Savsaaba– Thrwomp’s Followers

So I was trawling through Nexus, like you do– and this fellow caught my eye.

Not sure who all’s noticed, but there’s been some scuffling and squabbling going on around here and Erdi and I are about ready to take a vacation someplace far, far away. Atmora, maybe.

In any event, our boys could use some competition, so–

Savsaaba- Standalone Follower

He’s pretty adorable.

Skin tone in these pictures fluctuates quite a bit– I was having some ENB troubles at this point due to a bit of a game bug I introduced while fooling around at Sheogorath’s tea party. So sometimes he looks quite dark and sometimes there’s a lot of bloom going on, or something, and he looks lighter.

One thing to note is that Savsaaba uses Better Males for his skin textures, so if you see some pixelation or some artifact on him, it’s not the fault of his mod author. It’s that Better Males skin. The choice is understandable because despite all that, it’s still a very well modeled skin and it is the only one that seems to support a darker skin tone well. I’ve tried CMO, Vitruvia, Fair Men/Real Men, the RWoS optional file with SSE’s Tempered Skin, and Veteran Skin… none of them work quite as well as Better Males at dark skin.

This is why if you find a mod author who puts up the psd or uncompressed files for any of their textures, be sure to thank them profusely!

I’ve used Better Males for my Ahtar and I end up having to retouch him quite a bit in some of the story photos because of this–

See that? Artifact is quite visible on Ahtar’s neck and on his forearm, for one. And I did quite a lot of touchup on Ahtar’s diffuse map while I was putting the scars and hair on. And, of course, you’re looking at the PC version of Ahtar. The NPC version that I did of him is not as good a quality.

So that is a lot of words to say that dealing with skin textures on NPC mods is more difficult than it looks. It’s probably eighty times worse trying to do a female NPC due to the 9000 skin texture mods… what am I saying. Honestly I just want to gnash my teeth when I think about the lack of variety we get for males and the number of things I’ve had to retexture for myself. Poorly of course.

EDIT: I am wrong about Sav’s skin, and I want to profusely apologize. I took a look at the diffuse texture file in GIMP and saw that it is in fact has some edited details of Better Males but is  not– which I should have realized based on its colors along the chest and neck and its darker tones. It appears as if the base skin may actually be Schlongs of Skyrim’s diffuse texture– in which case HUGE kudos to Sav’s author because that skin is damn near impossible to even make look acceptable– and Savsaaba looks pretty good.

Savsaaba says I need to forget about all of that and pay more attention to him now.

He is so striking with that hair and those eyes, isn’t he? I adore that quirk of eyebrow– I bet he’s always up to some mischief.

I think we’ve got some jealousy going on back here– I’m hearing some snide comments about how “We didn’t think that ‘frosty winter morn’ would EVER be an acceptable mode in Hegarthe”– what? Forget it, that elf stuff is just too tedious.

And someone else is mumbling about copycats and haircuts.

You know what, Marcus? I think maybe you should go over there and meet some of Savsaaba’s friends. Make some introductions.Maybe even get Sedave–

Okay, okay!

Sedave will remain our secret.

Clothing is Guard’s Clothes which is something I don’t think I’ve ever seen on any modlist. I do love the color that Savsaaba has on– I think it really suits him.