Follower mod - skin color and physics

[Salticid]

In game, a follower's face looks one of the best I've ever seen for the game and very realistic, but...she has no physics. I couldn't want to delete her.

How do I add physics to her? I use CBPC/HDT-SMP/3BBB. It works fine on other followers, btw.

 

Another question. How can I change a follower mod's skin color?

 

FYI, I may want to avoid CK, if there is possible to change without it.

Edited January 31, 2020 by Salticid

[Salticid]

I almost forgot two more. How do I remove a warpaint from a follower mod and change eye color? I replaced (word).dds in data/textures/actors/character/(name of a follower)/eyes, it didn't work well in game.

Edited January 31, 2020 by Salticid

[anjenthedog]

Adding physics to static followers is a bit tricky. If you have the skills, you can use either BHUNP or CBBE (or one of it's variants) to recreate the body in bodyslide, then export the output to a dummy folder and apply the meshes to the follower by file replacement. Any further work to augment their textures is complicated.

 

I don't have a paint-by-numbers answer, but that's how I replaced a few follower bodies. It was a bit of a pain in the ___

 

ideally you find followers with bodyslide XML, but as you probably know, most of these ported LE followers are UNP and don't have any accompanying specification. And even most CBBE followers/companions don't come with bodyslides either so there's that too.

 

As a for instance, I worked on Sha. I know she was originally created on a SevnBase body, so that's the preset I used when working in bodyslide. I know that she's UNP, (that is, the Sha i originally installed was UNP-sevnbase...not sure why I chose that over the cbbe ver, but I did), so I used the BHUNP bodyslide Body to modify a sevenbase stock preset to fit as closely as I could by fiddling with the sliders.

 

That was difficult because I use CBBE normally, and I have no texture that appropriately displays BHUNP bodies in bodyslide, so there was a lot of guesswork (specifically with regards to her breasts, since the texture is applied wrong for UNP and the nipples are in the wrong positions, so contours in that area are more difficult to see, and so, to replicate (ie meshes...remember we're creating meshes. the idea is to reuse the original texture for the follower to avoid head vs torso discolorations, and when encountered in an LE port, retain any special tats or whatever)

 

I output *build) to a dummy folder using the "advanced" output path in bodyslide and make sure to use the physics, special or one of the new body styles offered by BHUNP, 3BBB, and 3BBB advanced in order to get movement.

 

Always check the build morphs checkbox. don't ask why (not sure I can give a correct answer") just do it.

 

The meshes were used to replace the meshes in her mesh spec folder by manual replacement

 

I had to blend the "special" regions into the texture files for her using Paint.net

 

It worked out pretty well, but it's not a perfect replication of the original Sha mod.

 

I also replaced Hikari and Elwin (both are UNP based). Both of those were far more difficult because I didn't know what their original preset specs were, so there was a ton of hit-and-miss in finding presets that would work (ie are naturally close enough to the form of the follower that the sliders will allow morphing one of the stock presets into a close approximation). I'm kinda ticked because I didn't really take any notes or save custom presets for any of these three, Just on-the-fly magic when I was "in the moment", so I'm not even sure anymore what I did. (ie ticked because I don't have any custom presets for future clothing/armor fitting.)

 

moral of the above paragraph? Save your work in custom presets before exiting the application! (I know better too. My player presets are all saved and ready to go, just none of the ones I created for my followers. - kicks self again for good measure)

 

One thing I'd recommend if you haven't already is to download as many bodyslide specs as you can find so you have a pallete of presets to work from.

 

I also have

CBBE

3BBB

3BBB Advanced

and BHUNP installed (CBP only in my case)

 

Having said that, what I wrote above is the general idea. Hope it helps.

 

Oh...one more tip. Take screen shots of the NPC you want to work on so you can compare contrast while working in bodyslide. It helps when proportioning various body parts/features (side, front, back, 3/4, and above, with targeted follower/companion nude/nevernude as the case may be)

 

sorry if I rambled. it's the best I can offer.

[Salticid]

@anjenthedog, you didn't ramble. You helped me to understand more how the system works. You're right it seems it's a pain in the _. Thank you. I appreciate.

 

How about eyes and warpaint? It looks like eyes and warpaint are similar to what you've explained, right? How about skin color? That, too?

[anjenthedog]

I'm afraid I have (few, or) no substantive answers for that. If they're baked into the NPC/follower, you could have a look at their textures to see if it is applied by some sort of overlay processing (there would be a dds file with flattened body elements AND another file of the same extension with the tat in it), but I believe that in most cases, you'll find they are applied directly to the main dds texture file for that NPC/follower.

 

For instance, I use Hikari as a follower. Her texture file has her tattoos embedded in the main skin texture. it's not an overlay.

 

Be patient and maybe someone else will provide a better answer.

 

in the meantime, you can check your follower(s) (or others) by looking in the

Program FIles (x86)/Steam/steamapps/common/Skyrim Special Edition/Data/texture folder. where you may find a folder with the name of your follower(s) OR go a couple of folders deeper to the /actors/character folder to find your follower/companion folder and look there.

 

The files of merit are either in the follower-named folder (ex: 0FollowerElwyn) or in the /Body folder within it, and the file of interest will be "femalebody_1.dds". View (preview) it using windows filemanager View >>extra large icons. If it has flattened body elements with tats/etc on it, them it's embedded and I have no idea how you'd remove that info.

 

it'd be instructive in either case to do this and help you understand things a bit better.

 

best wishes.

 

PS> that pita thing....after a while, if you are a persistent person, will become less complicated. it's more of a pita trying to explain than to do.