Modding: Mixing armor parts and bodies

[enlo]

There are a lot of bodies available and they are even splitted in several custom races - a lot of players use custom races and textures with tattoos

What's the best way to mix those customized bodies with clothing?

 

 

I see three ways for matching bodies to clothers:

 

a) The player installs his own body and race. The clothing then uses the ArmorAddon slot (or basically any slot but NOT UpperBody).

- The downside is, that I loose a slot this way and probably a lot of scripts will assume that I'm walking around naked (since the UpperBody is empty).

- On the upside, the textures and body will be as the player selected.

 

b) The clothing contains a body and uses the UpperBody slot.

- That's nice and easy for me, but if the player uses different textures in a custom race (for example tattoos), they won't appear.

- At least the textures work fine as long as the default races are used, the body is not be freely selectable.

 

c) Clothing in UpperBody slot, with a body as ArmorAddon.

- Same as b) but enables me to actually change the worn body with scripts.

- Since the body is in a separate NIF, the user can actually replace it and customize.

- The textures would not work for custom races since it's hardcoded in the NIF (or can I somehow set an override texture somewhere?)

 

 

 

I think that solution C would rock, as long as I can find out what texture and mesh the player is using.

So, I can find out what race a user is playing using scripts. Fine.

Is there a way to find out what body parts ( NIF ) a race consists of? And what textures it uses?

 

I'm also thinking about a FOMM solution where the user would have to select his body, but then again, how do I get the custom texture into the mesh?

[Quetzlsacatanango]

Your premise is flawed. Armor can include the body, use the upperbody slot, and show custom race features such as tattoos. In the nif, set the shader type as shader_skin and tick winow_environment_mapping and the skin will show just fine.

[enlo]

hmmm after some thinking that even makes sense, since when you equip an item into UpperBody it kind of replaces the default mesh, but not necessarily it's texture.

Well but I'll still doom the players to be wearing the body of my taste [while reducing the chance of clipping].

 

I guess C still works easily then since the texture will be correct anyway. And the player actually _can_ replace the body without having to know NifSkope

Soooo... why didn't I anyone see doing this yet? There must be some downside

[Quetzlsacatanango]

If you are talking about using a different body type, like type 3, and wanting to use armor made for a different body, like exnem, there is no good way to get around that. Even your addon slot ideas would result in a lot of clipping, no matter what.

But if you're talking about using different variants of type 3, there is no issue. Your race can by type3 cali and you can wear armor made with type3 berry, and the textures will show just fine, tattoos and all. The body shape will just change slightly when the armor is equipped.

[enlo]

that's clear, yes.

 

But I'm a bit reluctant to include a body because even with limiting to type3 you get a ton of various options. For example the non-nude body would suddendly show nudity when the item is equipped (which does matter when your item is a shirt without pants). Also some variants like narrow shoulders work like charm with shoulder-free clothing and the visual impact is noticable (in contrast to cali/berry/... where most user won't notice any difference).

 

Thats why I like the idea of a armoraddon-body. I can provide a base body and the user can still break the whole mod and whine around :D

 

 

BTW: Thanks for your help so far, you already saved me a whole bunch of useless trial-and-error.

Edited April 12, 2011 by enlo

[Quetzlsacatanango]

You can try, I don't think you will be happy with the results, especially when it comes to things like shoes. But good luck.