Creating a new race
Introduction
Hello, and welcome to my 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 sound 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 how much 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 first numbers are male, and the next are female.
Strength = 65 and 45. Males tend to be physically stronger than the women.
Intelligence = 60 and 60. Both genders have about the same intelect.
Willpower = 60 and 60. Same as before.
Agility = 45 and 65. Females are usually more thin and slim, which makes them
more agile than men.
Speed = 50 and 50. This doesn't really depend on the gender.
Endurance = 60 and 40. The female body are not as strong as the male body.
Luck = 50 and 50. This depends on the person.
Personality = 0 and 20. Females tend to be more mannered than the men. Why I picked 0 for the males is cause 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 spended in total. 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 leaved me with 1 dropdown box that says NONE. But I've reached my own set limit, 45. I won't give more skills.
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 70 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's have almost no talking recorded which leaves me with 3 options.
1. Just let it be like that. Text can still be readen. Or don't place any NPCs with your custom race. The player doesn't speak anyway. 2. Pick another race from the voice menu.
I sticked 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.
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 part is for more advanced people who know modeling/textures or know how to import them. I am not one of those persons, so let's skip this part.
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 like 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 to dislike/like. If you use a negative number such as -5 your race will dislike them. 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!
Nethros 14:01, 10 December 2006 (EST)