Hey guys,

I could use a few pointers on how to create a good looking imperial woman. Preafbly with sliders. I am not a fan of mods so prefably without those.

Cheers,

G

It's difficult.

The way the lighting is on the creation screen and without the inability turn the character around, Bethesda made it tough.

Not even a way to zoom in or change the camera amgle.

I don't know why we don't have a chance to remake or adjust our character just as we exit Helgen Keep. They did it in Oblivion and Fallout 3...but oh well.

Oh... in reply to your original question... it took me many reloads and restarts. Just gotta take your time and hope the when you hit the finish button and she loads up, she actually looks like she did when you made her.

The following guide does talk about some mods, but for the most part, it shows you how to get the most out of the stock game's settings. Also, they have added a slider database so that you can see how some NPCs were made, and use that as a starting point.

http://j-u-i-c-e.hubpages.com/hub/better-looking-characters

Patience mostly, and fine control over the sliders themselves. I use the arrow keys to make smaller, more incremental changes. The mouse doesn't offer very good control when it comes to making tiny tweaks.

A good picture in your head of what you want the character to look like definitely helps, too. With my character, I had a very clear image of what I wanted to her look like before I started--right down to how high her cheekbones were and the shape of her nose. (Yes, I am kind of OCD. I'm also a writer, and the character in question was meant to be a relative of my Morrowind/Oblivion character, so I had a good template to work from.)

It took a retexture to make her look a bit younger and tidy up some of the dirt, and then later on I finally tracked down a hair mod to get the reality tweaked to really match that mental image I had of the character, but even right off the bat I think I did all right. (For reference, http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/505764575224791898/5EC63BC7D239D713AE502951DEFB1D9C8753E7CB/ with just the skin retexture. And then later, when I http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/505766656299100703/6BE6F7735A60409072C8184D55A28DCF4BD7B730/)

You may really want to look into even a simple skin retexture if you'd prefer a character without wrinkles, dirt, etc., since most of the sliders won't eliminate those completely. Otherwise, you'll have to work the best with what you've got. That's really the only advice I can give, since everyone's image of "good looking" is different. Start with an image of what you want the character to look like and work off that.

And don't forget patience. I spent 45+ minutes tweaking and making minute adjustments to various sliders before I finally declared it done. I'm very, very happy with the results though, so all that time and patience does pay off.


You can grab the character's face and turn it side to side with the mouse, for the record. At least that way you see what they'll look like from varying angles.

Time and patience it took me two hours to create my last female character but it was worth it.

http://i252.photobucket.com/albums/hh12/daveclisle/2012-03-21_12-25-26_82.jpg

http://i252.photobucket.com/albums/hh12/daveclisle/2012-03-21_12-24-09_18.jpg

She does look a little different cause she is a stage 4 vamp

This is my imperial

http://i252.photobucket.com/albums/hh12/daveclisle/2012-02-27_15-34-17_978.jpg

The reason i dont much use mods is that i sometimes have a little difficulty running a smooth game. Especially in water areas, if not only. So if u know a few mods who do help but wont slow me down more, i would be open for suggestions.

Cheers,

G.

Skyrim is actually doing a bad job on character creation. I can make good looking faces male or female no problem without mod. But in skyrim, there are two critical issue which makes its almost impossible to make good faces.

Face texture matter the most, no matter how good your face proportion is, the face texture makes you like a middle aged person. Slider also very bad. In Oblivion you can modify the chin forward backward without moving the lower lip, now in skyrim the more you push the chin forward the more underbite your face. There are more similar cases which make face making very bad IMO. I end up use mods to make my characters look younger.

Like the poster above has said patience.I make a note of all my settings and adjust them accordingly if i dont like the look when i exit Helgen.
The problem is the look of your character changes when you exit Helgen so dont make your mind up and restart while still in the castle - wait til you can see them outside before deciding what to change.

My assasin female looks great (gave her the typical ''dark'' appearance), did not took me a long time though.
She looks around 23 or something. I have spent most of the time adjusting the wide of the chin and cheekbone.
Otherwise then that i felt perfectly fine with it.

Hm. Well, you can try http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=58. That's the retexture mod I mentioned that I use. It's pluginless, and all it does is take away the dirt/wrinkles and makes the faces a little less blocky. The textures are uncompressed, but they're still of smaller sizes than the other two body mods that have come out since (UNP and I forget the second), so it should be less of a performance hit than those mods if there's even any at all.

If you find it does impact your performance, you can always remove the files and go back to the vanilla, no harm, no foul. But it's worth a shot if you can't get a character you're happy with with the vanilla textures.

I went for the easy way with a preset 2 Nord and some tweaks on 360... see sig.

Impossible to achieve on consoles as their is no option for red hair. Unbelievable.