High Poly + ECE + SAM morphs = Best male character creation tool

[axland 41]

I honestly think that a version of ECE actualized with SAM sliders and high poly assets could be the best male character tool for Skyrim. That would give the player a near total control over their character body and head. I some of you may know I don't use Racemenu at all because I like to tailor my chars ingame. With racemenu I must use other tools more frequently to get marginally better results.

1 Low Poly vanilla ECE

2 High Poly. Char edited with ECE and then imported to Racemenu (no other way to get this appearance)

 

[SavrenX 10,323]

15 hours ago, axland said:

I honestly think that a version of ECE actualized with SAM sliders and high poly assets could be the best male character tool for Skyrim. That would give the player a near total control over their character body and head. I some of you may know I don't use Racemenu at all because I like to tailor my chars ingame. With racemenu I must use other tools more frequently to get marginally better results.

1 Low Poly vanilla ECE

2 High Poly. Char edited with ECE and then imported to Racemenu (no other way to get this appearance)

It's not about TOOLS but about SKILLS. If you use ECE since beginning you can create anything with it because you now how to use ECE more than anyone. But to say ECE can make better result I think not. Even with Racemenu I'm fine creating my own imagined character.

Young...mature or elder...just the same.

Even without ECE I'm fine making pretty boy too.

[axland 41]

2 hours ago, SavrenX said:

It's not about TOOLS but about SKILLS. If you use ECE since beginning you can create anything with it because you now how to use ECE more than anyone. But to say ECE can make better result I think not. Even with Racemenu I'm fine creating my own imagined character.

Young...mature or elder...just the same.

Even without ECE I'm fine making pretty boy too.

I agree... to some extent. In one interview Jimi Hendrix said that he played electric guitar because it was a dumb instrument easy to master, it's not really totally true but we can get the idea. To me ECE is like an electric guitar and I agree with you that mastering the tools is the job almost done if you know where to go. But in the end when I navigated the pages of Nexus (where 90% of NPC are waifus, I know) I found only a handful of NPC males that I could consider handsome. For the sake of realism I understand that it is not "lorefriendly" to have a game of supermodels running with bikini armors on the snowy mountains, and I like some equilibrium, not supermodels girls and rude nords ugly as hell... XD

I'm rambling. The thing is very few, almost none, of the males generated with Racemenu seems me handsome, sorry. I'm not expert in Racemenu so I can't say 100% if the problem are the modelers or the tool. But certainly without ECE I have a hard time without touching meshes like crazy, so there is a problem, and the output in Nexus seems to confirm that, as far I can remember the only Racemenu preset I liked is a very old one https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/67951?tab=posts and that's a long shot. In Vectorplexus  I found several good males made by people that clearly know what are doing, but also I know they are extensively modded ingame and out. That's why I talked about players, not dedicated modders.

I plan to create several chars and one is a middle aged man, perhaps there I will appreciate more Racemenu, but now that we have high poly meshes I tremble with the idea of editing them there. In ECE you have control of the skeleton in a way that Racemenu can't, that's why I'm sure that adding SAM, Samson and Samuel sliders would be the ice in the cake. Also I'm sure that having High Poly enabled in ECE could be a shortcut to get nice males with some clicks.

I know, 90% of players look for the 90% of the waifus premade in Nexus and that's one of the reasons why ECE it is not very appreciated.

And for god's sake, not having sliders for the neck in Racemenu is a crime.

[SavrenX 10,323]

1 hour ago, axland said:

I'm rambling. The thing is very few, almost none, of the males generated with Racemenu seems me handsome, sorry. I'm not expert in Racemenu so I can't say 100% if the problem are the modelers or the tool. But certainly without ECE I have a hard time without touching meshes like crazy, so there is a problem, and the output in Nexus seems to confirm that, as far I can remember the only Racemenu preset I liked is a very old one https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/67951?tab=posts and that's a long shot. In Vectorplexus  I found several good males made by people that clearly know what are doing, but also I know they are extensively modded ingame and out. That's why I talked about players, not dedicated modders.

 

If you're talking about your own taste, don't make a formula like using certain tools to get good results. Because the facts are not like that.

From your perspective, maybe the other person's character is not good. But are you sure that your own character is good for everyone with all your formulas ? Are you sure your creation is superior to others because of ECE and they all agree ? definitely not.

My point is, just create your own fun mod in your own way and let other people create it in their own way. 

[axland 41]

2 hours ago, SavrenX said:

If you're talking about your own taste, don't make a formula like using certain tools to get good results. Because the facts are not like that.

From your perspective, maybe the other person's character is not good. But are you sure that your own character is good for everyone with all your formulas ? Are you sure your creation is superior to others because of ECE and they all agree ? definitely not.

My point is, just create your own fun mod in your own way and let other people create it in their own way. 

Of course is a question of personal taste, and that's a valid point for everyone, no exceptions.

Savren, I guess you miss the point. I'm saying that the output of Racemenu seems to confirm me that it's not that easy to get satisfactory results with it, and that's from a player point of view like me, not an expert modder. And that's why I'm advocating for such combo, because I honestly think that makes all the work faster and easier. Simply looking at the sliders, not the mesh editor, I see that ECE has fewer but more meaningful options.

To put a practical example I was testing COTR and I found that I needed to force sliders to reach some particular trait, perhaps because I'm used to ECE, possibly, the thing is that I was looking with the right eye the meshes and I decided that it was not worth the effort. Racemenu was constraining me to the style of faces of COTR and I was not willing to touch meshes. If not existing the SAM sliders my statement would be more hard saying that Racemenu it's not a good tool making males. In ECE I can decide proportions, position, thickness of almost every body part I even managed to make a presentable body with vanilla Ygnord, you know what I'm talking about. The only lacking features are not allowing to modify the cranial area (something that forces me to touch meshes), which Racemenu also cannot do evidently because scalps and hairs, the edition of male sex because it was not designed with that in mind (ten minutes in Nifskope) and the change of body type like SAM morphs do to some extent. And here I insist that hopefully we have SAM as a body with several flavors so in the end we have something good to use in Racemenu, (and ECE), but the faces, the heads, that's another history.

I put an example of the vanilla PC editor of Elite Dangerous to add salt to the injury because it's not bad at all, within their limitations, despite the player will rarely see the face of their char.

On the other hand I have nothing to say about females because with such terrible profusion you have horrible ones and pieces of art, but seems me players have plenty of options to choose starting from presets and ending in body types all made to work with Racemenu, so in fact they do not need to edit almost nothing, simply pick something they like and retouch here or there and done.

That's not the case for males, just my five cents.