UNP/CBBE question (not another which is better question), also PoS vs I-AI

[BUCKinFL]

Not looking for a debate on which is better. There are enough threads for that. This is more of a "do I need it" question. I really just want more immersion through better NPCs.

 

Looking for immersion, not fantasy wives/female warriors. Also, I have a preference for improving faces over bodies. I definitely want to add Bijin wives for the beautiful faces, and Sky Hair for the nice hair styles. If I add a body modifier, I was leaning toward UNP because it was stated that the realism is better, but since I have zero experience with rather CBBE or UNP, I have to take other people's word for it. I don't play female characters so my emphasis is on making the NPC's look better, especially the wife options. Especially faces, but also bodies if I can get enough bang for the buck out of a mod.

 

I have Whiterun Mansion, but it caused mage gamer to seriously lag, so I had to go to the control room and select the lite option. This makes me leery of adding too much. It affects how I make mod choices now. So let me first give my system specs.

 

i5-4460 3.2 Ghz

8gb RAM (going to double it)

GeForce GTX-750

Win 10 (looking to revert back to 8.1)

 

 

These are my tools, and installed Mods. Only 27 of them so far.

 

1. Mod Organizer
2. SKSSE
3. TES5Edit

 

1. IMAGINATOR
2. RaceMenu
3. SkyUI
4. Immersive HUD - iHUD
5. High Quality 3D Map
6. A Quality World Map and Solstheim Map - With Roads
7. Unofficial Skyrim Legendary Edition Patch
8. Unofficial High Resolution Patch
9. Skyrim HD - 2K Textures
10. I Cant Believe Its NOT ENB 3
11. Enhanced Lights and FX
12. Climates Of Tamriel - Weather - Lighting - Audio
13. Supreme and Volumetric Fog
14. Morning Fogs
15. True Storms - Thunder and Rain Redone
16. Splash of Rain
17. Skyrim Flora Overhaul
18. Grass on Steroids
19. Realistic Water Two
20. Immersive Roads
21. Improved NPC Clothing - High Res
22. Immersive Weapons
23. Immersive Armors
24. Immersive Amazing Follower Tweaks
25. Movement Speeds Fixed
26. Whiterun Mansion
27. Book Covers Skyrim

 

So far, other than the Whiterun Mansion issue, I have had no issues.

 

What I want...with "bang for the buck" in mind.

 

1. More interesting NPCs
2. Better Looking NPCs
3. Better looking environments
4. More interesting places to visit, with things to do.
5. Better Creatures
6. More ways to travel Skyrim in real-time, such as ships, railroad, etc...

 

For first play through, I am not going to add Frostfall, or RNnD, or anything that makes it very difficult to make my way through the game.

 

I am going to add things such as SkyHair and Bijin Wives (Those Faces!)

 

Intend to add things such as The Scarlett (Ship Mod)

 

Like the features of both People of Skyrim, and Immersive AI, but they are not compatible. Wish somebody could combine the two. Also, after the Whiterun Mansion problem, I may not be able to run either of these mods. Any help with this would be great.

 

As I said, I do want to add places and things to the game but it needs to add a lot without taxing my system, I think. Maybe this won't be as much of an issue when I add RAM. Doubling RAM is never a bad thing. :) No intention of buying a new vid card for the next year or two. Being retired Navy, I don't have an unlimited PC upgrade budget. Maybe if and when I can get a big jump up in performance with very low cost, I will do it.

 

My experience with modding is low. I have a basic understanding of Mod Organizer. Never used Wrye Bash. Have not used TESVedit. Have IMAGINATOR installed but have not used it yet. Same for RaceMenu. Also, installed that memory patch while trying to solve the Whiterun Mansion issue but have Not made any tweaks yet. Not even sure how. Also, ICBINE3 is great and only made one tweak to it, and that was the Antialiasing thing, but he said to disable the one in game, but have not yet figured out how to do it. Not sure how to tweak anything else in it, though I am going to have to try. My nights are too bright as are the skies in the heavy rain storms. Have yet to see any heavy fog, and the morning fog seems to be non-existent. I tried the Grassification Project but it was too much. So while I have no critical issues yet, I do seem to need to figure out how to do some tweaks.

 

 

Summary:

 

NPCs/AI

I want to make the NPCs more interesting and better looking, within my rig's abilities. I have never done this before. Not to this level. I did add Better Heads and Better Bodies, etc... in Morrowind.

 

Very much plan to play Skywind when it's done. Hope modders add good stuff to that also, such as player homes, etc... I figure some mods will cross over, but location dependent mods won't, of course. /tangent

 

 

Anyway, for the general population, just something to make them look a little better is OK. Better faces, hair, and I guess better bodies. Better interaction and better idle action is good. Immersive AI looks really good for that. But People of Skyrim also added good stuff. Just not sure I can handle the extra buildings around Whiterun. Advice on anything AI is greatly appreciated.

 

For the wives, SkyHair and Bijin wives will do most of what I want, I think, and I wonder if UNP or CBBE is worth the tax on the system. I don't intend to dress them skimpy, nor give them ZOMG boobs and butts. C/D is fine, though a little bouncing cleavage, and swaying hips, is OK too. If there is clothing options that keep them classy looking, but sexy, that would be cool. I'm thinking something less "Little House on the Prairie," yet still long, and somewhat period looking. Can you really fix up the wives and essential people you interact with a lot while doing less to all the other NPCs, in order to save memory/frame rates?? Advice on how to get there, is greatly appreciated.

 

 

Environment

Any help on making the nights darker while using ICBINE3 would help. Using CoT nights lvl 2.

Any advice on the fog would be nice. Am I just not supposed to see it in the Whiterun area?

Any advice to enhance the terrain/environment is good so long as it doesn't tax my system too much.

 

 

Adding Content

Any advice on "must have" additions, such as The Scarlett, best mansions, etc...

City visual or physical upgrades would be great so long as they are compatible with mods I want to add, or have added and don't tax my rig too much.

 

 

My experience.

Very little. I have shied away from a couple of essential mods because they seem complicated. I think SMIM was one of them, or one of the mods he said to install, that also wanted another mod installed, all of which seemed to require tweaks. I know, I know...kind of looking at that jam packed garage and feeling overwhelmed when you want to clean it out, but when it is done, you will be glad you did it.

 

Looking at my mods, if you know what order is best for them to load, feel free to let me know. I don't seem to be having any major issues, but that's no guarantee for the future.

 

 

 

[MichikoUnknownFox]

CBBE takes a little more work to get going, but not an inordinate amount. Just like all body mods, once you've got it set up it's all gravy as long as you install compatible clothes/armor later. UNP is compatible with vanilla bodies so if you find an armor mod that is for vanilla, UNP will work with it, and vice versa. I'm told CBBE uses a different UV map or something like that, so it'll take a bit more work to get it to look good, but only for armors that show some skin especially around the arms and legs and whatnot.

 

That said, you don't actually even need a body mod. Again, most UNP armors will work just fine with the vanilla body, as long as you wear their whole sets (otherwise you might get seams at the wrists or something). Their shapes will be different but to be honest, a lot of the UNP armors don't even follow the default UNP shape either. Heck a lot of them don't even support weights, so your character will end up with a differently proportioned body when wearing armors sometimes. But that's just how body mods work.

 

I personally like UNP better if only for that simplicity. Some of my favorite armors do not have a CBBE version (yet?), and while BodySlide exists, I'm too lazy to actually deal with that, especially since I already have UNP set up properly.

[BUCKinFL]

Thanks for the info!

[MichikoUnknownFox]

Oh yeah sorry I totally missed your other questions.

 

In general, it won't actually affect your performance much provided you don't use 4K or higher textures for people (skin, etc.). Your rig should be able to handle 2K textures and below just fine. 4K textures to me are a waste, but hey I won't knock it if other people like it and their machines can actually handle it.

 

Make sure you optimize the textures you get in mods as well. This is probably the most important part. There's a lot of options for it but yeah. A lot of texture modders give you uncompressed or otherwise unoptimized textures, which is bad if you need FPS and stability. Textures being too big for your RAM can cause crashes (often the main cause of crashes in fact) and significant loading lag or stutters if you have a slow HDD. Even if you had an SSD it can still cause loading lag, as the bottleneck will be elsewhere (transferring the data from SSD to RAM). Some people report almost a minute of loading even on an SSD with a lot of ultra HD textures.

 

I don't use a lot of NPC specific mods. I have some for the companions, and I've modded some myself. Basically those are pick whatever one looks best to you. Don't worry about performance too much with that. However, installing a good face + body texture (make sure they match) often makes a big difference already.

 

Same applies to better-looking environments. Pick a retexture you like. You may also want to consider something like Skyrim Flora Overhaul or an alternative.

 

Your rig is pretty good so you might be able to use an ENB without problems. It's a little complicated to set up at first, and most ENBs look different from the screenshots (some are not playable and only used for screenshots in fact).

 

Here's a travel+house mod you may want to consider: Dev Aveza.

[Prismuth]

Probably UNP if you don't want buxom babes running around. CBBE is really well done, but the bodies are really, well, buxom.

[Jeir]

  On 1/3/2016 at 5:14 AM, BUCKinFL said:

Also, I have a preference for improving faces over bodies.

CBBE has a face mod in its installer. If you don't like it, you can use TexBlendLite (also in the CBBE installer) to remove the neckseam between the default CBBE body textures and almost any face retexture mod. Many body textures out there also have seamless face textures to go with it.

 

 

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I was leaning toward UNP because it was stated that the realism is better

The only thing UNP has over CBBE is more polys. It has decent legs, but the waist looks too high, the torso too long and top-heavy, and breasts stick out and defy gravity too much for them to be considered 'realistic'. At least, with the default bodies, CBBE's beasts have some sag.

 

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I wonder if UNP or CBBE is worth the tax on the system.

CBBE has less polys than UNP, and has four options for texture size, ranging from 4k uncompressed 'ultra' textures (best quality, but requires a good system) to 2k compressed 'low' textures (less detail, but good for weaker systems). On my old computer which had a GTX 550 Ti 1GB, I ran the 'medium' colour textures with the 'ultra' normal and spec maps without issue (all 2K uncompressed)

 

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I don't intend to dress them skimpy, nor give them ZOMG boobs and butts. C/D is fine, though a little bouncing cleavage, and swaying hips, is OK too.

The default body, Slim, is around an A-C cup. Curvy is around C-D. HDT is supported with BodySlide, which you can also use to customise the shape of the body. CBBE also has a huge list of compatible clothing, armour and texture mods in its Forums tab to make searching for outfits easy.

 

 

  On 1/4/2016 at 4:28 AM, Prismuth said:

Probably UNP if you don't want buxom babes running around. CBBE is really well done, but the bodies are really, well, buxom.

UNP has larger breasts than even CBBE Curvy. =P Has been that way for a few years.