HGEC or Robert's bodies?

[Ditchedcoyote]

which mod had more clothing options? or can you have both? and do clothing mods that claim to only support one type of body mods actually know that its true? Edited December 8, 2011 by Ditchedcoyote

[LFact]

HGEC has more clothing options, but Robert's female body has better UV mapping..(If you're gonna make a tattooed texture, you would know). Although if you want realistic body shape with HGEC texture, there's TGND.

[Nephenee13]

which mod had more clothing options? or can you have both? and do clothing mods that claim to only support one type of body mods actually know that its true?

 

You cannot have both (well, you can have HGEC female and Robert's male, which is what most people use), because of how clothing works in this game.

 

If you are aiming for maximum compatibility, you will want HGEC, it is by far the most used female body mod. If you prefer Robert's Female, feel free to use it, but its less supported overall.

 

Of course, if you find a piece of HGEC clothing that you really want to use with your Robert's Female body, you could always alter it yourself...

[DrakeTheDragon]

and do clothing mods that claim to only support one type of body mods actually know that its true?

By default you can just expect a mod author to know it's true when a statement like "doesn't support X" is made in the description. Else it won't have been made to begin with.

 

Then furthermore by design of the game engine clothing/armor items only ever fit 1 body, not only body mod but body mesh, the one that's inside them in their NIF files. Clothing "replaces" your body, it doesn't just get put over it.

There are borderline cases where it might look "acceptable" wearing an item for one specific body with a different one, all the Exnem family's body mods for example use one and the same texture layout mainly, thus meshes for a different derivative will still look somewhat fine, as the texture mapping keeps working fine, but at least at the connection lines between the bodyparts there will be gaps.

 

Wearing Vanilla items, with Vanilla body meshes inside, for example will in most cases look somewhat acceptable "with default races". There will be gaps at the connection lines again, of course, but the Vanilla body meshes will use the Vanilla textures for each bodypart left-over in the textures folder and thus there will be no texture issues (only the foot texture is the one replaced by body mods for full-body coverage mostly, the rest of the body might work fine with Vanilla). But if you consider "custom" races which only come with textures for a specific set of body mods, those will be lacking Vanilla textures entirely and the game will either use Imperial skin or the purple "missing texture" error-indicator, sometimes even the pitch-black or invisible "missing normalmap" error indicator will take precedence.

 

So by design wearable items only ever support 1 single body, the one that's included. And a mod author telling it won't work with any other body is only stating the obvious, for those who still don't know.

If it indeed works more or less fine with your different body type, despite a statement telling the opposite, then consider yourself lucky, not the mod author as being mistaken.