Category: Stories

Finally, we are outside of the city of Solitude. We are going to be leaving Haafingar!

AND– it’s the end of the first arc.

I’m curious if it made sense throughout.

Do you think I should POV switch at some point, or is the elf bearable? He’s such a thinky little cuss.

So on the characters–

Ahtar is kind of flipping back and forth between his original look and the way I modded him. That’s due to the timeframe of when I made the screenshots and how tricky it is to do this without making your own modded NPCs.

In the early shots, Cyrelian is the player character and Ahtar is a modded NPC from the Males of Skyrim mod. That’s where he has the softer face with the thin scars. While that Ahtar is cute, it’s not the look I was going for throughout. Ahtar is really a scary sort of fellow.

All of the clothed Ahtar shots with the new scarred face are of Ahtar as a player character. Since his body is hidden, I didn’t need to worry about his distinctive arm scars. How did I give solo-Ahtar the correct facial textures? Simple, I used it as the base skin for every male in the game. That’s why you don’t see another male in those shots.

In contrast, all of the naked Ahtar shots with the thin braids/less scarred face and the body scars were accomplished by using the scarred body as the male default body. Cyrelian was the player character in these shots, and his body textures are unique, using a unique character mod which I did a bit of surgical repair on as I experienced errors with the face textures and meshes. For this reason, I couldn’t use the scarred face textures for Ahtar as Cyrelian would have ended up wearing them too.

I can’t remember why I didn’t just give up and use a custom race.

At this point I said the hell with it and taught myself how to make NPCs.

And then I realized I would have to make two Ahtars– one with skinny braids, and one with the dreads I wanted. And I’d already built the .esp file and just– nope.

This is why scarred Ahtar gets to wear headgear until it was time to get rid of those damned braids.

I can’t say the NPCs are good, but they work for screenshots.  Currently Marcus, Cyrelian, and Ahtar are completed. Erdi’s meshes and textures are done but I need to redo that .esp as it made Marcus all wonky and bald.(Of course he didn’t look bad, just weird, but that’s Marcus.) Alfgar’s meshes are done and I’m still figuring out textures for him, old man that he is.

I liked doing this one because of the armor– that made it a lot of fun.