Attempting to randomize textures of human NPCs from custom .dds files

[Wygaella]

Hello! First post here, hopefully it landed in the right place.

 

I'm fairly new to modding and have some basic programming experience, but I've never really done much other than use save editors and change game files in a text editor.

 

I have CBBE installed for female bodies and BodyTalk V2 (with all requirements installed) for male bodies. What I have done is opened BaseMaleBody_d.dds and femalebody_d.dds in Photoshop and created several variations of it adding body hair, scars/blemishes, tattoos, etc. and have been able to get a single variation working for the female and male bodies in game.

 

What I would like to do is somehow set things up so that each human NPC (more specifically Gunners and Raiders, not necessarily every human NPC) have different variations of the body textures for some variety in-game. Ideally, something where those NPCs are randomly assigned a texture out of ones I provide, but I'd even be okay with something where, for example, raider model 1 is given texture 1, raider model 2 is given texture 2 and so on (not sure if that's how it works, I haven't dug too deep in Creation Kit yet). I don't really care about changing face textures, just the body textures to use the ones I've made.

 

Is there a way that I can achieve this? I've looked in to a mod that adds more settlers in game, but haven't given it a try as I'm fine with the settlers as they are. I tried doing some searching a few days ago but didn't find much on how to go about doing this.

 

I have the Creation Kit installed and have also used B.A.E to extract all of the texture folders, I'm just unsure of how to proceed.

 

TL;DR: I've made several different versions of the base male and female textures to try to add variety to the bodies in game. I want to randomize the textures (from the ones I've created) for Gunners, Raiders, etc. so bodies have randomized textures based on the edits I made. Is this possible, and if so, how do I go about it?

 

Any help or a push in the right direction would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

[Thirdstorm]

So I am a little rusty after a 7 month break from Modding but before reading the details of my reply check my Profile/Mods.

 

 

 

 

Ok moving forward...

This is kind of a complicated subject matter and only going to highlight one facet of it..

 

 

Modifying a body texture can be done, randomization is much harder, there are ways, as I understand, using F4SE and Looksmenu. however you will run into significant performance drops for a number of reasons...

The only one that matters in this case is the "Head" of all NPC's is typically Exported as a file, a "PreCombine" for NP's like the game has the for environment.

By changing the Body texture (Which is used for the Rear head piece) you are breaking this PreCombine,

 

This has a moderate but usually forgivable impact on core NPC's that are Vanilla, as they have a base Exported FaceGeometry, and they have been checked out and error corrected, but most Mod Added NPC's have not been, and as a result cause a much greater performance hit.

[Wygaella]

So I am a little rusty after a 7 month break from Modding but before reading the details of my reply check my Profile/Mods.

 

 

 

 

Ok moving forward...

This is kind of a complicated subject matter and only going to highlight one facet of it..

 

 

Modifying a body texture can be done, randomization is much harder, there are ways, as I understand, using F4SE and Looksmenu. however you will run into significant performance drops for a number of reasons...

The only one that matters in this case is the "Head" of all NPC's is typically Exported as a file, a "PreCombine" for NP's like the game has the for environment.

By changing the Body texture (Which is used for the Rear head piece) you are breaking this PreCombine,

 

This has a moderate but usually forgivable impact on core NPC's that are Vanilla, as they have a base Exported FaceGeometry, and they have been checked out and error corrected, but most Mod Added NPC's have not been, and as a result cause a much greater performance hit.

Would the PreCombine still be broken if, for example, the texture for a Raider's body was modified in Photoshop (or any similar program) for just cosmetic changes (i.e. putting body hair/tattoos on the texture versus trying to use the texture for the Player Character texture on the NPC)? Or is the PreCombine broken when any modifications are made?