There are so many mods for character models and face improvements...he

[Shotokanguy]

I'm in the process of modding Skyrim for the first time, and, obviously, one of the things I want to do is make characters look better.

 

It doesn't look as if there's a Project Beauty analogue for Skyrim, and it would make sense because Fallout 3's engine made much more messed up looking people. Still, I've looked at mods and there's clearly improvements to be made. So, a few things:

 

1. Is there one mod out there that covers a lot of things at once? I've seen a mod for detailed lips, detailed eyes, detailed whatever...but is there a mod that would cover pretty much everything about appearance?

 

2. So, how do the body mods work? I've never been interested in the nude stuff, but I do think my female Redguard warrior should look more athletic, and there's something just...kind of bad about the way the skin looks.

 

So if I were to install a body mod, does underwear disappear, and removing NPC armor or clothing leaves them naked? Are there any mods out there that can make NPC bodies look fairly different from each other? Maybe even use several different types of bodies?

 

3. How would these mods interact with each other? There are so many possible combinations, it doesn't seem like I can just take one mod that changes the face textures and another mod that changes the body and expect things to come out looking right.

 

My overall goal is simply for all characters to look more sensible, more realistic. I don't want things to look flawless and pretty or like a cartoon, just better. Thanks for any advice you guys can give me.

[Kabunouveau]

1.) There are a few mods that perform mass edits on faces, the most popular and all-encompassing of which would probably be Xenius Character Enhancement. Makes a lot of edits to faces to make some general adjustments. If you're looking for gender-specific ones, obviously there are going to be a lot aimed at female characters and far fewer for males, but personally I enjoy Better Females by Bella (I use the non-makeup version as some of these are quite caked) and Geonox's high res face maps for men (one of my favs - it makes a REALLY big difference IMO). You can use these and Xenius's mod together, though I would reccomend installing Xenius first and then following up with the other two and overwriting whatever from XCE they need to. There are also good mods for better looking beast races as well which I can reccomend if you're interested.

2.) I use an athletic body mod for females called Athletic Nude Women. It's not over the top but it's not too subtle to be unnoticeable, and despite the name, you actually can choose a version with underwear and it's compatible with vanilla body meshes.

3.) It's hard to say what mods are compatible with others since there are SO many, but generally speaking, if you keep your face mods gender-specific and stick to one for each, there shouldn't be issues. I reccomend XCE because it takes care of some of the smaller tweaks that the gender-specific mods sometimes don't cover. It seems we have similar tastes -- I enjoy realism and I don't indulge much in flowy amazonesque faces and perfect bodies, so I think you will find what you're looking for in these reccomendations.