Hello,

I'm kind of new to modding and was wondering if someone with more experience might be able to tell me what I'm doing wrong. Basically, I'd like to fix a number of female characters (Lydia, Jordis, Mjoll, etc.) who are using male animations. I thought I could simply go into the properties for each female actor and uncheck "Opposite gender anims", but this doesn't seem to work. Even if I uncheck "opposite gender anims" for the affected characters in a new .esp and then put that .esp at the very bottom of my load order, the characters still refuse to use the proper animations. Strangely, I can change their gender in the .esp without any problem and that shows up in game just fine. But the animations absolutely refuse to switch. Does anyone know what else needs to be done?

Thanks!

Have you tried starting a new game and seeing if your changes have taken effect? If they have, your mod works, but not with an existing saved game.

It's nearly unnoticeable.

It might be a racial thing, and not necessarily an NPC to NPC thing. It could be that female Nords are all set to the male animation set rather than the female one, though I'm not completely certain if this is the case.

Also, while we are talking about animations, does anyone know how to change the backwards swimming animation? All my characters have been using the wrong animation when swimming backwards since at least Patch 1.5, and it's been driving me crazy. I've sworn I have observed the werewolf race using a different animation when swimming backwards (should double-check on this), it's just they for some reason didn't care enough to get it working properly for all races. If for some reason there is no vanilla animation for backwards swimming, then I guess the whole thing is sunk unless someone is able to produce one.

The hulking gorilla animations of some of the women bother me to no end too. I read somewhere that it may be because they are classed as warriors but haven't tried changing that as a fix.

As already suggested, you have to start a new game to make this effect appear. To test it, just uncheck Lydia's "Initially Disabled" button and coc from main menu straight into Dragon's Reach and you will see that it works fine. But to make it look more natural I would reduce her weight too, which is set to 100 to make her look like a trained warrior.

Awesome! Thank you to everyone who told me the fix. I didn't realize that changes like this could only take effect in a new game, so that's definitely good to know!

If you reduce her weight, be sure to export her facegen data to reflect the change.