangaros!

 

Actually, OCO is meant for vanilla heads and bodies. It includes the body textures for the vanilla bodies. And since the texture for the feet is named identically to the Robert and Exnem variants for the whole body, these things happes. Because yes, the footmale.dds and footfemale.dds contained in the base OCO package are just the foot texture for vanilla bodies.

 

Let's see how applying body textures works on Oblivion:

 

Heads take the headhuman.dds or headargonian.dds or whatever headvermin.dds you have set in the texture asset.

Torso takes the Upperbody(male/female).dds

Legs take the Leg(Male/Female).dds

Hands tahe the Hand(Male/Female).dds

Foot take the Foot(Male/Female).dds

 

Each vanilla body part mesh is UV-mapped to the corresponding texture.

 

When the diverse Body Replacers were created, it was discovered that you can use just ONE texture file for all the four body parts (not the Head). But the only texture slot that was suitable for that was the feet slot (Exnem decided to use a separate texture for the hand, and it remains like this nowadays). But that uncovered a miscalculation made by the game developers: the Khajiit race uses the very same foot texture for both males and females. In order to apply the correct body texture, now set to the feet slot, it's needed to redirect the asset in the Oblivion.esm (hence the Khajiit female fix and Robert's use of the RTfootmale.dds texture file).

 

It's a feature hard-coded in the game engine and cannot be bypassed: you need either four texture files, with each mesh UV-mapped to one specific texture file, or you use only one texture file, with all the meshes UV-mapped to it, but it needs to occupy the feet slot. Period.

 

Nuska created textures for the vanilla and Robert female Khajiit, but the HGEC texture is a lot of a hell of work due how the UV-mapping is created (ask Movomo and Junkacc, and also Capucine, all of them still have nightmares about it). But before she could finish it, Real Life stormed on, grabbed her by the neck and flown away, and Nuska was nowhere to be seen again.

 

I remember this issue being addressed eons ago in the comments section, and I think I recall it being addressed in the now non-available first drafts of the readmes and description, but with time we grown used to it and forgot abou (like I did here).

 

So yes, you were right: installing HGEC-OCO-OCO texture patch will "break" the female Khajiit texture and force you to overwrite it with the one provided with your HGEC version or another one of your choice.

 

You can combine HGEC and DMRA as you please, since both body types share the same UV mapping. If you combine an HGEC body with a full set of DMRA clothes or armor, your character will look full DMRA and vice-versa.

 

I don't know how to explain it simpler than I have done before: the exposed body parts you see when equipping skimpy or revealing equipment IS NOT THE BODY YOU HAVE INSTALLED. It's the body INCLUDED IN THE EQUIPMENT. When you equip a cuirass, the game swaps the Upperbody nif with the Cuirass nif. Same for the rest of the body (when you equip a helmet, the game swaps the hair you have with the helmet).

 

Each body part (Torso, Legs, Hands and Feet, and also Ears, Hair, Eyes, Mouth, Tongue and Teeth) are "slots" the game fills with predetermined meshes, and you can swap these meshes by means of equipping specific items or changing the asset paths on the CS (body parts from the neck down only can be swapped by Blockhead).

 

WHat was I talking about? I forgot!!!

 

 

About the rest of your questions, sorry, I am still lost here. As far as I understand, you're doing things right, your game would look really pintoresque if you didn't.

 

Cheers!

[Rangaros]

Alright, that finally clears out a lot of doubts. So basically the OCO compatibility with HGEC wasn't quite finished because Nuska kinda disappeared.

 

 

About the exposed body parts, honestly I'm either misunderstanding or... Cause at first I understood it that way you're saying now: that each armor or clothing part REPLACES the WHOLE body part. It's like a Lego thing or something. If you want a new shirt you gotta take off the whole upper body and put a new one that has that shirt.

BUT then from what Striker just said, I understood than when clothing has exposed skin, it actually takes that skin from somewhere else, NOT from the clothing files. And that's why mixing different body and clothing types will mess things up. If the clothing replaced the WHOLE part then why would the exposed skin look wrong? I mean, maybe your arms wouldn't match with your legs, and you'll have blue arms and red legs, but that's a different part altogether, and individually, legs whole and arms whole should look fine, and match the clothing of that part.

 

So now I'm not quite sure which way it is.

 

Or maybe I'm just not getting it cause I don't really know what UV mapping is :P

 

 

Also, one little detail, does upper body include arms (but not hands)?

[IkeCoast]

Oh, the thing Striker told you and you didn't catch refers to the skin TEXTURE.

 

The exposed skin parts of an armor or clothing are, like all objects in the game, composed by TWO parts: the 3D mesh and the texture.

 

The 3D mesh of the bare skin parts of the mesh have a hardcoded texture in themselves. This means, you can change the textures of the clothing, but not of the skin. The skin part of the armor or clothing mesh will "read" which body texture it is replacing, be it Imperial, Khajiit, Argonian, Dark Elf or Abysmer. And will take the same texture file as the body part it replaces. If the armor is an HGEC armor, and you have the HGEC textures installed, everything will look ok.

 

But if the armor is a RobFem and you have the HGEC body textures installed, since RobFem and HGEC have different UV-mapping, the HGEC texture will not be correctly applied to the exposed skin mesh. And will look warped.

 

UV-mapping is the "Unwrapped Vertices Map" of the mesh. You take the mesh, cut it with a knife, lay it flat on the table and use this template to create the texture for it. Depending on how you cut it first and then iron it out on the table, the map will be different even for the same mesh, not to mention for different meshes.

 

Cheers!

 

Edit: yep, UpperBody includes the arms, but not the hands, like Lowerbody includes the legs, but not the feet.

Edited March 29, 2015 by IkeCoast

[Rangaros]

Ooh, yeah, duh I'm stupid. It's because all the mods now come with both meshes and textures, I tend to forget they are separate things. So the problem would be when combining clothing mesh+texture of one mod, with skin texture of another, something like that?

 

 

So the UV mapping basically determines where the mesh has the seams then? Like, depending on where it was cut to make it flat, those cuts will become the seams when put back into 3d-shape.