Fonkin

Kelymych, Thank you for a very comprehensive answer. Really nice to have great folks like you running about to help us newbs make informed decisions. This is great and current information.

Still haven't played Skyrim yet, having too much fund modding before I play. Thanks again to this wonderful community of modders for making Skyrim absolutely beautiful. In my wanderings, I came across this article and if I understand it correctly, this is a merged patch created in TES5Edit versus a Bashed Patch as instructed by the STEP project. It's totally possible I missed a step, I've gone through the entire process 3 times now and have found one thing I missed here or there along they way. If I missed it, my apologies for the post. If not, should I create a Merged Patch for the STEP install and if so, where would I place it? Or would it supersede the Bashed Patch created by following the STEP instructions?

So for those who might find this thread in the future, I discovered a few things. One of the biggest surprises for me is that RaceMenu (RM) presets look entirely different from their ECE counterparts. The blocky sharp angles in the RM presets I've used are smooth and photo realistic with ECE. From what I've read RM has taken the lead as the preferred mod and I'm not sure why as the mods I've found so far look better in ECE. Even things like selecting the same exact beard render differently from ECE to RM. The hair even looks finer and smoother with ECE as compared to RM. Yes, I find RaceMenu is easier to use with its cleaner UI, but I won't be spending a lot of time with either one once I get the preset I want. Seems to me that I should just go with ECE over RM to attain the look I want. Anyone know of any drawbacks?

Too bad he has to be like that, he's talented.

Ok, I've learned some thing, so please disregard trying to answer my above question, as it is nigh impossible. Without going into to a lot of detail, suffice it to say I am unable to reproduce those amazing presets such as this or this. The first one is crazy and look so realistic and it would seem like it should be easy to follow the directions and add the appropriate mods, but I'm certain the author is running other mods effecting lighting and skin textures. I attempted to reproduce this preset and it's pretty sad - I mean not even the skin or hair color was the same with the preset, I tried to approximate it. I finally got the neck and arm lines to blend better, but not even close to author's mod. The presets without a NIF file never look even close to the example. I still have no idea how using the preset slider bar relates to using it prior to hitting F9, maybe it was a throw back to a previous version of RACEMENU and you had to select a preset before hitting F9? It does''t seem to matter if I rename a 12.slot file to 0.slot and then follow the instructions - same result. What I do know is the screen shot examples require some special lighting and cinema effects with ENB (which I tried) and proper setup just like real photography, but come on. This can't be this hard!! Is it? Don't even get me start on the guy who made an amazing mod, didn't want to share it, charged for it and then threw a temper-tantrum (not sure about what - and don't care). At this point, I'm ready to pay someone to fly to my home and show me how to reproduce those amazing presets.

Happy New Year! (almost - couple more hours to go here in California) I'm going crazy trying to add a racemenu preset. I have slot files 0 - 12 located in F:\Skyrim Mods\Mod Organizer\mods\RaceMenu\SKSE\Plugins\CharGen\Presets I can press F9 to load them, but they don't look anything like what they're supposed to. Yes, I set the race and sex accordingly. What I have noticed is that the "Presets" slider in the ALL menu will only slide between 0 and 9. I thought having 0.slot - 12.slot would give me more presets. I also thought when I changed one of the x.slots with a different slot file, the face or something would be different. For example: The Janessa preset instructs me to slide the slider to 12 om the All menu tab, which I can't and then hit F9 (I assume from the Presets tab) to load the file the rest of the way. At least that's what I think it's telling me to do. I've scoured the net for the past 3 hours looking for a solution and can't figure this out. I'll even happily take a LMGTFY link. ;)

Greg, thank you for the history lesson, I like knowing stuff like that.

Oh, ok - sounds like I'll play around with that after I get this extended up and running. Just installed the STEP Compilation patch and it worked, yeah! Only 3 days to get to that step, lol. Found the mod, tried to install it, denied me and so I started reading... lol - pretty great guide so far. Took me a bit to understand what constituted core and extended, but I think I'm there. Now I gotta go learn Wrye Bash. Standby for a whole new set of questions. hehe

Oh, ok, so it must of originally been for Fallout before it was used for Skyrim. It's all coming together now. Thanks TechAngel85.

Nozzer66, thanks for pointing that out. TechAngel85, can you tell me which mod has the ash spawn? I looked in all the archives and didn't see any folder called ash spawn.

You called it, <faceplant>I should stop doing all this modding at 2am</faceplant> but I can't help myself, this modding for Skyrim is way to cool and I'm happy to say I'm new to Skyrim as well as modding it. Not to mention I'm missing work over it, well, missing isn't the right word. lol Thanks for putting up with the newb.

LOL - Thanks all, but I just want to know what it stands for? F.O.M.O.D. -- if anything at all. Google didn't turn up and results I could find for the acronym.

Thank you Akatosh, I'll dig around. :)

Ok, I know I'm a total newb, so here goes.... What is FOMOD? What does it stand for? I thought I was using MO. I'm guessing FOMOD is a scripting structure that MO uses?

Um I feel like I must be really dense here. I get that prompt too. However, I thought that was just to name the mod. Where's the manual option?

Installing AMidianBorn Book of Silence and it mentions towards the very bottom about a 4K version. There is an incorrect file path in Book of Silence which needs to be fixed: Notice:if the 4K variant is used these steps can be skipped. I checked around, but can't find any 4k versions of these group of mods. Does anyone have a link to the 4k versions?

I was reading the "In the second case, you are done!" - I saw that the file was cleaned up, but not in the directory I was expecting. I expected it to leave the cleaned up ESM file in the same one it started in, not the overwrite. Also, I only have SSD in my system, so I figured naturally I would go to option 2. Doh! But reading option one even more closely, I see that we're leaving the original in place and using the cleaned-up one as a mod through MO. I understand now. Guess I was getting to tired for my own good. Danke!

Yes, other mods open the manual dialog. I tried re-installing a few times, pretty sure I'm not triple clicking. :) I even tried right click install to make sure. Same results. Thanks for trying, just strange. Thanks for the tip, moved the ESP out of the subfolder into the root addon folder.

Thank you for the confirmation.

GrantSP, thank you for responding. Verified the file checksums match yours. My mo.ini and checksum screen shot are attached. ModOrganizer.ini

I'm stuck on this step to install the Content Addon. It says to "Choose "Manual" at the installation prompt", however, I never see the prompt. The mod just installs with no dialog boxes. I thought maybe the STEP instructions were out of date, but even the ReadMe file (AMB_ContentAddon_Installation directions.txt) within the mod says, "During installation, you can choose any of the texture options you want." Any guidance is greatly appreciated. Just to confirm, the filename I downloaded is: aMidianBorn - Content Addon-24909-1-9.7z Using Mod Organizer v1.3.11

I'm following the STEP manual and am now at better males. They mod author instructed me to modify the skyrim.ini and skryrim_default.ini to include the two BSA HighResTexturePacks. Googling this I discovered this is to prevent the HighResTexturePacks from overriding the mods. My concern is STEP didn't tell me to do this and it seems a lot of careful thought went into the guide. I'm wondering if anyone know definitively whether or not these should be added to the two ini files? Below are the two complete lines for the ini files: Original: sResourceArchiveList=Skyrim - Misc.bsa, Skyrim - Shaders.bsa, Skyrim - Textures.bsa, Skyrim - Interface.bsa, Skyrim - Animations.bsa, Skyrim - Meshes.bsa, Skyrim - Sounds.bsa Suggested: sResourceArchiveList=Skyrim - Misc.bsa, Skyrim - Shaders.bsa, Skyrim - Textures.bsa, Skyrim - Interface.bsa, Skyrim - Animations.bsa, Skyrim - Meshes.bsa, Skyrim - Sounds.bsa, HighResTexturePack01.bsa, HighResTexturePack02.bsa

Thank you kindly.

Thank you for the confirmation. Maybe one of our fine authors can update the STEP instructions to mention this as a possibility.

Following the guide from the very beginning and reading everything (5 hours in so far and have all the fixes in place) I ran into an interesting issue. Everytime I cleaned one of the ESM files, it saved the clean file in the ModOrganizer\overwrite folder. I was able to easily move it back to the skyrim data folder, but it took me some time for figure out why it kept moving. Maybe I have something misconfigured, but that I would pass this along in case the STEP instructions need updating or someone else has this issue.