1.0 Main File - Initial release. 1.0 Optional File - Added Fine clothes. 1.1 Optional File - Added a Skychild replacement .esp, let it overwrite or place it below Skychild. I only changed a M to a F in one armor record, not worth a patch or adding an extra .esp to everyone's loadorder. It stops the females from using the male fine boots that clip thru the dress, and reverts the TKAA default female shoe that worrks best with a long dress. 1.11 Main File - Removed the pouch from the Merchant Dress. 1.13 Main File - Restored the Normal map on the Merchant Dress, That I somehow broke Removing the pouch. 1.0 Optional File - Added Skychild - TKAA Revamp, My take on the on TKAA dresses, just merge it into main file.
Since I can't post at original mod, may I ask question about what may cause black face bug? I checked it in XEdit and mod organizer and can't find any conflicts.
The "black Face Bug" is caused by a character's assets not matching their records. Their could be alot of reasons why they don't match.
The first thing I check, like you did, if there is any conflicts with the .esp's. The .esp that you want to win must be loaded last. If you are comfortable enough with xedit you can delete NPC from the .esp(s) you don't want to win, but it will work just fine if you don't. I remove them to cut down on possable conflicts, it lets the .esp be more flexable as to where they can be placed in the loadorder, and to reduce redundant or unused records the game as to sift thru to free up alittle performance.
Other conflicts with the .esp are mods changing other things about the NPC loading after, things like AI packages, spells, weapons, armor or dialouge controls like in follower mods. 99% of the time these kinds of mods make their changes based off the NPC's vanilla apperance. The NPC apperance mod rarely includes the changes from those mods. So a simple patch is needed to forward the changes from both mods or you need to do it yourself. Alot of time patches that forward records for NPCs will include loose head meshes and facetints to get around loadorder restrictions or help noob modders avoid blackface, but providing loose files too someone who doesn't know how to use them or conflict resove them, ends up causing blackface more often than it help prevent it, so it's something to be aware of.
Next you have to make sure the assets that .esp needs are also loading last. Most NPC's overhauls just have a head mesh and a face tint texture but could have more. Same rules apply, Loading the right one last is fine, but deleting the conflicting ones is best.
Conflicting assets will have the same names but could have vastly different contents. A mesh could have completly diferent head parts, diferent names on those parts, or a different nubmer of parts.
Face tints are just textures, they sometimes can be wrong and still work(other than looking funny). The only critical thing with face tints is the QNAM (base RGB values of the texture) must match that NPC records in the .esp.
Example: SkyChild's Lars Battleborn has a QNAM lighting value of 221,221,221(the lightest skin tone that still looks human). Any face tint from any NPC would work in it's place as long as the textures base color has a red value of 221, a blue value of 221, and a green value of 221. In vanilla there are 5 to 7 "set" skin tones per race making it easy to swap facetints between NPCs that use the same skintone. With custom NPCs the skintones can be whatever the author wants, making the included facetints extreamly important.
Sometimes the assets can be right, but are in the wrong folders, have a grammatiacl error, or corrupt from a bad download. The first 2 is caught when everyone downloading the mod complains that it isn't working and the mod author has to fixes it. The last one only happens to one in a few thousand and only that person can fix it by re-downloading.
The last possability is a bad mod. Sometimes mod authors make mistakes packaging up thousands of assets and records that make up the mod and miss a few things. I use NPC overhauls for Bruma and Wyrmstooth, both include main NPCs that you need to talk to to start those expantions walking around Whiterun with backface, and to this day has never been fixed.
I noticed the guy to start Wyrmstooth face was darker than his hands so I looked in xedit and found he is listed as a imperial, has a dark skin tone like a redguard and uses a breton forsworn tated facetint?? I got the RGB values from his facetint and put those values into the .esp and it fixed the blackface, but it still felt off... Imperials can have a pretty dark skintone but the forswon tatoo didn't feel right, pair up against noble fine clothes, so I grabbed a lighter skintone, more normal looking facetint from another NPC, got the RGB values and put those in the .esp, now he has a lighter skintone and a clean face that matches his voice and clothes.
Bruma adds a tavern worker that travels to whiterun from time to time, with the NPC overhaul she had really bad blackface. Looked in xedit couldn't find a single issue, checked her facetint against QNAM records and they were fine. The problem was in her head mesh, either one of her head parts is named wrong or isn't registered in the .esp. Instead of spending hours trying to troubleshoot the problem, I just deleted her from the NPC overhaul, deleted her head mesh, letting her return to a vanilla Bruma NPC. I did keep her better quality facetint from the NPC overhaul so she would look alittle better than a vanilla NPC though.
Thank you for answering, I think I found the problem, as per the original mod's page:
Dark heads, horse face, scary monster kids - You have a conflict with another child replacer. Make sure that you completely remove any mods that replace the child npc forms and/or have installed loose files that replace the default kids.
This can come from unlikely sources. For example the mod "Cleaned Skyrim SE Textures" includes loose files that overwrite tint masks for kids. This CANNOT be patched. If you want to use that mod, you need to delete these loose files. Why they are even included in the bsa version of the mod (where they are already included), is a question for the ages.This can come from unlikely sources. For example the mod "Cleaned Skyrim SE Textures" includes loose files that overwrite tint masks for kids. This CANNOT be patched. If you want to use that mod, you need to delete these loose files. Why they are even included in the bsa version of the mod (where they are already included), is a question for the ages.
In my case Cleaned Skyrim SE Textures were indeed the culprit. Unfortunately original mod author didn't name the files which need to be manually deleted from Cleaned Skyrim SE Textures (and other mods which can cause similar problems) for Skychild to work, do you know them by any chance?
The facetint files are in the vanilla bsa's, skyrim cleaned textures(and/or other mod) must also have them in either a bsa or loose files. (overwritting them)
bsa vs bsa is a loadorder issue, if Skychild was the only mod that has them in a bsa, it would win because all mods load last(after all vanilla game bsa's).
bsa vs loose files , the loose files always win no matter the load order, overwritting without showing a conflict in mod managers.
This is what the original mod says is the problem and why they seem to not like other mods using loose files. But as I mentioned, loose files are used for the greater good of making sure mods and patches get their assets forworded to avoid blackface.
When unwanted loose files are overwritting wanted loose files, it is a simple load order issue, just like with bsa vs bsa.
Just check the conflicts tab in your mod manager and look for files conflicting with the original mods files( by opening up the file tree on the original mods download page to compare) Sometimes the contents are unavaliable or won't load(seems to be a site issue recently).
In this case Skychild is 100% packaged in a bsa. If the suspected issue was with another bsa you would just try moving Skychild to the last position in yor loadorder and see if the problem is fixed. If the problem remains your looking for a loose file conflict. The best way to track down the files that could be causing the issueis to unpack the SkyChild's bsa.
Once a conflict resolution rises to the level of unpacking an effected mods bsa, the same loose files which are causing the issue, become your best friend and the easy solution/fix to the problem.
Since no conflicts show in your mod manager with SkyChild , and you suspect Skyrim Cleaned textures to be the issue(but there could be more), you are forced to unpack Skychilds bsa (making them loose files). In unpacking the bsa you have 2 options:
1- unpack the bsa into same folder that contains it. Now that the loose files are in the original mods folders, a simple refreash of your mod manager will let the conflicting files show up in the conflict tab. Delete the unwanted conflicting files from other mod(s) and aftwards all the loose files you unpacked into the SkyChild folder.
This is the cleanest/most proper way because you are targeting unwanted files for removal. The end results, the original problem files are gone and no file were added to your loadorder.
2- after unpacking Skychilds bsa, delete the original bsa instead. This makes all the assets, "loose files", makeing them win any conflict with any bsa. Loose file conflicts return to a simple load order issue(the one loaded last wins) and can be seen and reported by your mod manager.
This way gets to the same end results of the first meathod because your not adding any new files (just changing the way the are packaged so mod managers can handle/report the conflicts better) which lets you see the conflicting file for easy removal. When the conflicting files are removed , the conflicts with SkyChild's loose files will go away also. If you install another mod in the future that touches the kids, packed in a bsa, those files becomes irelevant(SkyChilds loose files always wins). If you install a new mod with loose files your mod manager will report it, letting you choose which file wins(thru loadorder placement or removing the unwated files).
This meathod seems like it's all pros over the other one, but has a few slight con offsetting it a bit. The loose files are slightly bigger and have to load one at a time. The ammount this effects has depends on 2 things, the size of your loadorder, and your systems performance.
- slightly bigger file size = more disk space con - The files take up more disk space pro - You/mod manager can see the files conflicts so you can delete redundant/unwated/conflicting files(saving disk space offsetting the cons)
- loose files load seperatly = slower con - loose file are slightly larger so they will by nature take slightly longer to load useing more bandwith traveling thru your system(no way around this fact) - each loose file has to be called in when needed, with Skychilds bsa installed, the entire bsa gets loaded into RAM and all it's assets are avalabe to the system, weather its one child on screen or every child in the game, the loading will always take as long as it takes to load the entire bsa.
With loose files, when you come across a child the system has to call in the head mesh, body mesh, hands mesh, feet mesh, body texture, hand textures, face textures, mouth textures, eyes textures, hair textures, etc into RAM, using bandwith making all theese calls. If you come across another child some of the assets which are shared are already in RAM and can be used imediatly, but the new child will have a different head mesh, different eye and hair textures which need to be called in. The game has to do this thousands of times every second pulling in assets from evey mod you have installed anyway. Adding to the number, by making a singe call for every singe asset can use up bandwith slowing the whole game down.
pro - since there is only a few children in each town, loading just the files you need, can be faster. Making 30 really fast calls uses less bandwith than loading in an entire bsa containing hundreds of unused assets. If your in Dawnstar that only has one male child, how can it be faster or use less RAM/Vram loading in every asset for every child in the game???? This can cause the system to stutter as it loads in a much bigger bsa instead of just the files needed for just one child. The larger the bsa the bigger the stutter. - with thousands of mods installed or where you are pushing your system to the limit(weak or overloaded CPU, maxed out system RAM, maxed out Vram or congested data pipelines) loading just the files needed, to create an image on screen, for the things in one area, will always be more efficient than loading in thousands of unused assets. In these conditions where you hit a limit of the system, slow downs will happen either way, but being in Dawnstar loading in 50 bsa's, one bsa for all the assets for every child in the game, multipal bsa's for hundreads of NPCs from all over the map, multipal bsa's making changes to Dawnstar including assets and changes to other areas not currently loaded, loading and unpacking huge texture bsa's to get just a few Dawnstar only textures never really made a good argunemt for the use of bsa's to me. Older systems with limited Ram/Vram that could make better use of bsa's smaller size usally suffer from stuttering as they get stuck in an infinate loop of loading them into RAM, unpacking all the assets, only to purge most of them to make room so they can unpack the next one, and performance/playablity suffers as the data transfer pipelines get maxxed out. If this gets too extreame and assets aren't avalable when needed, the system waits, causing a stutter, if it waits too long the engine can freeze or crash. - unpacking a bsa(with some mods) make them not require a blank .esp file to load the assets anymore. Your mod manager just loads the assets into your games folders on startup, instead of loading a bsa and an esp, just to tell the game to load the bsa, this never made(and still doesn't) make sense to me. Load more stuff so you don't need to load as much stuff??????
I currently have 1296 mods in my loadorder, and the only bsa's I have are the vanilla game and all the creation club ones on my steam drive in the game install folder, I don't have a single bsa in my MO2 install folder on my mod drive. I even keep unpacked copies of all the vanilla game bsa's, loaded in as a loose file mod. WHY?? because of problems like this, I hate hidden files controlled by programs nobody knows what they do or how they do it. I hate relying 20 different programs just to get an clue of whats going on, when a mod manager should be all that is needed to use mods. That and the fact that with modern systems, one cpu core gets hammered rendering a billion polygons per frame(like with every game ever), and the other 3 to 63 core are idling handleing background task(like loading assets being called in)or completly parked. With the power of modern graphics cards containing 20 to 50 times the pixle pushers(cores) and 8 to 24 time the Vram that the original game was desined to use, they need 1000+ mods with some 4K and 8K textures, just to make them not idle, and get your money worth out of them. Modern Software like community shaders bypassing the games ancient shaders and replacing them with the latest direct X has to offer. 1 TB PCIe 5.0 drives able to push out above 10,000 Mb per second for less than $100, and 16 Gb of Ram running at 3200Mt+ per second for less than $50. I can't get my my CPU above 20% or my graphics card above 30%. My system uses 16Gb of Ram at the desktop, but that's because I have 64Gb, and it doesn't ever go over 20Gb running Skyrim with all my mods. I spent an ungodly amount of money or a GPU with 24Gb of Vram which is a total waste for skyrim, as I can't make it use more than 16Gb. The simple truth is, we just don't need all the complexity and headache that these slight mico optiomizations bring , when the average potato PC can power thu this ancient game with ease.
This is the contents of my unpacked Skychild bsa , facetints textures only because that more than likely your issue. (I'm still using version 2.0 but they should be the same incase you don't want to unpack the bsa)
Thank you for detailed answering. I am 99% sure that Cleaned Textures are guilty because I had previously made Skychild load last and I still had problem, but as soon as I removed Cleaned Textures I solved it. I suspect Cleaned Textures may also be causing some other graphical issues with NPC-s, I'll have to test it.
If it is causing issues with more NPCs than just SkyChild just delete the entire facetint folder out of it...... cleaned facetints offer little to no benifits looks wise. I usally run any mods added facetints thru cathedral asset optimizer to compress them for smaller file sizes and quicker loading if no higher quality ones are avalible. For better looking NPCs you need higher resolution facetints made with better assets. I always start a new loadorder with this mod as a base for NPCs:
If I remember right there are no children included in it so you shouldn't have issues with SkyChild, and you can choose loose files or bsa to avoid conflicts with other mods. Just delete the entire facetint folder from the cleaned texture mod, Install the bsa version of this and place it above all NPC mods, should be conflict free like that.
thanks, this is nice for the future. but as of right now, i use still TKAA and immersive outfits https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/130672 plays well together
Good to know, so no neck/wrist/ankle gaps then.......nice might play around with it a bit.
I really like how that mod uses SPID to distribute the outfits, but some of the outfits are way too fancy for my liking and from the screenshots it looks like some outfits may be suffering from too low res textures.
Maybe when I get the time I can make me a custom .ini for it, to get ride of the outfits I don't like and make it more suited to my game.
i have vanilla kids from other mods which have no patch (or at least i did not install one), yes they have a blue body underneath the clothes,but i don't mind, can barely see it But sso far no problems with TKAA, so probably neither with SkyChild
To fix the body you need to open up the clothes meshes and point the body parts to the textures of your child mod.
Another way to do it would be, put renamed copies of your child mods body textures into the folder structure of the clothes your tring to fix.
TKAA,SkyChild,RS Children are all just modified UNP adult female bodies. They all use UNP textures just in a different folder stucture. If I remember right RS Children male and female, TKAA males, and SkyChild males all use slightly edited (removed boobs) UNP Bijin Textures. I think the females use Leyenda Skin.
SkyChild is eactly the same as TKAA, only differeance is the HP head. They withstand the extreame morphs needed to make the adult heads look like children, alot better than the older low poly head.
You can use Immersive Outfits - RS Children Edition SPID with Skychild, it has no dependencies so you can just install it for the oufits (but not all outfits work since some are part of RS Children i think so missing textures > invisible body!?)
Use ESP explorer or console to get the outfits then use Ring of Fashion designer to change the outfits of your Skychild adopted children.
NPC Clothes Changer and Maintainer SSE : https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/50066?tab=files
Since comments are disabled on their page, I'll post here, I hope thats no issue to anyone. Has anyone had luck loading the tintmasks from Bethesda archive extractor? They come out corrupted for me. I want to remove the make up, seems odd putting lip gloss and eye liner make up on children tghat are probably like 8-10 years old, I'm wondering if they are the same tintmasks as TKAA which doesn't have make up as far as I'm aware, I've also been making the kids bigger by adjusting the height to 1.15. and I'm going through the meshes and seeing if I can increase their head size without causing seams. IDK as a parent myself, these kids seem miniature
The tintmask from TKAA and SkyChild are the same with some differences and "should" "mostly" work. The thing that will determine if the child gets the balck face bug or not is the RGB value of the QNAM - textuture lighting. You can use any facetint from any NPC as long as the values match exactly, without editing them in SSEEdit.
ex. Lars battle-born and Lucia both have a QNAM = 221,221,221 so they can swap with eachother without any edits.
The way I check a textures QNAM value (which is the textures base color). I open up the facegen texture in Paint.net and select the color picker tool, open up the color wheel, than click one of the outermost corners, and get the RGB values from it, than double check those values in the other 3 corners.
As far as the BSA being unpacked, mine all unpacked fine, but I didn't do it manually myself thru B.A.E. I have ModOrganizer2 set to automatically unpack them. It uses B.A.E to do it, which is included with it, so I'm not sure why you would be having trouble.
Maybe you can try Cathedral Assets Opimizer, it has a BSA extract funtion.
I’m a big fan on TKAA. I wasn’t planning on switching, but I kind of messed up my TKAA. I always would adopt the two rugrats that he added in Morthal and in the Dawnstar’s inn. I changed their names and couldn’t remember the original names now. I tried changing their outfits and somehow destroyed my game for these two kids. I removed all of my TKAA content. I tried reinstalling and going back into my texture and mesh folders. No matter what I did, my kids looked like freaks with big heads and bad hair.
I removed the TKAA mods and cleaned my saves in resaver. It looks like I’m okay. Skychild works and seems to be good. I like the models, but not the clothes. I also don’t like how big the girl are. I like having little squirts around the house. Your mod addresses this with the kids in the main game and dlcs. I can live with the modded girls looking older. You’ve done a really good thing here. I’m goin to give this a go this weekend.
Thank's, I really do think SkyChild is the best child mod. My second choice would be Realistic RS children(some really cute kids in that mod) but installing the aging RS Children as a base, than 10 other mods on top of it, and hunting down patches from 20 differnt mod authors(that may or may not be for the Realistic RS Children) is getting exhausting. One bad Mod in the chain, and it all comes crashing down.
I just want one main mod with patches for the mods I use from a few trusted authrors, to keep things consistant. Not 20 or more .esps for what are essentially set decorations!
I always hated how the standard kid dresses clipped so badly with the body, especially noticeable when you see them running around town or using the play on the floor idle. Not entirely happy with the solution I came up with, but it's all I could think of. The alternative would be to convert the dresses to smp, but I don't have a clue how that stuff works.
For me the short dresses make the torso too short and the legs too long. The way the short dress is bulged out to not clipp with the lower body make the children look "big bottomed" and much older.
Could you cut the dresses around the knees,and keep them closed bottomed, like most of the bandit, hide, and impeial armors. With the longer dress the torso won't look so short. The dresses would be attached higher up on the legs so they wouldn't need streach so much. I tried messing around with it in outfit studio(which I suck at) but I don't know how to work meshes like that, and I'm not sure how to partion off the parts of the legs that would be showing and attach them to the dresses, I always break the animations, weightings, or something.
I may play around with that, I'm also considering reverting to the old body. Or maybe have two body types, so some kids are slim and others are chunkier. IIRC one of the old original TKAA version had that setup. I look at Lucia sitting on the bench now and she seems really bottom heavy, as in really well fed lol
Ok so I Added a NiAlpha Property to the merchant dresses. Added alpha channel to a renamed copy of its texture. I removed the bottom part of the dress texture just below the knee. I removed the partitioned body and pasted in the full body (clipping in a few places). Loaded it into the game and the movement is great, the dress streaches at the bottom a bit, but the weight painting can handle it. It looks very promising!!! I added screenshots of my testing in the picture section.
yeah if I can just remember how to work outfit studio...............I'm so noob with it, I don't even know what question to ask.
I want to cut out the parts of the body that clip thru the dress during animations, or atleast make them invisible(add alpha). But I cant figure it out.
Mask off the parts you want to retain, then go to Tool, Inverse Mask, then Shape, Delete Vertices. The UNMASKED parts will be deleted, so double check this, as it's NOT reversible
Thanks, I'll give that a try. I always found it odd you masked off the part you wanted to keep. I always did it in reverse , usally making a mistake, having to start over. Never thought of the invert funtion even though I use it in image editing software all the time... just wish it had a simple undo button like all image software does.
You and me both. Spent several hours editing a dress. Mask the underlying body to delete parts that are covered. Hit delete vertices - the dress I just spent hours editing disappears, because I had THAT selected instead of the body. My wail of anguish may have woken some dead people
yeap, its all the toggeling between wireframe, texture , and hiding mesh that screws me everytime. I find it usefull to edit them in small steps. Right now I'm working on torsof02.nif , so I create a folder on my desktop called that. Than every few minutes I save to it renaming the nif each time, torsof01.nif, torsof02.nif, torsof03.nif, torsof04.nif, etc. That way when I do mess up I don't lose alot of time, or if I change my mind, I can reload the one before the change I want to undo. When I want to test it out in game, I drag a copy of my lastest version into my test mod and manually rename it.
Thanks, let me know if there is anything else you would like changed or broken. I made it real quick, loaded it into my game to make sure it would work, and it did so I uploaded it incase anyone felt the same as I did.
I taught myself thru trial and error.......breaking alot of stuff...........than fixing it If you really want to learn, my advice:
First thing - Learn the Skyrim file structure, mostly the meshes and texture folders(70-80% of mods happen in there) To see them download BSA extractor and extract all the .bsa files in the "C:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Skyrim Special Edition\Data" folder. I personally unpack all of them into a folder called "vanilla" on my desktop, compress the folder with 7-zip, than drag the file into Mod Orginizer 2, install it as a mod, and place it at the top of my loadorder. This does a few things for me, 1 - I have a referance of all the vanilla files neatly stored in my mods folder in a loose format (so I can see them and MO2 can too) 2 - When I install a new mod, I can check the box on the "vanilla" mod and check the conflicts in MO2, to see what exactly the new mod is replacing. 3 - If a new mod is replacing something, I can open both files and look at them side by side to see what exactly has changed. (this is what I learned the most from, seeing what other modders change and finding out why)
Second thing - get the tools and learn their basic functions 1 - as mentioned above BSA extractor, super simple launch it, drag and drop a .bsa file into it's window, and you can see what files are contained within that .bsa. If you want to see the actual files you have to extract them, just point the program to the folder where you want the files to go and hit the extract button. https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/974
2 - Image editing software that can handle .dds file types for textures. (photoshop, gimp, or Paint.net) The abillity so see that a vanilla tomato texture is less than 1k, and most modders do photo realistic ones with 2k textures gives you a sense of how stupid 8k tomato textures really are (total waste of SSD drive space) and feel out what resolutions you really need to save VRam and improve loading. I use this mod if I don't know where to start on texture size for an object: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/83972
I personally use Paint.net, it's free, handles .dds textures out the box and does everything, that someone of my skill level, needs without all the stuff I'll never use just complicating things so much I'll get frustrated and not enjoy the modding process. https://getpaint.net/
Some mod authors will blanket 4K/8k everything in their mods, when most things don't need to be, being able to look at the "8K dragon mod" textures, you just downloaded, and "think does Alduin really need 4K eyes and teeth", "no not really" and downscale just those textures to 1K in a few seconds, without having to download that authors lower res texture pack(if avalable) is super handy.
Cathedral asset optimizer is real good for batch downscaling textures. If a mod author only offers 4K textures , but you only really need 2k , just point it to the texture folder of that mod, check the downscaling check box and make sure it's set to a ratio of 2, and run it, in a few seconds it will do everything. https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/23316
Sometimes one texture out of a thousand in a texture pack is just to bright, to red, too flat and lacking contrast, etc. Knowing the mod its from, knowing Skyrim's folder stucture, going to that mod and finding the texture becomes easy. Drag the problemed texture to your desktop, open it with paint.net, darken it by 5% if it to bright, tone shift it away from red if its to red, hit it with a few % of contrast if is milky and flat looking. Save your new edited texture back in the originals place, load the game and see if it is an improvement or not. If it's good, great! If you think it needs a bit more edit it some more. If its worse, just put the original back in place. Textures are 100% safe to mess around with and mod, if you mess them up, most of the time, the game won't care.
Meshes contain most of the unseen data, in the game. If you can't look at meshes, you can't solve or fix most of the problems in the game. A mesh(model) will just be called something like statuedibella.nif and so will Mandragorasprouts Dibelia statue replacer's model. Their model is a differen size, differnt shape, has different collisions, and uses different textures, which is why it needs an .esp file to position and scale it to fit into the game in place of the original model properly. Without looking at the mesh in nifscope you can't see any of this, you just see two meshes named the same.
This mod was made in Nifscope in about 5 minutes. I could of did it without nifscope by just puting the TKAA meshes in the right folders to replace(overwrite) the Skychild one and it would have luckly worked, but when I would have jumped into the game, the children would have been missing their body textures.
To fix that I would of had to take coppies of the skychild body textures and put them into the TKAA folder structure so the clothes I cannged had those textures, and the clothes I didn't could used the original textures in the skycild folders. But thats not an efficient way of modding, good for a quick proof of concept, but bad otherwise.
First, I opened up the TKAA merchat dress and Copy/Pasted in the Skychild heads, hands, and feet to make sure that a complete child was formed (no mater how bad they look in their raw fourm) without neck, wrist, and ankle gaps. Everything was fine so the mod was do-able, because it's within my skill set(knowledge), and I could continue on.
I put all the meshes I wanted to replace in the right folders and made sure they were named right so the SkyChild .esp could find them. I open up each of the TKAA dresses in Nifscope and clicked the exposed body parts of the mesh and saw they were looking for textures in the "textures\actors\character\tkaa\female\femalebody_1.dds" texture folder of TKAA.
The new Skychild body textures have the same names but theier location is now "textures\actor\character\skychild\femalebody_1.dds", so all I had to do it replace \tkaa\female\ with \skychild\ for each of the 4 skin textures slots that make up the childs skin on each of the dress meshes and the mesh would "call in" the right textures from skychild texture folder and not the missing TKAA textures folder.
Meshes are not 100% safe to mess with , if a mesh is missing, saved in the wrong folder. or you renamed them wrong the game could crash. I would do one change thing at a time, verify that the game starts and that the change has the intended effects, when first starting out.
4 - SSEEdit , its basically so you can see what the .esp file are doing to your game and how they interact with eachother. https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/164
I'm not a master at using this by any means, but I have gotten good enough to fix simple conflicts between mods, track down the reason a NPC has a black face, merge an .esp patch that make one simple change into the main mod so I don't have another .esp patch to manage ( do this 100 times, that 100 less .esp files to manage) and make my own simple patches(not releying on other so much). I also use it to remove bloat from .esps.
A good example is NPC mods, skyrim has something like 6000 NPCs If your like me and use Modpocalypse NPCs - to update the looke of every NPC in the game. Bijin AIO Kalilies NPCs Pandorable's big AIO Pandorable's small AIO Skychild Serana Reimagined Mare - lydia replacer
That load order will work just fine as long as the mesh and texture folders are loaded in the same order as their .esps, but its not efficient, your machine is loading data its not even using.
Serana is created in vanilla skyrim, modpocalypes wants to change her looks, than Pandorable wants a crack at her, than Serana Reimagined gets the final say so on how she looks. Lydia is the same way. Mod organizer 2 will show the head meshes and face gen textures that conflict, so its easy to just remove them from the mods that don't get the final say so, but your still loading the useles data in the .esp files. A quick run of SSEEdit and go to the NPCs tab Look for Serana and Lydia (which will be highlighted in red because of all the conflicting data) and click delete on their names from the mods that you don't want effecting them. Exit out of SSEEdit and it will make new .esp files automatically replacing the old ones. Run SSEEdit again and their names will now be highlighted in green indicating that they are all good.
It also can solve load order issues, that can't be solved any other way. Say you like Maven Black-briar from Pandorable's small AIO but want to keep Bijin's Ingun Black-briar. if you put Bijin's .esp below Pandorables it also overwrites Maven and many other conflicting NPC's. A quick run of SSEEdit, go to Pandorable's Small AIO , click on Ingun's name and delete, exit SSEEdit, and it replaces Pan's small AIO with a new .esp without her in it. Delete her head mesh and face gen texture from Pan's Black-briar Ladies and load order dosn't matter for her anymore, you will always get Bijin's Ingun.
The more you play with these tools, the more trouble you will get into at first, but fixin those mistake is how you learn, and the more you learn the closer you get to becoming the master of your own Game.
You mean like in the original mod?? The answer would be NO, because there are no shorter dresses to "Revert" back too. You wan't the "Skychild female clothes Redux"mod, this is the "Revert" mod.
Many thanks for this mod, the TKAA dress does look a lot better proportion-wise compared to the newer tunic and leggings. Would it be also possible to change some of the noble girls' dresses back to what they were wearing in TKAA as well, specifically Dagny? Her new Skychild outfit seems rather, well, "not warm" would be nicest way of putting it lol (it also seems to have the same proportional issues as the SkyChild's new girl's tunic).
no problem, I'll add an update, soon. I only covered the outfits with the pants to get it out quicker. My character is in Solitude right now, so I didn't want to change things I couldn't verify as working.
37 comments
1.0 Optional File - Added Fine clothes.
1.1 Optional File - Added a Skychild replacement .esp, let it overwrite or place it below Skychild. I only changed a M to a F in one armor
record, not worth a patch or adding an extra .esp to everyone's loadorder.
It stops the females from using the male fine boots that clip thru the dress, and reverts the TKAA default female shoe
that worrks best with a long dress.
1.11 Main File - Removed the pouch from the Merchant Dress.
1.13 Main File - Restored the Normal map on the Merchant Dress, That I somehow broke Removing the pouch.
1.0 Optional File - Added Skychild - TKAA Revamp, My take on the on TKAA dresses, just merge it into main file.
The "black Face Bug" is caused by a character's assets not matching their records. Their could be alot of reasons why they don't match.
The first thing I check, like you did, if there is any conflicts with the .esp's. The .esp that you want to win must be loaded last. If you are comfortable enough with xedit you can delete NPC from the .esp(s) you don't want to win, but it will work just fine if you don't. I remove them to cut down on possable conflicts, it lets the .esp be more flexable as to where they can be placed in the loadorder, and to reduce redundant or unused records the game as to sift thru to free up alittle performance.
Other conflicts with the .esp are mods changing other things about the NPC loading after, things like AI packages, spells, weapons, armor or dialouge controls like in follower mods. 99% of the time these kinds of mods make their changes based off the NPC's vanilla apperance. The NPC apperance mod rarely includes the changes from those mods. So a simple patch is needed to forward the changes from both mods or you need to do it yourself. Alot of time patches that forward records for NPCs will include loose head meshes and facetints to get around loadorder restrictions or help noob modders avoid blackface, but providing loose files too someone who doesn't know how to use them or conflict resove them, ends up causing blackface more often than it help prevent it, so it's something to be aware of.
Next you have to make sure the assets that .esp needs are also loading last. Most NPC's overhauls just have a head mesh and a face tint texture but could have more. Same rules apply, Loading the right one last is fine, but deleting the conflicting ones is best.
Conflicting assets will have the same names but could have vastly different contents. A mesh could have completly diferent head parts, diferent names on those parts, or a different nubmer of parts.
Face tints are just textures, they sometimes can be wrong and still work(other than looking funny). The only critical thing with face tints is the QNAM (base RGB values of the texture) must match that NPC records in the .esp.
Example: SkyChild's Lars Battleborn has a QNAM lighting value of 221,221,221(the lightest skin tone that still looks human).
Any face tint from any NPC would work in it's place as long as the textures base color has a red value of 221, a blue value of 221, and a green value of 221. In vanilla there are 5 to 7 "set" skin tones per race making it easy to swap facetints between NPCs that use the same skintone. With custom NPCs the skintones can be whatever the author wants, making the included facetints extreamly important.
Sometimes the assets can be right, but are in the wrong folders, have a grammatiacl error, or corrupt from a bad download. The first 2 is caught when everyone downloading the mod complains that it isn't working and the mod author has to fixes it. The last one only happens to one in a few thousand and only that person can fix it by re-downloading.
The last possability is a bad mod. Sometimes mod authors make mistakes packaging up thousands of assets and records that make up the mod and miss a few things. I use NPC overhauls for Bruma and Wyrmstooth, both include main NPCs that you need to talk to to start those expantions walking around Whiterun with backface, and to this day has never been fixed.
I noticed the guy to start Wyrmstooth face was darker than his hands so I looked in xedit and found he is listed as a imperial, has a dark skin tone like a redguard and uses a breton forsworn tated facetint?? I got the RGB values from his facetint and put those values into the .esp and it fixed the blackface, but it still felt off... Imperials can have a pretty dark skintone but the forswon tatoo didn't feel right, pair up against noble fine clothes, so I grabbed a lighter skintone, more normal looking facetint from another NPC, got the RGB values and put those in the .esp, now he has a lighter skintone and a clean face that matches his voice and clothes.
Bruma adds a tavern worker that travels to whiterun from time to time, with the NPC overhaul she had really bad blackface. Looked in xedit couldn't find a single issue, checked her facetint against QNAM records and they were fine. The problem was in her head mesh, either one of her head parts is named wrong or isn't registered in the .esp. Instead of spending hours trying to troubleshoot the problem, I just deleted her from the NPC overhaul, deleted her head mesh, letting her return to a vanilla Bruma NPC. I did keep her better quality facetint from the NPC overhaul so she would look alittle better than a vanilla NPC though.
In my case Cleaned Skyrim SE Textures were indeed the culprit. Unfortunately original mod author didn't name the files which need to be manually deleted from Cleaned Skyrim SE Textures (and other mods which can cause similar problems) for Skychild to work, do you know them by any chance?
bsa vs bsa is a loadorder issue, if Skychild was the only mod that has them in a bsa, it would win because all mods load last(after all vanilla game bsa's).
bsa vs loose files , the loose files always win no matter the load order, overwritting without showing a conflict in mod managers.
This is what the original mod says is the problem and why they seem to not like other mods using loose files. But as I mentioned, loose files are used for the greater good of making sure mods and patches get their assets forworded to avoid blackface.
When unwanted loose files are overwritting wanted loose files, it is a simple load order issue, just like with bsa vs bsa.
Just check the conflicts tab in your mod manager and look for files conflicting with the original mods files( by opening up the file tree on the original mods download page to compare) Sometimes the contents are unavaliable or won't load(seems to be a site issue recently).
In this case Skychild is 100% packaged in a bsa. If the suspected issue was with another bsa you would just try moving Skychild to the last position in yor loadorder and see if the problem is fixed. If the problem remains your looking for a loose file conflict. The best way to track down the files that could be causing the issueis to unpack the SkyChild's bsa.
Once a conflict resolution rises to the level of unpacking an effected mods bsa, the same loose files which are causing the issue, become your best friend and the easy solution/fix to the problem.
Since no conflicts show in your mod manager with SkyChild , and you suspect Skyrim Cleaned textures to be the issue(but there could be more), you are forced to unpack Skychilds bsa (making them loose files). In unpacking the bsa you have 2 options:
1- unpack the bsa into same folder that contains it. Now that the loose files are in the original mods folders, a simple refreash of your mod manager will let the conflicting files show up in the conflict tab. Delete the unwanted conflicting files from other mod(s) and aftwards all the loose files you unpacked into the SkyChild folder.
This is the cleanest/most proper way because you are targeting unwanted files for removal. The end results, the original problem files are gone and no file were added to your loadorder.
2- after unpacking Skychilds bsa, delete the original bsa instead. This makes all the assets, "loose files", makeing them win any conflict with any bsa. Loose file conflicts return to a simple load order issue(the one loaded last wins) and can be seen and reported by your mod manager.
This way gets to the same end results of the first meathod because your not adding any new files (just changing the way the are packaged so mod managers can handle/report the conflicts better) which lets you see the conflicting file for easy removal. When the conflicting files are removed , the conflicts with SkyChild's loose files will go away also. If you install another mod in the future that touches the kids, packed in a bsa, those files becomes irelevant(SkyChilds loose files always wins). If you install a new mod with loose files your mod manager will report it, letting you choose which file wins(thru loadorder placement or removing the unwated files).
This meathod seems like it's all pros over the other one, but has a few slight con offsetting it a bit. The loose files are slightly bigger and have to load one at a time. The ammount this effects has depends on 2 things, the size of your loadorder, and your systems performance.
- slightly bigger file size = more disk space
con - The files take up more disk space
pro - You/mod manager can see the files conflicts so you can delete redundant/unwated/conflicting files(saving disk space offsetting the cons)
- loose files load seperatly = slower
con - loose file are slightly larger so they will by nature take slightly longer to load useing more bandwith traveling thru your system(no way around this fact)
- each loose file has to be called in when needed, with Skychilds bsa installed, the entire bsa gets loaded into RAM and all it's assets are avalabe to the system, weather its one child on screen or every child in the game, the loading will always take as long as it takes to load the entire bsa.
With loose files, when you come across a child the system has to call in the head mesh, body mesh, hands mesh, feet mesh, body texture, hand textures, face textures, mouth textures, eyes textures, hair textures, etc into RAM, using bandwith making all theese calls. If you come across another child some of the assets which are shared are already in RAM and can be used imediatly, but the new child will have a different head mesh, different eye and hair textures which need to be called in. The game has to do this thousands of times every second pulling in assets from evey mod you have installed anyway. Adding to the number, by making a singe call for every singe asset can use up bandwith slowing the whole game down.
pro - since there is only a few children in each town, loading just the files you need, can be faster. Making 30 really fast calls uses less bandwith than loading in an entire bsa containing hundreds of unused assets. If your in Dawnstar that only has one male child, how can it be faster or use less RAM/Vram loading in every asset for every child in the game???? This can cause the system to stutter as it loads in a much bigger bsa instead of just the files needed for just one child. The larger the bsa the bigger the stutter.
- with thousands of mods installed or where you are pushing your system to the limit(weak or overloaded CPU, maxed out system RAM, maxed out Vram or congested data pipelines) loading just the files needed, to create an image on screen, for the things in one area, will always be more efficient than loading in thousands of unused assets. In these conditions where you hit a limit of the system, slow downs will happen either way, but being in Dawnstar loading in 50 bsa's, one bsa for all the assets for every child in the game, multipal bsa's for hundreads of NPCs from all over the map, multipal bsa's making changes to Dawnstar including assets and changes to other areas not currently loaded, loading and unpacking huge texture bsa's to get just a few Dawnstar only textures never really made a good argunemt for the use of bsa's to me.
Older systems with limited Ram/Vram that could make better use of bsa's smaller size usally suffer from stuttering as they get stuck in an infinate loop of loading them into RAM, unpacking all the assets, only to purge most of them to make room so they can unpack the next one, and performance/playablity suffers as the data transfer pipelines get maxxed out. If this gets too extreame and assets aren't avalable when needed, the system waits, causing a stutter, if it waits too long the engine can freeze or crash.
- unpacking a bsa(with some mods) make them not require a blank .esp file to load the assets anymore. Your mod manager just loads the assets into your games folders on startup, instead of loading a bsa and an esp, just to tell the game to load the bsa, this never made(and still doesn't) make sense to me. Load more stuff so you don't need to load as much stuff??????
I currently have 1296 mods in my loadorder, and the only bsa's I have are the vanilla game and all the creation club ones on my steam drive in the game install folder, I don't have a single bsa in my MO2 install folder on my mod drive. I even keep unpacked copies of all the vanilla game bsa's, loaded in as a loose file mod. WHY?? because of problems like this, I hate hidden files controlled by programs nobody knows what they do or how they do it. I hate relying 20 different programs just to get an clue of whats going on, when a mod manager should be all that is needed to use mods.
That and the fact that with modern systems, one cpu core gets hammered rendering a billion polygons per frame(like with every game ever), and the other 3 to 63 core are idling handleing background task(like loading assets being called in)or completly parked. With the power of modern graphics cards containing 20 to 50 times the pixle pushers(cores) and 8 to 24 time the Vram that the original game was desined to use, they need 1000+ mods with some 4K and 8K textures, just to make them not idle, and get your money worth out of them. Modern Software like community shaders bypassing the games ancient shaders and replacing them with the latest direct X has to offer. 1 TB PCIe 5.0 drives able to push out above 10,000 Mb per second for less than $100, and 16 Gb of Ram running at 3200Mt+ per second for less than $50. I can't get my my CPU above 20% or my graphics card above 30%. My system uses 16Gb of Ram at the desktop, but that's because I have 64Gb, and it doesn't ever go over 20Gb running Skyrim with all my mods. I spent an ungodly amount of money or a GPU with 24Gb of Vram which is a total waste for skyrim, as I can't make it use more than 16Gb. The simple truth is, we just don't need all the complexity and headache that these slight mico optiomizations bring , when the average potato PC can power thu this ancient game with ease.
This is the contents of my unpacked Skychild bsa , facetints textures only because that more than likely your issue. (I'm still using version 2.0 but they should be the same incase you don't want to unpack the bsa)
textures\actors\character\facegendata\facetint\dragonborn.esm\00018fca.dds
textures\actors\character\facegendata\facetint\hearthfires.esm\00003f5f.dds
textures\actors\character\facegendata\facetint\hearthfires.esm\00003f56.dds
textures\actors\character\facegendata\facetint\hearthfires.esm\0000403b.dds
textures\actors\character\facegendata\facetint\hearthfires.esm\0000403c.dds
textures\actors\character\facegendata\facetint\skyrim.esm\00013668.dds
textures\actors\character\facegendata\facetint\skyrim.esm\00014132.dds
textures\actors\character\facegendata\facetint\skyrim.esm\00014133.dds
textures\actors\character\facegendata\facetint\skyrim.esm\000b94a3.dds
textures\actors\character\facegendata\facetint\skyrim.esm\000b94a9.dds
textures\actors\character\facegendata\facetint\skyrim.esm\0001c18a.dds
textures\actors\character\facegendata\facetint\skyrim.esm\0001c185.dds
textures\actors\character\facegendata\facetint\skyrim.esm\0001d4b7.dds
textures\actors\character\facegendata\facetint\skyrim.esm\0001e82c.dds
textures\actors\character\facegendata\facetint\skyrim.esm\0009f839.dds
textures\actors\character\facegendata\facetint\skyrim.esm\00013b78.dds
textures\actors\character\facegendata\facetint\skyrim.esm\00013ba9.dds
textures\actors\character\facegendata\facetint\skyrim.esm\00013bad.dds
textures\actors\character\facegendata\facetint\skyrim.esm\00013baf.dds
textures\actors\character\facegendata\facetint\skyrim.esm\00019a2c.dds
textures\actors\character\facegendata\facetint\skyrim.esm\00019c01.dds
textures\actors\character\facegendata\facetint\skyrim.esm\000132a9.dds
textures\actors\character\facegendata\facetint\skyrim.esm\000133ab.dds
textures\actors\character\facegendata\facetint\skyrim.esm\000135e5.dds
textures\actors\character\facegendata\facetint\skyrim.esm\000135ee.dds
textures\actors\character\facegendata\facetint\skyrim.esm\000135f1.dds
textures\actors\character\facegendata\facetint\skyrim.esm\000136b9.dds
textures\actors\character\facegendata\facetint\skyrim.esm\000136ba.dds
textures\actors\character\facegendata\facetint\skyrim.esm\000274a5.dds
textures\actors\character\facegendata\facetint\skyrim.esm\0001329b.dds
textures\actors\character\facegendata\facetint\skyrim.esm\0001337a.dds
textures\actors\character\facegendata\facetint\skyrim.esm\0001347e.dds
textures\actors\character\facegendata\facetint\skyrim.esm\0001434b.dds
textures\actors\character\facegendata\facetint\skyrim.esm\0001434c.dds
textures\actors\character\facegendata\facetint\skyrim.esm\0001434d.dds
textures\actors\character\facegendata\facetint\skyrim.esm\00013292.dds
textures\actors\character\facegendata\facetint\skyrim.esm\00013294.dds
textures\actors\character\facegendata\facetint\skyrim.esm\00013359.dds
textures\actors\character\facegendata\facetint\skyrim.esm\00013363.dds
textures\actors\character\facegendata\facetint\skyrim.esm\00013378.dds
textures\actors\character\facegendata\facetint\skyrim.esm\00013385.dds
textures\actors\character\facegendata\facetint\skyrim.esm\00013477.dds
textures\actors\character\facegendata\facetint\skyrim.esm\00013642.dds
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/18360
If I remember right there are no children included in it so you shouldn't have issues with SkyChild, and you can choose loose files or bsa to avoid conflicts with other mods. Just delete the entire facetint folder from the cleaned texture mod, Install the bsa version of this and place it above all NPC mods, should be conflict free like that.
plays well together
I really like how that mod uses SPID to distribute the outfits, but some of the outfits are way too fancy for my liking and from the screenshots it looks like some outfits may be suffering from too low res textures.
Maybe when I get the time I can make me a custom .ini for it, to get ride of the outfits I don't like and make it more suited to my game.
But sso far no problems with TKAA, so probably neither with SkyChild
Another way to do it would be, put renamed copies of your child mods body textures into the folder structure of the clothes your tring to fix.
TKAA,SkyChild,RS Children are all just modified UNP adult female bodies. They all use UNP textures just in a different folder stucture. If I remember right RS Children male and female, TKAA males, and SkyChild males all use slightly edited (removed boobs) UNP Bijin Textures. I think the females use Leyenda Skin.
SkyChild is eactly the same as TKAA, only differeance is the HP head. They withstand the extreame morphs needed to make the adult heads look like children, alot better than the older low poly head.
Use ESP explorer or console to get the outfits then use Ring of Fashion designer to change the outfits of your Skychild adopted children.
NPC Clothes Changer and Maintainer SSE : https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/50066?tab=files
The tintmask from TKAA and SkyChild are the same with some differences and "should" "mostly" work.
The thing that will determine if the child gets the balck face bug or not is the RGB value of the QNAM - textuture lighting. You can use any facetint from any NPC as long as the values match exactly, without editing them in SSEEdit.
ex. Lars battle-born and Lucia both have a QNAM = 221,221,221 so they can swap with eachother without any edits.
The way I check a textures QNAM value (which is the textures base color). I open up the facegen texture in Paint.net and select the color picker tool, open up the color wheel, than click one of the outermost corners, and get the RGB values from it, than double check those values in the other 3 corners.
As far as the BSA being unpacked, mine all unpacked fine, but I didn't do it manually myself thru B.A.E. I have ModOrganizer2 set to automatically unpack them. It uses B.A.E to do it, which is included with it, so I'm not sure why you would be having trouble.
Maybe you can try Cathedral Assets Opimizer, it has a BSA extract funtion.
I removed the TKAA mods and cleaned my saves in resaver. It looks like I’m okay. Skychild works and seems to be good. I like the models, but not the clothes. I also don’t like how big the girl are. I like having little squirts around the house. Your mod addresses this with the kids in the main game and dlcs. I can live with the modded girls looking older. You’ve done a really good thing here. I’m goin to give this a go this weekend.
I just want one main mod with patches for the mods I use from a few trusted authrors, to keep things consistant. Not 20 or more .esps for what are essentially set decorations!
Could you cut the dresses around the knees,and keep them closed bottomed, like most of the bandit, hide, and impeial armors. With the longer dress the torso won't look so short. The dresses would be attached higher up on the legs so they wouldn't need streach so much. I tried messing around with it in outfit studio(which I suck at) but I don't know how to work meshes like that, and I'm not sure how to partion off the parts of the legs that would be showing and attach them to the dresses, I always break the animations, weightings, or something.
Added alpha channel to a renamed copy of its texture.
I removed the bottom part of the dress texture just below the knee.
I removed the partitioned body and pasted in the full body (clipping in a few places).
Loaded it into the game and the movement is great, the dress streaches at the bottom a bit, but the weight painting can handle it.
It looks very promising!!! I added screenshots of my testing in the picture section.
I want to cut out the parts of the body that clip thru the dress during animations, or atleast make them invisible(add alpha). But I cant figure it out.
I find it usefull to edit them in small steps. Right now I'm working on torsof02.nif , so I create a folder on my desktop called that. Than every few minutes I save to it renaming the nif each time, torsof01.nif, torsof02.nif, torsof03.nif, torsof04.nif, etc. That way when I do mess up I don't lose alot of time, or if I change my mind, I can reload the one before the change I want to undo. When I want to test it out in game, I drag a copy of my lastest version into my test mod and manually rename it.
Thanks!
I made it real quick, loaded it into my game to make sure it would work, and it did so I uploaded it incase anyone felt the same as I did.
One of these days, I gotta learn how to mod....
yeah me too..........
I taught myself thru trial and error.......breaking alot of stuff...........than fixing it
If you really want to learn, my advice:
First thing - Learn the Skyrim file structure, mostly the meshes and texture folders(70-80% of mods happen in there)
To see them download BSA extractor and extract all the .bsa files in the "C:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Skyrim Special Edition\Data" folder.
I personally unpack all of them into a folder called "vanilla" on my desktop, compress the folder with 7-zip, than drag the file into Mod Orginizer 2, install it as a mod, and place it at the top of my loadorder.
This does a few things for me,
1 - I have a referance of all the vanilla files neatly stored in my mods folder in a loose format (so I can see them and MO2 can too)
2 - When I install a new mod, I can check the box on the "vanilla" mod and check the conflicts in MO2, to see what exactly the new mod is replacing.
3 - If a new mod is replacing something, I can open both files and look at them side by side to see what exactly has changed. (this is what I learned the most from, seeing what other modders change and finding out why)
Second thing - get the tools and learn their basic functions
1 - as mentioned above BSA extractor, super simple launch it, drag and drop a .bsa file into it's window, and you can see what files are contained within that .bsa. If you want to see the actual files you have to extract them, just point the program to the folder where you want the files to go and hit the extract button.
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/974
2 - Image editing software that can handle .dds file types for textures. (photoshop, gimp, or Paint.net)
The abillity so see that a vanilla tomato texture is less than 1k, and most modders do photo realistic ones with 2k textures gives you a sense of how stupid 8k tomato textures really are (total waste of SSD drive space) and feel out what resolutions you really need to save VRam and improve loading. I use this mod if I don't know where to start on texture size for an object:
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/83972
I personally use Paint.net, it's free, handles .dds textures out the box and does everything, that someone of my skill level, needs without all the stuff I'll never use just complicating things so much I'll get frustrated and not enjoy the modding process.
https://getpaint.net/
Some mod authors will blanket 4K/8k everything in their mods, when most things don't need to be, being able to look at the "8K dragon mod" textures, you just downloaded, and "think does Alduin really need 4K eyes and teeth", "no not really" and downscale just those textures to 1K in a few seconds, without having to download that authors lower res texture pack(if avalable) is super handy.
Cathedral asset optimizer is real good for batch downscaling textures. If a mod author only offers 4K textures , but you only really need 2k , just point it to the texture folder of that mod, check the downscaling check box and make sure it's set to a ratio of 2, and run it, in a few seconds it will do everything.
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/23316
Sometimes one texture out of a thousand in a texture pack is just to bright, to red, too flat and lacking contrast, etc. Knowing the mod its from, knowing Skyrim's folder stucture, going to that mod and finding the texture becomes easy. Drag the problemed texture to your desktop, open it with paint.net, darken it by 5% if it to bright, tone shift it away from red if its to red, hit it with a few % of contrast if is milky and flat looking. Save your new edited texture back in the originals place, load the game and see if it is an improvement or not. If it's good, great! If you think it needs a bit more edit it some more. If its worse, just put the original back in place. Textures are 100% safe to mess around with and mod, if you mess them up, most of the time, the game won't care.
3 - Nifscope......Period!!
https://github.com/niftools/nifskope/releases
Meshes contain most of the unseen data, in the game. If you can't look at meshes, you can't solve or fix most of the problems in the game.
A mesh(model) will just be called something like statuedibella.nif and so will Mandragorasprouts Dibelia statue replacer's model. Their model is a differen size, differnt shape, has different collisions, and uses different textures, which is why it needs an .esp file to position and scale it to fit into the game in place of the original model properly. Without looking at the mesh in nifscope you can't see any of this, you just see two meshes named the same.
This mod was made in Nifscope in about 5 minutes. I could of did it without nifscope by just puting the TKAA meshes in the right folders to replace(overwrite) the Skychild one and it would have luckly worked, but when I would have jumped into the game, the children would have been missing their body textures.
To fix that I would of had to take coppies of the skychild body textures and put them into the TKAA folder structure so the clothes I cannged had those textures, and the clothes I didn't could used the original textures in the skycild folders. But thats not an efficient way of modding, good for a quick proof of concept, but bad otherwise.
First, I opened up the TKAA merchat dress and Copy/Pasted in the Skychild heads, hands, and feet to make sure that a complete child was formed (no mater how bad they look in their raw fourm) without neck, wrist, and ankle gaps. Everything was fine so the mod was do-able, because it's within my skill set(knowledge), and I could continue on.
I put all the meshes I wanted to replace in the right folders and made sure they were named right so the SkyChild .esp could find them. I open up each of the TKAA dresses in Nifscope and clicked the exposed body parts of the mesh and saw they were looking for textures in the "textures\actors\character\tkaa\female\femalebody_1.dds" texture folder of TKAA.
The new Skychild body textures have the same names but theier location is now "textures\actor\character\skychild\femalebody_1.dds", so all I had to do it replace \tkaa\female\ with \skychild\ for each of the 4 skin textures slots that make up the childs skin on each of the dress meshes and the mesh would "call in" the right textures from skychild texture folder and not the missing TKAA textures folder.
Meshes are not 100% safe to mess with , if a mesh is missing, saved in the wrong folder. or you renamed them wrong the game could crash. I would do one change thing at a time, verify that the game starts and that the change has the intended effects, when first starting out.
4 - SSEEdit , its basically so you can see what the .esp file are doing to your game and how they interact with eachother.
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/164
I'm not a master at using this by any means, but I have gotten good enough to fix simple conflicts between mods, track down the reason a NPC has a black face, merge an .esp patch that make one simple change into the main mod so I don't have another .esp patch to manage ( do this 100 times, that 100 less .esp files to manage) and make my own simple patches(not releying on other so much). I also use it to remove bloat from .esps.
A good example is NPC mods, skyrim has something like 6000 NPCs
If your like me and use
Modpocalypse NPCs - to update the looke of every NPC in the game.
Bijin AIO
Kalilies NPCs
Pandorable's big AIO
Pandorable's small AIO
Skychild
Serana Reimagined
Mare - lydia replacer
That load order will work just fine as long as the mesh and texture folders are loaded in the same order as their .esps, but its not efficient, your machine is loading data its not even using.
Serana is created in vanilla skyrim, modpocalypes wants to change her looks, than Pandorable wants a crack at her, than Serana Reimagined gets the final say so on how she looks. Lydia is the same way. Mod organizer 2 will show the head meshes and face gen textures that conflict, so its easy to just remove them from the mods that don't get the final say so, but your still loading the useles data in the .esp files. A quick run of SSEEdit and go to the NPCs tab Look for Serana and Lydia (which will be highlighted in red because of all the conflicting data) and click delete on their names from the mods that you don't want effecting them. Exit out of SSEEdit and it will make new .esp files automatically replacing the old ones. Run SSEEdit again and their names will now be highlighted in green indicating that they are all good.
It also can solve load order issues, that can't be solved any other way. Say you like Maven Black-briar from Pandorable's small AIO but want to keep Bijin's Ingun Black-briar. if you put Bijin's .esp below Pandorables it also overwrites Maven and many other conflicting NPC's. A quick run of SSEEdit, go to Pandorable's Small AIO , click on Ingun's name and delete, exit SSEEdit, and it replaces Pan's small AIO with a new .esp without her in it. Delete her head mesh and face gen texture from Pan's Black-briar Ladies and load order dosn't matter for her anymore, you will always get Bijin's Ingun.
The more you play with these tools, the more trouble you will get into at first, but fixin those mistake is how you learn, and the more you learn the closer you get to becoming the master of your own Game.
The answer would be NO, because there are no shorter dresses to "Revert" back too.
You wan't the "Skychild female clothes Redux"mod, this is the "Revert" mod.
Would it be also possible to change some of the noble girls' dresses back to what they were wearing in TKAA as well, specifically Dagny? Her new Skychild outfit seems rather, well, "not warm" would be nicest way of putting it lol (it also seems to have the same proportional issues as the SkyChild's new girl's tunic).
I only covered the outfits with the pants to get it out quicker. My character is in Solitude right now, so I didn't want to change things I couldn't verify as working.