Creating a new race

Introduction

Hello, and welcome to this tutorial which covers race creation for Oblivion. By the end of your tutorial you will probably have learned the following and maybe more:

• How to create a new race
• Learn how to balance your race.
• Make it unique by making it look and sound different from other races, without actually creating or finding new models or textures.

Without further ado, let's move on to the tutorial

Create your very first race

Start up your TES: Construction Set, if you haven't already, and either open a current plugin or make a new one. I'm going to be a little quick and expect that you already know some of the basics. At the top there are two bars, on the lower one, find 'Character' and click it. Then click on 'Race...'. This will take you to the race menu where you can either edit a race or make your own one. There is a list to your left and this shows all the races that are in the game right now (there might be more if you have a race mod that you haven't activated from the Construction Set.) On the right side you'll edit the settings of the race.

Now, at the list of races, right click on your mouse and click 'New'. A new window pops up. This asks you what will be the ID of your race. Not name but ID. Two completely different things. Type in anything you want, or just go with me. My race name is 'Grevo' without the ' marks. When you've typed in something, press OK. (Or you can just right click an existing race and press duplicate. Just for my race's looks, I did this for Dremora and then changed my race name to Grevo by clicking on the race and changing the text.) Wow! A new race popped out into the list. Now you might be thinking "If i start the game now, will my new race already be there, ready to be played?" The answer is no. You still are required to do some more simple things before you can head into the game and try playing with your race. Now let's go through all the tabs.

General Data

General Data will set what skill bonuses your race will get, how much for each attribute they'll have when they start out, which spells they will have when they start out, and also the sounds for Male and Female. Let's start with the attributes. Since they are abbreviated, I'll go through them.

• Str is Strength
• Int is Intelligence
• Wil is Willpower
• Agi is Agility
• Spd is Speed
• End is Endurance
• Luc is Luck
• Pers is Personality

Next to the abbreviations are the attributes they start with for both Male and Female. If you want to have a little more role-playing experience then do something like me.

The Grevo race
Stat	M	F	Description
Strength	65	45	Males tend to be physically stronger than the women.
Intelligence	60	60	Both genders have about the same intellect.
Willpower	60	60	Same as before.
Agility	45	65	Females are usually more slim, which makes them more agile than men.
Speed	50	50	This doesn't really depend on the gender.
Endurance	60	40	The female body is not as tough as the male body.
Luck	50	50	This depends more on the actions of the player.
Personality	0	20	Females tend to be more well mannered than the men.

I chose 0 for the male's personality because the Grevo race are ruthless, terrifying and evil creatures.

Now, let's see. Under the Male and Female attributes are some numbers. They indicate how many points both genders have spent in total. For a standard race this number is 320. If you followed my attributes exactly, then they both should be 370. These numbers are what balances the genders. You should have these equal, especially if you plan to release your race mod to the public.

Let's move on to the next part of General Data, which is Skill Bonus. The name explains itself. This is how much of picked skills you get when you start off. When you click on one of the drop down boxes you'll see every skill in Oblivion and when you have one picked next to it you can type in a number which indicates how much of that skill will be given. If you dont want to cheat much give your race as max 45 like the other races. I gave my race these:

Blade = 10
Athletics = 10
Acrobatics = 10
Block = 5
Heavy Armor = 5
Destruction = 5

This left me with 1 dropdown box that says NONE. But I've reached my own set limit, 45. I won't add more skill points.

Then the next part is Specials, which is what spells the race will start out with and the voice. To give a race or npc a spell, you have to drag the spell from the dropdown list at the far left to the list in your race. The Spells are in the Magic tab.

The only spell I gave my race was Summon Scamp, beacuse my attributes are unbalanced with 370 points.

Now under the spell list there are two dropdown boxes, Male Voice Race and Female Voice. I want my Grevo to sound like Dremora's so I pick them from the dropdown list for both female and male. But now comes a problem: The Dremora have almost no speech recorded which leaves me with 3 options.

1) Just leave it that way, you can still read subtitles. 2) Don't place any NPCs with your custom race, the player doesn't speak anyway. 3) Pick a different race from the voice menu.

I stuck with Option 1. This concludes the General Data section.

Body Data

Body Data is the thing that defines how your race's body's will look like and also what hair and eye colors will be available to your race.

First, I change the Male Bodies part.

Height = 1.6000 (The Grevo's are large. As I said, they're not human.) Weight = 1.6000 (I took the same, cause otherwise they look really funny.)

The rest sets the meshes/textures of the male bodies.

Female Bodies are basically the same as Male Bodies. For their Height and Weight I set both to 1.4000.

[NOTE] Creatures, as far as I have tested, cannot be used as models, because they are one complete model. That is to say, the one file has the hands, arms, body, eyes, feet etc. It is possible to break a model up and then use the separate files to create a race. (Bek)

The Eye Color and Hair Style (edited by SickleYield):

Leave the race screen open. Click Character-eyes. You now see a list of all the eyes in the game. Highlight one and drag it over to the "eyes" list area of your new race. It should then appear in that list. Repeat for as many eyes as you want your character to have. Just drag and drop.

Hair is the same way. Open the Character-hair screen and repeat.

This can take a while, especially if you make a lot of new eyes and hairs for your custom race, but it's worth it to have those available to the player.

Important warning note: Making any changes at all to eyes and hairs, even adding new ones in a new race, will make your mod incompatible with other mods that do so. Main culprits include Ren's Beauty Pack, Capucine's Eye Textures, and the Cosmetic Compilation (which contains both of the above). The creators of that mod generally will give permission for you to merge their mods with yours if you give them credit, so don't hesitate to contact them about this option.

Alternately, you can warn modders to use Tes4Plugin to merge all their appearance mods when using yours. Either way, you should always, ALWAYS give a compatibility warning in your readme if you add new eyes and hair.

Face Data

This holds all of the animation / textures for the face. To create a custom face, there is a tool by SI called FaceGen Modeller (3.1). With FaceGen, you can create a custom face and then export it into the TES Construction Set for use.

FaceGen Data

This sets what your race will look like preset. If you right click somewhere on the face and hold right click you will start creating it different. I changed mine so that it wouldn't look just like a copy of Dremora's.

Text Data

Here you set what name the race will have in the game and the little description that you'll see when you're browsing races. I typed Grevo in Name. Here's my description:

The Grevo are disgusting creatures, Half Dremora, Half Giant, but looks nothing like neither. They are evil and hate any other races but their own.

But before we go to the next tab, there is one thing left to do. If you plan to let people and yourself play as the race, Check the 'Playable' Checkbox next to the Name textbox.

Reactions

This sets how much your race will be liked or disliked by other races. If you want to change this, right click and press New. Then at the Opposing/Affiliated Race dropdown menu you choose what race and under it you choose how much they like/dislike your race. If you use a negative number, such as -5, your race will be disliked by that race. I took -30 for all races except for Grevo, VampireRace and Dremora.

Conclusion

Now you have completely graduated Race Creation. I hope this will help you in your modding. Now go try out your new race, and then submit it for all of us to see!