Body mod underwear advice?

[thiafy]

Underwear is basically clothing that all characters wear by default until different clothing is put over it, yes?

 

I'm wondering if I can make it vary by character race -- bloomers for some and moderately fancy-looking shifts for others (altmer), for instance (and if I could manage an OMOD script to let people choose what goes on who, that would be even better). I'm planning to tailor it to my favorite body mod, which has conversions for all the clothing I want to use, and I know how to ask permission before posting it up anywhere. :)

 

Is there a guide somewhere on making underwear? Or just a body mod-making guide, which certainly would include such instructions? I'm having trouble figuring out what search terms I should use. And is it even possible for the underwear to vary by character race?

Edited September 3, 2011 by thiafy

[BarefootWarrior]

In Oblivion, the default (diaper) underwear was for all races (that i know of) and to this day I have never found the mesh. It is a mesh that the avatar wears. As far as I know (and I could be wrong) I don't know if anyone has ever made underwear for each race, so you could be onto something. I would like to do something like this but my skills in Blender are not at that point yet, textures I'm good at. I am not aware of any guides as such, maybe some one else will jump in here and give some info. :thumbsup:

[fore]

The underwear is simply part of the vanilla lowerbody.nif, femalelowerbody.nif, femaleupperbody.nif in meshes\_male. Nowadays, with all the body replacers, non of us probably uses it any more, but it still resides in the games bsa files.

 

The problem is that all humanoid races share these same meshes. And up until today I thought it's impossible to change this. But there is a mod Modders Resource Unique Racial Meshes and Textures , which claims just that. But it doesn't seem to be easy.

[thiafy]

@ BarefootWarrior: Well, I'm not planning on doing any texturing or meshing myself, but I've found at least one free-for-reuse underwear-type outfit that would suit each different race (or group of races), and a few extras for people to choose between, once I go and figure out how to script OMODs. And, well, I can also retexture, yes, so there might be a few new recolors. :)

 

I know that the various body mod makers all include underwear versions. So I just need to figure out how to change the underwear, period, and then if it's possible to make the underwear unique for each race.

 

---

 

@Fore: Ooh! Hmm. Well... even if it's not easy, if the instructions are thorough enough, I should be able to manage it. We'll see. =D Thank you.

 

edit: "Until a way is figured out to change Oblivion from pointing to the body meshes (over in the _male folder), having unique body meshes appears to be impossible." -- That mod's creator.

 

However, it looks like it may be possible with scripts? Or something similar, at any rate. If anyone has any idea how, I am willing to try my hand at anything. :) (Now that I think of it, the creator of the Argonian Beautification mod had some sort of script to make an interesting foot mesh apply to all argonians, didn't they?)

Edited September 4, 2011 by thiafy

[BarefootWarrior]

The underwear is simply part of the vanilla lowerbody.nif, femalelowerbody.nif, femaleupperbody.nif in meshes\_male. Nowadays, with all the body replacers, non of us probably uses it any more, but it still resides in the games bsa files.

 

The problem is that all humanoid races share these same meshes. And up until today I thought it's impossible to change this. But there is a mod Modders Resource Unique Racial Meshes and Textures , which claims just that. But it doesn't seem to be easy.

 

ahhh..guess I could have figured that out and now it makes sense. Good to know. But you are right, no one uses them anyway, I changed over to the Roberts male body and won't go back, much better. I hope they do better then that in Skyrim...lol :tongue:

Edited September 4, 2011 by BarefootWarrior

[fore]

However, it looks like it may be possible with scripts? Or something similar, at any rate. If anyone has any idea how, I am willing to try my hand at anything. :) (Now that I think of it, the creator of the Argonian Beautification mod had some sort of script to make an interesting foot mesh apply to all argonians, didn't they?)

Not really (I think). There is one mod, Set Body and Set Body Self, which can change the players and NPCs body mesh, on the fly, by using a spell. Seems to be it? Not really.

 

What this mod does, it dresses the character with a new body mesh on top of the standard mesh, like a 2nd skin.

 

This seems to be exactly what you want to do. But the problem with this kind of scripting is that it has to be applied individually. And you cannot script ALL NPCs. I had the impression you wanted to avoid just that, especially for cases where you are looting a dead enemy.

 

So if this is what you think of (looting), you could try with a quest script, which constantly checks if the player opens and closes an NPCs inventory (should be possible), and then if the character is looted (upper and/or lower slot empty) dress with you special underwear mesh. :thumbsup:

 

Edit: you could in fact look into "Scripted Argonian Feet". But I don't think you can do that with body mesh nifs, only with equippable items.

[thiafy]

Hmm. Yeah, I had this in mind for looted enemies and player characters (I, at least, don't often run into nude NPCs). Only modding looted NPCs wouldn't be as exciting as my original idea, but it is the largest part of what I had in mind. =D I thankfully have a reasonable idea of what you're saying here, too. Any more advice would always be appreciated, though.

 

Then I'd just need to figure out how to replace all undies in the game, for my player character -- still having trouble finding a body-mod-related guide on the CS wiki. I probably just have to set up a .NIF and replace my current files with it, though, I think. Then just make it modular with OBMM, for rapid mind-changing. =D

Edited September 4, 2011 by thiafy

[fore]

Then I'd just need to figure out how to replace all undies in the game,

That's the main problem. You cannot do it all for once. Unless you change the inventory of ALL NPCs with CS. And then you still don't have the custom NPCs.

 

So you need to do it dynamically. You can do this with the OBSE functions GetFirstRef and GetNextRef, which are really handy. But the easiest way probably is to control the menumode for containers (1008, the NPC is a container), and make sure there is a body skin (which should be defined as unplayable clothing) when you close the container.

[DeadMansFist849]

I can ask a scripter to help me with this for Robert's Female--using the Set Body scripts, you could cast a spell to put different undies on different people.

[DrakeTheDragon]

The common way seems to be creating "equippable" body parts and letting scripts control their equipping.

 

By use of tokens, provided once when the player gets close to the actor, this can be achieved seperately on a per-NPC basis, be it by race, gender, or whatever criteria else you come up with.

I'm doing it for Argonians, by means of their race ID for one, but also by checking if they're affected by the racial ability Resist Poison, so not only Vanilla Argonian races will have Argonian feet but also some custom Argonian races or when the race itself was changed somehow. That's of course only an example of what all could be done here.

 

The common way is to let those custom body parts get equipped while the particular body slot is empty, as in nothing's worn in it, so you are allowed to wear everything you want and will only get custom body parts while not wearing anything. I altered my scripts a while ago to provide exactly this. Previously you were not allowed to wear any unfitting items at all with Scripted Argonian Feet, this had to change. It might be the key feature of my approach to "swap" the clothing or armor items you wear by ones fitting the custom body shape, but as this requires me to create such "fitting" versions of all the NIF files first, I had to introduce some changes to allow for more options in the mean time.

 

From my point of view it should be very easy to store a list of NPCs in an array to keep track of which underwear which one of them should have, and as it is underwear anyways, it should only equip when nothing else is worn in the slot, thus the default behavior, the most basic part of it all. Using my SAF scripts to learn how to do this is definitely not advisable. To achieve only equipping when nothing's worn one has to disable about 90% of the mod's doing, so the scripts of course contain far more than this and will only be confusing to the matter.

 

The only complex part as I see it now would be how to define which NPC wears which underwear without running through your whole game world and assigning it for every single person individually, or simply letting it be done randomly. On a per-race basis one could simply define it in a config array of sorts or even with a hard-coded list of options in the token scripts. The latter, due to the undefined number of possible races in one's game, is again not advisable though.