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WARNING: this method only works with the vanilla meshes or Expressive Facegen Morphs and similar mods that just slightly alter the vanilla face. Seems a lot of stuff, but you’ll get around this if you follow my steps.
NPC Nif Merge (don’t worry if it’s for Skyrim LE we’ll see later). Bethesda Creation Kit (very important! You can find it on the Bethesta website after you log in with your account). Beards and Brows retextures, and basically whatever you like to make your NPC as you intend to. Eyes mods (I use Natural Eyes as a vanilla eyes replacer). Hair mods (if you want to add better hairstyles – KS hairdos and Apachii Sky hair are both good). Skin textures (my favorites are: Botox, Bijin Skin, and Tempered skin for males). Racemenu (it gives you additional sliders to customize your character, but you can stick to the vanilla version if you want). A bunch of mods, if you feel fancy (mostly optional):. A mod manager (I use Vortex, but you can choose what you like). I won’t go too deep into detail with meshes and textures because I still have to figure out that part, but basically if you use the racemenu mod and a few other mods that make your NPCs look pretty, your character will look pretty too, without much of sculpting and adding extra stuff.īut enough talk, let’s go to the real stuff. Here’s what we’ll be doing: a semi-standalone NPC with the custom face I make with the advanced racemenu (more on that later), that can be used as a follower or spouse or both.Īlso you can use part of this tutorial if you just feel the need to change the face of some vanilla NPCs that you don’t like very much. So I thought to write down this quick and I hope easy to follow sort-of-tutorial of what I do and what works for me. I almost cried, I actually didn’t, since I’m a grown woman, but in the end, I managed to get what I wanted. I searched left and right, found a lot of useful resources, but also struggled to keep up because for a reason or another, things didn’t work or pieces were missing, or I had to follow hours and hours of videos with a lot of info I didn’t need just to get to what I needed. So I started to look around for tutorials and guides and fixes to start my journey in the worlds of mods.Īnd boyyyy was it hard. I used other vanilla NPCs or followers made by other modders (you are awesome, BTW), but I knew they weren’t 100% my folk as I imagined them, and since they’ve been with me for so long that I now considered them a part of my family, I just had to do them myself.
When I went back to play Skyrim in my current Fantasy obsession (aka trying to rewrite my first novels and make them better) I knew I had to recreate my characters as followers in the game. FebruSkyrim Special Edition: Making a Custom NPC Follower