HELP NEEDED ! Mod Project Realistic Beauty By Race

[Phoenux211]

Hi everyone,

 

I created this topic to ask for advises and explore news directions in my mod project. My goal is to create detailed body morphs by Race (for body, clothes and armors) so that every Races of the Elder scroll's universe has it's own particularities (silhouette, height, muscles, etc.) and having in mind some elements that seems necessary for realistic looking outfits (like materials weight, hardness, tension, animation, etc.)

I've played a lot the elders scrolls games, and, like a lot of modders, some aspects of the games doesn't do justice to the universe, the voice acting & the songs.

 

:dry: * * * * * if you don't want to read the boring part skip to my mod setup * * * * * :dry:

 

After deciding witch were my modding goals for Skyrim SE, I looked on nexus, loveslab, youtube, reddit for hours to find out if someone did what I was looking for.

Finally I find a bunch of interesting projects :

Racial Body Morph SE

Orc Overhaul SE

UMATBR (more close to what I'm willing to do I think)

The Spice of Life

EBD - Everybodys different redone

After trying extreme modding for my characters, I think it could be great to make a character body/outfit overall (like cbbe or unp, in the beginning) These mods seems to be a little outdated and not fitting exactly to my needs. But they all inspired me to do my own thing.

So I decided that with my designer skills I could use some of the amazing tools created by the modding community to make realistic looking bodies & outfits, fitting the lore and creating more immersive gameplay experience.

 

To do so I started one month ago to mess around with different mods and tools for Skyrim Special Edition.

I suffered a lot of weird looking glitches with my Body presets, some game crashes, but I kept looking reading & watching tutorials, learning what I was capable to understand. Finally I got rid of some of the buggy renders I've made it work nicely but without always knowing what I was doing good or wrong. Then I tried to adjust some clothes & armors to see if I was able to apply some physics and at first it was terrible. But then after countless hours on Outfit studio I finally got something decent and clean (I'll upload some gif or video to show you guys what I've been up to these past weeks). Now I have a more precise idea of what the characters could look with a proper attention to details.
I have learned that I needed a deeper knowledge of the tools and modding options to focus my work on the most efficient way.

 

Because my ultimate goal forces me to have defined steps of creation/workflow, for those who are interested in part of my project, I'll try to make and then share in different packages each parts of my work for the Realistic Beauty By Race project.

 

 

Here's my mod setup with some of the difficulties I encountered
(feel free to question the following choices)

1) The body BaseShape

I'm working with CBBE Body (with physics) and XP32 Maximum Skeleton SE

for the physics I'm using HDT-SMP framework & physics (if you're interested, look on the internet, there is a bunch of versions and websites including the Chinese one, to download it)

I didn't try the UNNP body for now, but I think that once I master the basic knowledge of body morphs and physics on CBBE SE, I'll be happy to help people to create conversion sliders for my bodies and outfits. But I'm really thinking in creating my own version of CBBE SE physics and bodyslides (see below).

 

2) The essentials tools

Like many others probably, I use the great BodySlide & Outfit Studio tools.

I've been using Bodyslide for a month and I feel pretty comfortable using it, but I struggle with the sliders and their effects on the bodies preset i created (strange physics on the belly/hips and the top of the breasts). So practicing, I learned that using Outfit Studio I could adjust the sliders to do what I need and (tell me if I'm wrong) that with enough knowledge I could create mi own set of sliders and modify the physics to obtain a better final rendering (witch I did successfully in some of my outfits tests).
My major difficulties with the physics part is that I'd like to create bones or attach some parts of the outfits to existing bones. I'd like to understand precisely what I'm affecting with the weight tool and what are the rules to achieve each rendering (some examples : a solid object like pauldrons should move without being deformed, on the other hand, I'd like to make all the robes more wavy and without showing the leg).

 

3) The deployment tools (for diversity of body morphs)

After discovering the previous tools and making a bunch of presets, I decided to try some mods to assign to each race a specific body morph.. To do so I installed Bodies Of Skyrim SE to manage my body presets & jBS2BG to convert them, witch seems the most appropriate mods and formula for what I'm willing to do.

That part is where I would have more needs of directions to know what I'm doing wrong, because I can't figure how to set it up properly and to make my presets work in game with Bodies Of Skyrim SE.

Project : Realistic Beauty By Race

What's that all about ?

>>> Each races will have body truly different (less humanoid Argonian and Khajiit, more slender Altmer, and a lot more :D )

>>> Each races will have 3 body morphs for male and 3 for female (slim, neutral, heavy/muscular).

>>> Male and female will have a different heights.

>>> All the vanilla Clothes and armors will fit nicely to these body morphs (no gap between outfit and body).

>>> All the bodies and outfits will have physics enable with subtle details.

>>> The presets should be available for Player character & NPC's.

>>> Finally I'll work on a FOMOD installer to customize your setup.

Thanks to each and everyone of you for committing time reading my post and feel free to correct my English if it's not good enough.

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Edited March 20, 2019 by Phoenux211