Making a new race

[highkingtorygg42]

Extremely new to modding.

 

How do I add a new race, with digitigrade legs and a non-human face? I want to put some khajiit in the mojave.

A new race is easy enough to make, but I don't know if non-standard legs and face are allowed.

 

Also, what is the legality of porting khajiit models from skyrim, oblivion, etc, and using them in a different game?

[DizzasterJuice]

A race refers to a human that use one of 4 bodies, heads, hands, and skeleton: male, female, male child and female child. You can morph a head, meaning you can change it as long as the vertices are exactly the same. But if you morph a head, you have to rebuild the egm file for the expressions and lip sinc to work. Morphing the legs is a different problem. You would have to build a new skeleton and the kf (movement files) thus a new creature. That's why the Khajiit have human legs instead of cat legs.

At one time I was seriously thinking of taking on a project to recreate the cat legs from my Minkie Cats (NSFW) for Skyrim but once I found out how much work was involved I put the project on the back burner.

 

I believe (correct me if I'm wrong) that Bethesda has an understanding with Nexus that you can not use assets from another game including their own games.

Edited November 6, 2015 by DizzasterJuice

[highkingtorygg42]

instead of morphing the head, I could just put a special helmet on, right?

[DizzasterJuice]

You can replace the head with anything you want, but unless you morph the original vanilla head keeping all the vertices the same, then rebuild the egm, it won't be able to move its lips to talk, can't blink its eyes, and it will have no emotions at all.

 

I have not compared the Skyrim head to the Fallout head but I'm going to guess that they have different verts. If so, you can import the Skyrim Khajiit head to Max or Blender. Then import the human head from Fallout and clone it as a copy. Turn both meshes to an editable poly, then use conform modeling tool to wrap the cloned human head to the Khajitt head. You may run into problems around the eyes and mouth that need to be tweaked. Then copy and paste the skin modifier from the vanilla Fallout head to the clone head. Add a dismember modifier on top of the stack, select all polys as "head" and export as nif. You can find the egm conversion tool on the Nexus to make the new egm. The whole process might take a few hours unless you have to tweak stuff.

 

Like I said, the head is the easy part, it's the digitigrade legs that are too much work. Also, I would check with a moderator about using the Khajiit head, otherwise you can soft select model it from the original head.