Alt Navetsea UNP Seamless (by Alt3rn1ty)

[DocClox]

That point is valid I suppose. Perhaps it is just my PERSONAL view (and therefore, not really important since each individual is entitled to do what they enjoy) but I find something a bit strange and immature (and ESPECIALLY LORE-BREAKING) about turning these games into Pornos. I mean, it takes place in a fictional middle-age fantasy world. Violence is obviously going to be part of the atmosphere. I mean, wars have always existed, but making the characters into supermodels and unrealistically jacked men....kinda hard for me (again, personal view) to take the game seriously with those types of changes. Also, as a 24 year old guy who (sorry, not trying to sound pretentious here) who gets laid on a pretty regular basis and watches porn pretty regularly too, it seems like a huge step back to "get off" to fake video game boobs. Just my two cents. Again, to each his own. I just PERSONALLY don't get it and I obviously don't think this stuff belongs anywhere near STEP (in the guide I mean, obviously they're welcome on the forums as far as I'm concerned)..  

 

Well, first and foremost, I'm definitely not arguing in favour of sexual content in STEP. I don't personally think that optional nudity would be a terrible thing, but then I'd be equally happy if STEP kept everyone's undies on at all times.

 

On the subject of immersion though ... my first Beth game was Fallout 3. I got out of the vault, found my way to the Springvale High School and got attached by raiders that I managed to dispatch. Then following long ingrained gaming instinct, I looted the bodies - to find that all these grubby raiders with their scruffy cobbled-together armour were wearing spotless brand new sports bras and undies. Now that was immersion breaking to my mind. 

 

I'll grant that violence is going to be a part of life in Skyrim, but presumably so is sex (or else there'd be no-one there to commit all the violence). And while I can certainly appreciate that many people aren't interested in aspect of the setting, for others it's omission is every bit as jarring.

 

Now this isn't to say that some of the models kicking around aren't unrealistic for the setting, because they surely are. And it isn't to say that some of the screenies kicking around out there aren't weird and freaky and completely out of place given the setting, because they surely are. But that doesn't mean that adult content can't be produced that respects the setting and the lore. I mean the island of Westeros isn't that dissimilar to Tamriel, and look at Game of Thrones - nothing there that probably wouldn't have really gone on, and nothing that wouldn't fit in Skyrim, really.

 

And like you say, personal opinion. :)

[EssArrBee]

Alright we've heard enough about your thoughts on body replacers. Let this thread be about the mod.

[DocClox]

That's fair. If anyone wants to argue the toss, I'll be happy to talk about it over in Banter Inn :)

[alt3rn1ty]

If I install the non-nude option from Exeter's UNP Armor meshes, does it mess up your textures?

 

I dont know, never used it. I would imagine the underwear mesh and underwear texture will just sit over the body texture .. As I am sure it would have to for Dimons own body texture, which this one replaces.

 

I think it should be fine.

[alt3rn1ty]

Am I the only one who's completely satisfied with the vanilla body shapes? Why would you want to make Skyrim look like a fantasy porno? If I want to watch porn, I'll watch a freaking porn with real human beings. I don't play Skyrim to get off....I don't understand this stuff. 

 

EDIT: Maybe I'm missing something. I apologize if I am. I just see all these mods with screenshots of naked girls and unrealistically jacked dudes. Do these mods have other features that are useful besides making people look like pornstars naked?

 

Vanilla Body shape is good for me too. As is the non glossy skin texture which looks a bit grubby.

 

Prometheus did a vanilla female body replacer which was similar in poly count to vanilla, and nude, and kept the grubby skin look of vanilla which for a while I thought was ideal .. Until you see them with no footwear on, aaagh vanilla paddles staring at you.

 

 

See my post #8 of this topic for my opinion, to summarise I consider this game setting to be barbaric, and cannot imagine the majority of the population especially out in the wilds being bothered about maintaining wearing and cleaning stinky underwear.

The underwear is just to make the game acceptable for a younger audience in the eyes of the world. And to me personally it is out of place.

 

So I chose the body shape of UNP as a preference because Navetsea did a not so glam textures which are rather good for the same meshes .. And there was a heap of support for Vanilla Clothing and Armour made to measure.

 

Thats basicly the premise for this mod, which just addresses the faults of Navetseas neck seam problems.

 

 

UNP and CBBE textures to me are too clean / glam, and dont fit my personal ideal look for the game, even Navetseas could do with being a bit grubbier to be honest, but I also dont want to go work on them more and possibly ruin that neck seam I have achieved.

 

 

What you make of it is your own opinion. I think some people complaining can be more deviant / messed up mentally than people who just fess up "yeah, I'm a bit wrong". At least they are honest about it, unlike some local religious leaders respected throughout our worlds communities which the Pope has had to apologise on behalf of recently. An apology saying "there will be sanctions". Ought to be castrations imho.

 

Do you consider nudists pornographic ?, or natural and beautiful ?, or even art as being pornographic ?.

I certainly do not regard this mod as turning the game into a porno.

To me its about as porno as a David Attenborough documentary on natives of our own world, which have been showing on family time TV for many years.

 

As with all these mods, if its not for you though, just dont use it.

 

I agree there is quite a lot of it that is blatantly about experimenting with sexuality, and the more visually real these games become the more attractive creating fantasy situations will become .. At least they are not targetting real people instead eh ?

[alt3rn1ty]

Damn, I did not know about this female armors thing. But hold on, these are meshes and so, they are not separated into female and male folders... does this mean that men wearing these armors will be using the UNP body?    OK, I know they probably won't but can anyone explain me how it works? I am not a modder so I have no clue these types of things. Are the meshes flagged to be used only by females or something? In Exeters' mod there are textures for bandits overwriting aMiddianborn as well as the Blades nif files, should I just hide these files or should I let them overwrite amb?

I have no idea how to respond.

 

We are all talking about a Female Body Mesh and Texture replacer

 

Are you talking about a particular Female Armour mod which you have not mentioned the name of .. Which conflicts with whatever amidianborn mod you have in mind ?

 

I have pointed at the mods which have FEMALE Armour and Clothing ( meshes and textures which have been created to fit this FEMALE body mesh and textures ) .. In the description of this mod on Nexus

 

 

Mostly, you will find in the games original meshes and textures, specific folders for male and female versions of just about everything ( there are occasional exceptions which both male and female use ) ..

 

But really if you want to resolve file overwriting conflicts, you really need to study the mods you are using which conflict in great detail as to what you want in your game .. There is no easy way really if you want to mix and match things together.

 

My installer was designed for people who just want an easy to install solution for female body meshes and textures. The rest is really up to yourself which armour and clothing sets you wish to install, I just gave what I feel was a good few recommendations .. You need to read their descriptions too and make your own mind up about what will mix well.

[phryxolydian]

Sorry alt, I wasn't referring to your mod not having female/male folders but the armors you link to (UNP Female Armors, UNP DG, UNP DB) which don't use separate female/male folders. I was joking when I said that males would be running around using the nif files for these armors if I use those mods. That's why I asked how it works, because I don't really know anything about Nifscope (I'm guessing) and if that is how the nifs are flagged to only be used by females.

 

aMiddianborn Book of Silence also has nif files for bladesarmorf_0 and bladesarmorf_1, as well as dds files for banditf and f_n, which I've kept for the time being instead of the ones used by UNP armors, solely because Khrajo is currently using my Blades armor haha. Now that I've written all these, I realize that the f at the end of the files very likely stands for female, right?   Sorry for wasting your time but congrats on the awesome work alt!

[alt3rn1ty]

I'll give you a run down of how things get loaded which may help a bit as background understanding ( and this is not going to be an exact representation of how the game loads files, just an understandable outline idea of it all ):

 

 

The game loads up any valid ESM ( Elder Scrolls Master ) and ESP ( Elder Scrolls Plugin ), and notes any associated BSA ( Bethesda Softworks Archive ( like zips but different format ) ) - BSAs have to have the same name as the plugin that requires them.

 

The masters and plugins set the scenario / world, and tell the game engine the resources path and names for all objects within that world.

 

Given a folder path and name for a resource, the game will look in associated BSAs first ( which it treats as a data folder within your data folder, a data folder extension if you like )

 

Additionally it will also look for the same file as a loose file, a replacer ( because it replaces the same folder path and filename in the BSA ), if a loose file not found the BSA compressed version of the same file is used

 

 

So the game has now loaded a mesh required for a particular object, the mesh can specify to the game to load further resources ( textures ), because the path and filename for its textures are part of the mesh data

 

And again the game will look inside BSAs and loose files for these textures.

 

 

Mod creators can make their own plugins, and have that plugin either pull in original game content ( use vanilla assets ), or make their own assets ( meshes etc ) .. And give those assets a unique folder path ( either within their own custom BSA or as loose files )

 

Additionally, their custom meshes can either pull in vanilla assets, or again use custom named ( non replacer ) assets in custom BSA / folder path name.

 

 

You are right in thinking files appended with an f are female, or you may get files in named male or female folders to distinguish them, or they may be used by either sex so do not need distinguishing.

 

What you need to study when mixing things up is ( logically taking the mod with the least amount of files so its less detective work ) .. Are the replacers. Custom files and folders are never going to conflict with vanilla content, so the plugin or mesh will always get its custom texture for example ( SMIM as an example has custom textures in a custom TexturesSMIM folder, which his high poly mesh replacers pull into the game when chosen instead of his non high poly meshes which just reference vanilla textures ).

Replacers like all of my mod files, and Exeters files, can also be replaced by other mod makers files which are themselves replacers .. I dont use amidianborn mods so dont know personally what is conflicting, but if they are also replacers then it is simply a case of whichever you installed last will overwrite any other replacer ( because they have the same path and filename ) .. And because they physically overwrote the other mods replacers they end up in game.

 

Installing Exeters files is IIRC a case of installing a loose meshes folder inside your data folder.

 

If amidianborn also installs a meshes folder, and it asks you to overwrite files, then if you say yes those files will be the ones you see in game.

 

Hopefully amidianborn does not use a mixture of all the above ..

 

 

Which would mean just as an hypothetical example :

 

You get a replacer amidianborn shirt ( showing parts of vanilla chest skin ), which was made to go with the vanilla trousers mesh ( not provided by amidianborn, so the game uses vanilla resources for this )

 

However

 

You are using a different skin texture, which does not match the vanilla skin of the shirt so you have a blatantly obvious neck seam mismatch

And you are using a custom trouser mesh and textures from the mod which did not have these files overwritten by amidianborn, so the result again is a mismatch with what you thought you would be getting from amidianborn

 

Probably none of that example applies in amidianborn ( as I said I dont use it so no idea ), but its just a possible example of the complications you can get with overlaying textures and meshes from different mods ..

 

 

Aaaand, the above is only considering one mesh and one texture per object .. When in reality there are multiple parts meshes per body ( body / hands / feet ), and multiple textures per part ( hand normal map / hand glow map perhaps on a custom race / hand diffuse ( colour ) map / hand specular map ) .. Maybe one mods replacers do not include a specular map for any / all parts of the model, but anothers does and you overwrote its files so the result is a completely different specular effect on the textures which looks nothing like the mod as shown by the author.

 

And only you can solve the installation you have made by understanding what you have done ( this is why a lot of more experienced modders do not like tools like Steam workshop and NMM making users believe the whole modding process is as simple as a couple of clicks .. Knowledge of every part of the games workings eventually becomes essential for everyone who wants to mod successfully. Knowledge also stops users going to modders and saying "you broke my setup", no, actually, the hands and head which caused the disaster belong to you.

 

 

This is why my description on nexus say this ...

 

 

 

This mod assumes you have no other loose mesh or texture files which affect female bodies or faces, to work correctly. It can be used with others, but thats down to how advanced you are with modding Skyrim. Also any mods which affect the same files but are packaged in a BSA, then my files will win being loose files, and override the look of that mod )

 

 

Anyway, generally if ALL your armour and clothing are said to be UNP compatible ( not just vanilla replacers ), and there are no conflicting files all should be well using them together, but as you can see from the above there is potential for many complications especially where there are partial conflicts, if you are not determined enough to chew out the conflicts to get your ideal setup, uninstall one mod or the other, and just to be sure re-install the loose files of the mod you want to keep installed to make sure any that were overwritten are put back in there after uninstalling the other mod ...

Also depends of course on how you installed them all, Manually ( pain in the proverbial keeping track of everything ), or using a Mod Manager.

Personally for my own use I make BAINs for Wrye Bash out of all the Armour and clothing meshes, with sub-packages of different types, so that I can determine file installation conflicts between mods and re-arrange exactly what sets of files and parts of mods I install ( I think Mod Organiser also has very granular control of individual files aswell, not sure I dont use it ), but I am not likely to go doing that for everyones mods out there which users will be also wanting .. Not enough lifetime :).

Edited May 5, 2014 by alt3rn1ty

[phryxolydian]

Thanks for your very detailed and informative post, alt. As well as for expanding my understanding of how modding works. I've been modding Skyrim for a while now so I do understand how mod managing should be, I've come a long way since using NMM and I too find it very strange how guys like Gopher still advocate and endorse this tool to his audience, making people believe it's as simple as click click and that's it. 

 

But, my real lack of understanding comes from not being a mod author myself, alt. I consider myself to be an experienced mod user but as I am not a texture artist, nor a script modder or any of that, then naturally my lack of knowledge comes from not using the tools mod authors use. Perhaps one day I'll have time and patience to educate myself with these tools but at the moment it's just not possible.

 

Thanks again for your effort put into giving a good and educated response. Cheers!

[alt3rn1ty]

:) NP, games are complicated and need a fair amount of study, so much so the modding hobby becomes more of an adventure than the game. Right Im off to take my better half out for a few hours before I start night shifts this time round.

[alt3rn1ty]

 

 

 

News : I will not be updating this mod for Skyrim SE, I do not personally use body mods anymore so have no interest in converting the textures to the new format ( although that only really applies to textures stored in BSAs, the new game may well have updated its basic textures and normal maps / skin / reflection maps and whatever else may be new to the game .. So the original Navatsea textures would need to be redone before I did the same tricks again on the neck seam problems between face and body textures = I dont think thats all going to happen )

 

This mod may well be compatible with Skyrim SE, installed as loose files as it is, but I will not be testing it.

 

 

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

 

 

For anyone using No More Ugly Bronze Shine by COTS

 

No need for that mods updated textures if you use Alt Navatsea UNP Seamless, I did my own variety of those ( they were not just a copy from that mod, I used the same idea, but gave a little warm red tinge to the black colour for my set of textures which works better with the neck seam blending, my textures were also a different dds format to the originals, and were made a little more optimal in the sizing department ( with different sizes between different options for my mod and the assumed VRAM use ) )

 

So you do not need to install what seems to be a newer update by COTS, they would be less well matched to all the other texture layers in this body mod

Edited October 18, 2016 by alt3rn1ty

[alt3rn1ty]

 

 

 

 

News : I will not be updating this mod for Skyrim SE

 

Hmm, I changed my mind apparently :) ..

 

Its now up on Skyrim SE Nexus https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/11879/?

[alt3rn1ty]

News : There is now a new version 6 for Skyrim SE, its meshes have been converted and textures redone in BC7 format, the new SE version now also includes all of Shiva182's UNP Body compatible Armour and Clothing meshes, with sets for UNP / B2 or Skinny meshes, all included in the installer. New Skyrim SE version is on this Nexus page. Unfortunately none of that can be back ported to Skyrim LE