My first little project is to add a new playable race, basically a copy of the Altmer race, to apply a body tattoo texture to my character alone instead of everybody in the game.
I created a bunch of new texture sets, duplicated the body parts and made form lists for them, added my new race to the form lists that decide what hair and eyes are available for it ... and actually got it all to work ... until I noticed my high elf copy is now using a human head. She has the “round” human face geometry and normal human ears. Eek!

Even before I got my hands on the CK I was wondering why there were no ear meshes and only one single set of head mesh files ... I think I know now:

I get this error message when trying to preview my race: FACEGEN: Could not find (and apply) race morph 'TEFHighElfRace' in TRI file 'Actors\Character\Character Assets\FaceParts\FemaleHeadBrowsRace.tri' for Geometry FemaleHeadBrows.

TEFHighElfRace is my new races editor ID. It seems all the race specific morphs for the humanoid head are stored in a single file, referenced by the editor ID. That would also explain why those ears look rather ... ugly.

I redid my race from scratch, dropping my usual TEF prefix and using a suffix instead, hoping the game would use the best matching name (since all the races exist as ...Vampire too). But no dice. Same error.

Does this mean that adding new races that recycle a vanilla head will always require tinkering with a bunch of binary TRI files? Eek?! Or maybe I overlooked something?

Anyway, I am happy the CK is finally here. So much to do

This caught me up too, let me know if http://www.creationkit.com/Tutorial_Creating_a_Playable_Race helps? I've gotten really terrible at writing tutorials.
The big thing is to set Morph and Armor race in the general tab of your race to match what you've copied from.

You are awesome, Throttlekitty! Thank you. Yes, that helped. A lot.

Changing “Morph Race” under “Copied Data” to “HighElfRace” fixed the head morph issue. ...imagine I was actually brooding over those TRI files in a HEX editor just now. I owe you one.

Now I just need to figure out how to get armor to render on my new race without changing “Copied Data → Armor Race” to something other than “None”. Until now I had not even realized that armor would not render on my new race.
I cannot use the “copy” option because doing so would make the whole exercise pointless since it forces my custom race back into using the default/generic skin texture ... and I want my own.

I didn't actually go that far in my tests, though I should/will, there has been so much to do! (and now i'm very sick, boo hoo) You should be able to keep Armor Race for wearing armor, create a TextureSet and HeadPart (head) for your race with the custom textures.

edit: yes, also needed to select the new head from the dropdown for "face" in the Face Data tab of the race window.

Editing the tri for a custom race was actually pretty easy, all things considered. Just had to create a new morph with the same name as the EditorID for the race in the tri. CK picked it up automagically.

Well, I am stomped.

The armor race override seems to include the “Skin” armor selected in the Body Data tab too, no matter what I try.
Since my unique body texture is defined in the SkinNaked armor for my custom race, using the armor race override overrides this definition as well. Instead of using my unique body texture, I am back to using whatever texture is set for the naked “armor race”.

A solution that works is to set “armor race” to “none” and manually editing every single armor item to include model data for my new custom race. Quite a chore (and a mod compatibility nightmare) but it works. Skin textures in the armor model are automagically replaced with my custom textures.

... since I mod for myself I can just edit those armors I actually use as I go ... and there are some you wouldn't even catch me wearing while dead ...

I actually really like this new approach of assigning different model/texture combinations for each race and gender. Its quite cool. But unless I overlooked some function, creating a new race where the only difference is a new body texture, compared to the Oblivion and Fallout editors, its quite a chore.

Oh! And adding working vampirism for a completely new race is a adventure too ... but nothing new there

I started to look into that as well, but got severly sidetracked. Is there any trick that mannequins use?

As far as I can tell, there is no “trick” involved with the mannequins ... except severe misspelling.

Those (scripted) actors are all of the “ManakinRace” and every single playable armor item has specific model data for the “ManakinRace”.

Anyone knows where the "Valid Races" list is located so i can add my own Race to the list?