Vampire Race Help

[Lunarbabe]

Hi, so I've been scouring the internet for information on how to make my own vampire race and I can't really find anything specific. It's all too vague or not exactly what I'm looking for. Who knows? Maybe I'm just not searching correctly. Anyway, I though I'd save myself more headache and just post for help.

 

Basically, I've never modded anything a day in my life. So I'm super new! Aaaand I'm one of those people who need everything taught to me super specific and step by step or my tiny brain can't comprehend. lol

 

If anyone can link their best resources and fully detailed tutorials, that would be super appreciated! I'm looking specifically for enabling the custom race to already have vampirism and scripting help. Also, sources for good vampire meshes and textures would be great to. I'm not sure I'd be able to create my own yet.

 

I have a character I created for a story of mine that I would like to implement into the game and the normal vampirism mechanics for Oblivion just aren't cutting it for me. (:

 

 

 

Thanks to anyone who takes their time to help me(:

I've been wanting to step into the world of modding forever and for some reason this has been the turning point!

 

It's been a bit overwhelming D;

[Pellape]

Step by step turorials are very nice and there are loads of them for all TES games. My best source is the CS WIKI, construction Set Wiki that you will also get to if you push F1 inside CS.

 

I do know the feeling of succeeding to start CS at all for the first time and when I did that 2004, I closed it again as I understood nada. It felt like I was hit with a mace right in the face.

 

The best way to learn CS is to make the Tutorial dungeon from the WIKI and maybe your own house before you start with races maybe? I did start with a dungeon 2004 and completed it 2020 for Morrowind, well remade it and made it a bit better. Well i feel I got all time in the world really... :D

 

Well if you only wanna make a race, then go direct to that section in the WIKI but what ye wanna do? New textures? A new body or just a new race with the standard Vampire as a base? COBL do have some extra races included but I do not know if they included Vampires... COBL is so damn good and provides so many basic things anyway so...

 

The Wiki is both pedagic and not pedagogic, it depends what type of page you are looking at. The tutorials are very good and the fact pages are not pedagogic so do not start with them as a new modderas as then it is like trying to read greek or latin... When you feel comfortable with CS, then that fact pages are very good.

Edited December 8, 2020 by Pellape

[Lunarbabe]

Thank you for the reply!

 

Yeah, I'm more of a character creator, stuff like houses and objects don't interest me too much. I'm always more interested in modding characters and their characteristics like eyes, hair, etc. May try some other stuff eventually, but for now I want to stick to creating a new player character. (:

 

So to be clear on what I'm wanting to do is, yes, basically just a new race that is a vampire. But I wanna do my own stuff to it, set different rules for it. Like for example, making it to where the sun doesn't bother them, npc still being able to talk to them, etc.. The way I think of Vampires is very different from how Oblivion does them. Also, my character I wanna base it off of was born as a Vampire, not bitten ;p So, I want to make it to where I can start the game as an already established Vampire character.

 

And I've checked out other Vampire race mods, but the way they have them isn't what I'm wanting or envision my Vampires.

 

I'm already following a CS Basic Race tutorial, but it doesn't teach how to make it a Vampire. It's just teaching the basics using a woodelf copy. It's going very well! I didn't even follow it totally exact, I used different hair meshes and eye meshes from what they used and it's worked just fine so far, so using CS is pretty easy for me. I just need to figure out how to give it the Vampire stuff, which is what I can't find information on :/

 

I'm trying to be clear as possible by what I mean, but if there's any confusion, I apologize!

Edited December 8, 2020 by Lunarbabe

[Pellape]

Well you did came further then I had expected :D As I ws ready to make a basic tutorial myself. So what makes a vampire a vampire... It is a decease so I guess you need to add it on your race from start.

 

Sidenote: Also be sure to load Blockhead when you edit your race if you are using blockhead in game...

 

I took a look at a Vampire in CS and saw this list of spells at it so add at least the first one to your race, just drag and drop from the spell list. You can add any spells, powers or whatever to it that you want it to have from the start.

 

 

I hope this will help :) And I also hope it works.

 

What you could do if you want later is to make a dungeon, a vampire lair with your race in it and you can also make that dungeon to your home of course.... ;) Just an idea that popped up in my mind...

 

[DrakeTheDragon]

Hmm, the biggest problem likely is, vampirism in this game is completely and utterly hardcoded, with almost no technical means for a mod to interfere.

 

Vampirism is a boolean flag, either you're a vampire or you're not a vampire. Being a vampire, by game engine, comes with all effects as a whole, good as well as bad, especially the visually unpleasing to many face deformation effects.

There's a special vampire "race" inside the CS, probably a Breton or Imperial human one. When an actor has vampirism the game will use this race as a morph target between this and the normal race, according to the level of vampirism the actor has. Where well sated, at level 100, makes him/her look almost completely normal and the hungrier he/she gets the more vampiric the shape. (Vampire modding experts correct me, if wrong!)

 

This is already causing a very odd situation with beast races, as you might imagine. A morph between an Argonian or Khajiit and a human vampire face is anything but looking right, especially with human eyes!

And you also cannot define vampire fangs or eyes separately per race, not even for beasts.

 

That's why most vampire mods instead incorporate a custom race, that does "look&feel" like a vampire but isn't "technically" one at all. They also introduce cooler features, abilities and the like. However, not using the game's hardcoded system also removes the face shape changing with vampirism level effect some still want to keep.

So it depends on what it is you want your custom vampire race to have, whether you go the completely custom race "faked" vampirism route, or try to somehow work against the game's hardcoded vampirism framework still. Quite some vampire mods I know went that way, too, like turning around the face changing rules, tweaking this or that feature, etc.

 

I'm not really in the know though what all can or cannot be done with this.

[Lunarbabe]

Ahhh, well thank you! I'll keep what you've said in mind and hopefully I can figure out a way to do what I want to do with my race. If not, guess I'll just stick with making a normal elf or something xD

 

For now I'll definitely try the way Pellape has shown me and see how it goes.

It's more for personal use, I don't plan on releasing it at all. So maybe I can contact certain vampire modders to use their race as a base for my own and just change some features. I'm not sure how that works, but I guess I can at least try.

 

Also, I do have blockhead, but CS still has a head that tells me to install blockhead, so I'm not sure what I've done wrong. It works in game with a mod I needed it for. Just not CS apparently.

Edited December 8, 2020 by Lunarbabe

[Pellape]

Nice DrakeTheDragon. I did not know anything about what you described as I never made any vampire myself.

 

I was wrong about Blockhead as it is a DLL and cannot be used in CS I think... It is OBSE based and I do start CS with OBSE from a shortcut...

"c:\Oblivion\obse_loader.exe" -editor

That will load CS with OBSE but add your path to where you have your oblivion in that shortcut.

 

I am sure though I did had Blockh... Wait, OCO2. :D I loaded OCO2 when I created my char, remade the player char before I started a new game... :wink: So if you use OCO2, load it in CS but do not activate it as otherwise your race will get added to it...

Edited December 8, 2020 by Pellape

[Lunarbabe]

Okai, yes, I use OCO2. I couldn't figure out how to load CS with OBSE, but thank you, I'll try that! I really wanna get this working. So hopefully there's something I can do. I don't want it to be a disease, just something my character was born with, minus all the weird negatives Oblivion gives them lol :p

[Lunarbabe]

Well. I think I figured out a way to do this. Kinda. I don't know if the NPCs will acknowledge the fact that my character is a vampire. But I might have thought of a way to make a pseudo vampire, by just making my own spells and adding them to give the attributes of a vampire. Not exactly what I wanted but seems to be my only solution.

 

With all these vampire race mods out there, it's really hard to believe that I can't find any clear information on how they do it xD Or I'm just not very good at finding it :huh:

 

I noticed that with Xenius Race Compilation that the daywalker race, is basically it's just a vanilla race, enhanced with different meshes/textures and with custom spells giving them powers of a vampire. Rather than them having the actual oblivion vampire scripting. So maybe, I'll do just that for my own, but of course change it up a bit, I don't want to make a clone and take from the mod, of course.

[Striker879]

When looking at other's work for hints how they solved different problems I find TES4Edit an invaluable tool. Open up the ESP's tree in the left panel and keep opening all the different branches (edits made by the other author) and you can discover much (scripts is about the only thing that won't show).