Custom character creation

[Dreamsequence]

Hey guys! I'm new to the modding scene but I've been learning 3D modeling the last couple years and I'm finally at the point where I can make models good enough to actually not look like utter crap in the game. I've wanted to do this for so long with Morrowind and Oblivion but I never had the skills. The problem I'm running into now is that there seems to not be much help out there for people making custom race meshes.

 

From what I've gathered by digging around in the files and looking all over forums and youtube, character meshes in Skyrim are fairly complex. I can tell learning this won't be easy, but I'm hoping you guys can get me on track to putting some more custom player races out there. (and utterly destroying the lore in the process. I promise, it's not ponies... not yet anyway. Maybe a Mog Mod revival for Skyrim would be in the books if I can figure this out or get some help with going from meshes and textures to functioning race in-game)

 

I currently have a character model made. It's a sculpt made from the ground up, built out of a sphere in Sculptris and retopologized, armor added, UVWs and everything in 3DS Max 2012. It's in a t-pose with arms stretched straight out, which might be a problem. That's one of those things I'm not sure about. When I import the skeleton, its arms are closer to down by the character's side than straight out. Does this mean I will need to make some changes to my mesh to get the arms in the right position before weighting the model to the Skyrim skeleton? Or can I simply move the joints around and save it as a new skeleton file specifically for this character?

 

If anyone has some insights they can share from their own time spent with custom race mods, I'd like to get some tips or any input on how to go from model to functional mesh in-game. Anything about the pieces that need to be made, how to get it all put together, maybe some specifics I need to look out for when I'm doing this in 3DS Max?

 

Thanks in advance~