Trouble adding custom npc to custom home

[hangarspace]

So I've created an NPC and saved it away to an esp file, when added to the game in the Riverwood trader as an example they appear fine.

 

But I want to add them to a custom home made by another modder (Riverside Lodge).

 

I removed the npc from their location in the riverwood trader and re-saved the npc esp file and made a backup!

 

Now, I wasn't sure which esp should be "active", whether it should be my NPC one or the custom home one, so I have tried with both.

 

Firstly, I set my npc esp as 'active' and dropped them into the location in the custom home and after the usual warnings the character appears in the render window. Saved it all, but they don't appear in-game. When I went back to CK to check, I see it had created some sort of duplicate cell for the home with just my npc in. I tried swapping the load order around on the two esp's but that didn't appear to make a difference.

 

So I reverted to the original clean files, loaded them up into the CK and this time set the home esp as active. I went thru the similar procedure of dropping the npc in the room, saved it and this time re-loaded it to see what it may have done and found that the character was not appearing in the render view.

 

Finally, I reverted to the clean files once again and with the home esp set as active I created a copy of my npc and dropped that into the room and it all worked hunky dory.

 

So, whilst it may work by creating the character within the house mod, this wasn't the way I envisaged doing it, I would have preferred to keep the npc and house mods separate. Is there a trick to doing this?

 

Thanks

 

Chris

 

PS After spending a few days playing with CK, I have even greater admiration for you guys!

[IsharaMeradin]

This should help you. Its part of a larger tutorial but it covers exactly what you need to do.

 

Using an ESP as a parent plugin

 

I would suggest picking the home as the parent since it needs be in place for the actor to be placed in. but really either way would work.

[hangarspace]

Thanks for that link it was useful and allowed me to resolve the problem.

 

Chris