Understanding Body Mods and Custom Races

[H1ms3lf]

This seems to be a rather confusing topic...



I'm trying to fully understand it but gonna need you knowledgeable people to help me :)

I'll try to write in a way that every commoner can understand, and if needed, later a moderator could have this pinned so more people may clear their doubts and get a better understanding of how body replacers work.



Anyway...



I get it that when you enter the GECK and look at the races, most share the same meshes (meshes dictate the overall dimensions and design of the body), and the textures have some variation from race to race, age to age.



So when we use a body mod (such as TYPE 3 or many others), it changes the meshes and textures. Textures are not much trouble (I believe) since those are like a coat of paint, easier to manipulate and edit around. However meshes change the design and dimensions of the body, and that can escalate into a myriad of issues since there are extra factors to accommodate this change, like clothes, weapons, animations, scenario interaction, etc.



This is where I start to have doubts...



Question 1:

Lets say I change to TYPE 3 body, it will replace the vanilla meshes/textures, but does everything else in the game "fits" into this new body? OR do I also need to download XYZ content? The answer to that is probably that it depends upon the body mod, it should have documentation telling what else needs to be done.



But then it can get more complicated! (If you wanna be an advanced user, and thats my goal :D )



Lets say I want different body mods, but I don't wanna change the VANILLA/default bodies for the races in the game. Then I'll need to create a "custom race", I'll have to point for this race (in GECK) which meshes and textures to use, and place these files in a different path, likely a .bsa file.



Then there is the issue of what "fits" for this custom race (clothes, weapons, animations, etc), and notice -> what "fits" into one body type is probably gonna look weird/bugged on another. So I have to include "everything" (that I plan on using) for this body type, as new content??



Presuming I've been kinda right to this point, here comes Question number 2, and I need help on this one:

Is there any way to flag or "tell" each content, that it should only accept to be used by X race? Because getting, for example, clothes that are for body X and trying to equip in body Y would cause visual bugs?



Add on top of that, if I wanna use a few different body types, which means creating a few different races and having to sort the content throughout these races, it could be a bit problematic and take some work...



This also leads to Question 3: Does increased body/race types also require a very powerful computer? Does it cause the game to run weirder or crash more often??



And Question 4:

Let say for example that I want normal people to use underwear, but NOT raiders, this is easy to accomplish right? That seems like one of the first cool changes to have. I May ask in the adult section if that is required :P

Also and alternatively, is there a way to make underwear on normal people to be an equipped item, which can be looted/removed upon death (or other circumstances?)



And finally question 5:

What exactly is the issue between custom races and TTW? Is it something that can be worked around, and does it need an expert modder to circumvent, or a bit of tweaking here and there does the job? (AKA "even a fool such as me could do it" ^^)



So, these are my doubts and mostly what I would appreciate for someone to clarify, please tell me where I'm wrong and if you could elucidate some points a bit further, maybe answer a question or two, that had be great!! No need to go into details just the basic run down or if doable or not.



Counting with your help peeps, thanks =]



PS: I'm not a graphical artist, my artistic skills are terrible! Anything that requires editing meshes, textures etc is beyond me. I hope most of the content can just be tweaked around without needing graphical knowledge, or that the amazing modders have already provided some (if not all) of these assets and options.

[H1ms3lf]

Thanks a lot luthien!!

[quote]The Broken Steel script should already be fixed to not cause crashes in TTW3.[/quote]

You mean that for the new version of TTW right? 3.0 and onwards?



There's one last question which I don't exactly know how to ask, because the topic is a bit too advanced for me.. but here goes:



I've seen for example, some raider looks/clothes that are specific to a certain type of body model (non vanilla), In order to have these "special looks" on raiders without having to exclude all pre-existing raiders, I would need to install the specific body model+clothes and create a custom race for raiders, edit the spawn/leveled list for raiders to include these new raider models, and probably the list of items they use/come with. Is that the correct approach?



And also does it works mostly the same way for mods that change/increase creature variety? Some creature mods look so cool! (like this one: http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout3/mods/18434/? ) And are a must have because killing identical creatures sucks compared to killing different looking ones. As they say variety is the spice of life :)