SkyrimForge

For the last day of our three day mod feature, we take a look at a texture mod that seeks to make Skyrim an even more beautiful place by improving one of the most important aspects of the game – the people of Skyrim themselves.  Just like the previous days, we were lucky enough to get an interview with this author to understand the process behind its creation.

Be sure to look at both Day 1 and Day 2 of our feature as well to get caught up if you haven’t already!

Detailed Bodies

Be sure to click the above image for a higher resolution one, as it’s difficult to see just how much of a difference it makes in the thumbnail!

Xenius01 – normally known as just ‘Xenius’ – is no stranger to the modding community, having created quite a number of well-respected character and race mods for Oblivion.  Skyrim is no exception for this author, as he has already pushed out texture replacements for just about all features of the various races of Tamriel.  Even more impressive is that they are all meant to work together, making truly seamless and complete textures become a reality.

Detailed Bodies takes all non-beast races (although he’s got a mod for that, too!) and their vanilla textures, and then goes and doubles them.  Specular maps got a rework too, making these textures look as high-res as they actually are.  This means that bodies are smoother, more detailed, and all the blockiness (and most of the artifacts) have been removed.

Below are Xenius01’s thoughts on the creation process and the ideas behind his work.

How much work goes into making the vanilla textures higher res?

Xenius01: For me it didn’t take that much time, since modding and creating textures is nothing new to me. For Oblivion I’ve made a lot of custom races which mostly involved creating unique skin textures. Due to that I already had the skills and resources to improve Skyrim’s textures.

It’s hard to say exactly how much time it took as I didn’t count it, I’d say a few hours and that’s without testing and creating updates to improve on it, so all in all it would be a lot more than that.

Also I made this after I created the Detailed Faces mod, so I mostly knew how it would look in the game and how the lighting would affect the textures, which saved time as well. The reason for creating the Detailed Bodies was to make the bodies fit better to the Detailed Faces. The original body textures were already quite high resolution compared to the face textures, so that was not the most important reason for doing this.

In your opinion, what’s the most difficult aspect of Skyrim to retexture?

Xenius01: I mostly focus on character design and custom races. For me the most difficult aspect to improve would be the game world: architecture, landscape, plants, dungeons, and stuff like that. Most modders focus on one specific area (so others may find character design the most difficult), and for me that’s character design, although I’ve done a few other things before like weapons and clothing (textures only).

Can you tell us about any mods you have planned for the future?

Xenius01: I still have to update some of my mods here on SkyrimForge, also I created a compilation consisting of all of my character enhancements, this package will be available soon. It is meant for those who use all of my stuff and to make things easier by only having to download and update one file instead of a bunch of small ones.

Once the Creation Kit is available I also plan to start creating custom races for Skyrim, just like I did for Oblivion.