Alternate body advice, also LooksMenu causing game to lock up

[StormWolf01]

Hi all, TIA for taking a look at my thread. I appreciate it :)

 

Ok, so first off, I'm finally thinking about seriously moving away from the vanilla bodies, to ones that accept bodyslide. I've decided that I'm going to start out with JaneBod.

(Please don't give me the pros and cons of CBBE over this, I appreciate it, but I want to start off simpler first, and I don't want to deal with the neck texture problems with CBBE as of yet.)

 

First question- I know that if you don't use a mod like Unique Player, all NPC females will also share the same body as the player. Should I install a mod like Unique Player BEFORE adding in the body mod? If so, what additional work will be required before/after?

 

2nd Que- Which unique player mod do you guys most recommend? I've seen unique player, unique followers, unique player redux, (that one I've read over, and I honestly don't understand some of the things in the directions) etc.

 

Are follower mods really required? I've seen some mods that modify the companions that include their own nifs, bodyslide presets, and json files. For what I'm talking about would be a Cait mod, and it uses CBBE. Since it includes it's own nif, would the CBBE mod be required? (Probly yes, but I'm still asking).

 

I should probly ask this in tech support, but I figure since I'm starting a thread, I'll go ahead and try to kill two birds with one stone.

 

LooksMenu is behaving wierd for me. It will automatically disable it's self from my load order if I don't start the game thru f4se. When it's not enabled, I get a bunch of Lookup Failed (or something similar) messages during character creation. I assume thats normal.

 

However, if I am trying to work on the character's figures, and I go into the Clothing menu, the toon goes nude, and the game locks up. Like to the point that in task manager it's listed as Not Responding. Any ideas on what I can do to fix?

 

Again, Thanks in advance for your time :)

-Storm

[G4M3W1NN3R]

Main Reply

 

 

for bodies, i can only talk about CBBE, been using it since its release for Skyrim LE (Oldrim) back in the day (Did also use UNPB for quite some time and before CBBE, however once i realized how much customization can be achieved with CBBE and when i started wanted to fully create my female toons, i was sold on it) . never once felt the need to change, and probably never will change (CBBE offers everything you could need, combined with the shear amount of clothing, armor and texture mods for it, their really is no reason to get a different body). bodyslide allows you to create any body you could imagine for your CBBE body, so getting specific bodies is redundant when you have cbbe as you can customise your cbbe body to be an exact replica of any other body, combine that with an incredibly easy method to conform clothing and armor to your body, their really is no reason to choose any other custom body, the only exception to this currently is fusion girl if you want a body that supports an advanced skeleton (but this will only benefit a specific target

audience)

 

Note: i know you did not want a pros and cons for CBBE but, what a wrote is facts based on my extensive use of CBBE in a very long time.

 

Unique Player based Mods are a Hit and Miss, you will run into problems when it comes to clothing and armor mods that are strictly made for custom bodies (CBBE for example) for me personally it does not bother me at all if every single female npc is using the exact same body as me, it just means i know for a fact all clothing and armor mods i use for my chosen custom body will work perfectly on them as well (plus i use Unique NPC mods which adds a lot of diversity to all NPCs anyway, so really the only female npcs that have the same body proportions as my character are the base game female companions. with unique player based mods you will need to do extra work to get your clothing and armor mods to work on them. (i have seen loads of problem based topics where people are having problems getting clothing and armor mods designed for custom bodies to work with unique player based mods)

 

as for follower mods, no they not required, but they can look considerably better then vanilla, so it really depends on how much visuals appeal to you, if you are going to be traveling with these for your entire playthrough then yes i would say it is required to get them looking as good as possible, especially if their female companions and you are using a custom body + custom armor and textures, and you give them said custom content

 

Note: same would also apply to the male companions, but since we are strictly talking a female body type, my post will primarily refeer to female NPCs

 

however with that said, you can customise any fallout 4 companion using Ultimate Follower Tweaks mod + Looksmenu mod (this also applies to custom follower mods as well), so getting visual mods for companions is not really required at all (although you will of course want character enhancement mods to make your companions unique, such as Hair Mods, Body Texture Mods, Eye Mods etc etc), since you can decide how your companions look via loading your own custom looksmenu preset for the companion.

 

however with that said, if we are talking fully custom followers such as Heather Casdin, Darlene etc etc, i strongly recommend them, very well made followers.

 

Looksmenu absolutely requires F4SE, and as such the game must be launched via F4SE, every time (Not Fallout4.exe or any other method)

 

As for the issue, this is a known Looksmenu bug clicking on the clothes option causes an immediate CTD (i am going to assume you are using windows 10, instead of crashing on that it will freeze the game instead), see below for a workaround

 

CTD Workaround

Whilst in looksmenu, Open Console (by pressing the Tilde key ' ) and type Player.Unequipall

this will make your character completely naked, so you can now see exactly what the body tattoo mods will look like etc etc.

Heres a more quicker method that is ideal if you wish to use looksmenu qute a bit:

A More Permanent Solution

1. Go to your Fallout 4 Installation Folder - Where Fallout 4 Launcher Is

2. Inside that folder, create a new text document

3. inside the text document write this: Player.Unequipall

4. Save the text document as somthing easy that you will remember, for this example i will call my text document TEST

5. Now in Game, Open Console (by pressing the tilde key ' and Type: bat TEST

Everytime you write that console command it will completely Un-equip absolutely everything.

 

 

Note: my reply to your primary post is in a spoiler, to make the post not take up a lot of space, best way to read this reply is to read the spoiler first, then the bug fix.

[StormWolf01]

Heyas G4m3w1nn3r! Thanks for the reply! (Sorry if I misspelled ur screen name, that one throws my dyslexia into a tizzy!)

 

Ok, I'm glad to know that the freezing is due to a known issue, when I try to change clothes on the character. And upon mention of the console command, I DID think of creating a batch file to handle it. I really appreciate you going ahead and giving me the code for that, it really does save me time for not having to look it up. Thanks so much! (and for answering my unasked question of "how the heck do people show nude screenshots in the CC process?? LOL).

It's actually on a couple of machines. On both of them, the win10, and the win8.1 machine, they both completely freeze. So at least for my setups, they both result in the same type of behavior. (Just posting that, so that you or anybody else who reads this knows that the two OS's get the same kind of screw up).

------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Also, thanks very much for the amount of thought and time that it took to write up the response to my questions about the alternate bodies. I really appreciate that, and there's definitely some good info in there.

 

Let me rephrase one of my questions. Since I'm thinking about going with Janebod to start out into this area. The exampled mod of Cait uses what looks like a CBBE body, that installs a nif file into a custom folder. https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/27102

This mod doesn't list CBBE as a requirement. So, I'm thinking that the body for this mod includes all the assets needed to make it work, without having to install CBBE, and might be compatible with JaneBod. Maybe? The only thing I found in the comments section was a bunch of lore mongering, and a question about it being compatible with CBBE.

 

I will look into that unique npc's mod that you mentioned, that may help me out substantially, thanks!

 

Hmmmm. I'd forgotten about clothes and armor not automatically magnetizing to the same settings as the body. If you've got a preset made for the body, can you also inject that preset into the clothes manually, or do you have to manually completely set up the dialers for them?

I'm guessing this is where the lack of support for clothing items for JB may bite me in the rump, since most of them are set up with CBBE dials?

[G4M3W1NN3R]

you are correct that linked mod does include a female body for cait so as such you wont need CBBE for her, however their does not seem to be any textures included, so you may need a body texture mod for her her body base. as for her femalebody.nif it will technically be compatible with janebod in the sense that both your character and cait will be using different bodies, however that is as far as it goes.

 

conforming outfits via bodyslide by default will not effect cait at all, as bodyslide only applies to the primary female body.nif (located in the location below this), that will be your character. which will effectively make any outfit that you give cait, that has been conformed to the primary female body.nif (yours), will transform her body into your body, which will cause a visual bug, as both bodies will be applied to her, and her body will look terrible. the visual bug will be 2 bodies merged into 1, which is something you definitely dont want to see.

 

so the way you would do it, is copy your own femalebody.nif file from meshes/Actors/CharacterAssets folder, and place it somewhere safe, copy cait femalebody.nif in to said folder, as well as the included .hkx file from the mod into its proper bodyslide folder (Tools/Bodyslide/SliderPresets folder), then in bodyslide select Cait Preset from the drop downbox, then build all your outfits and armor for her, via Batch build, then once done, copy Cait femalebody.nif, file back into its proper location, then copy your femalebody.nif back in to the address mentioned a bit above. then do the same method again in bodyslide.

 

^^^ i believe that is how you do things with multiple femalebody nifs. however this is just an assumption. but i am pretty sure it is how you do it.

 

but i will admit, i dont know too much about unique player based mods, as i have never personally ever used them. so my knowledge on them mods is very limited.

 

but yea you can load that Preset (the Hard Cait.xml file) that is included with Cait's Mod, that file is for the bodyslide sliders. so her body proportions will already be set, which you can load into bodyslide.

 

as for unique NPC mods, highly recommend, they offer a lot of diversity with all NPCs in game very good mod, their is however an issue with using said mods, and that will be stutter upon NPC load, but if you have an SSD and Fallout 4 is installed on it, and you have a Decent Amount of Vram, then that stutter will be very minimal and not last long at all, for me it only a split second stutter, then perfectly fine after, a very small con for a massive pro mod :smile:

 

for me personally i can easily ignore that very small stutter. because i love diversity, and a split second is not long at all. this game badly needs diversity, Both Unique NPC and Unique Creatures greatly furfill that diversity, both mods made by the same guy. strongly recommend both, if you can live with a very short tiny bit of stutter every time new NPCs load. (however i am running complete 2k and 4k texture overhauls so that does not help the situation but even so, very minimal stutter very short, barely noticeable)