UNP & Better Males

First of all, my apologies for the semi-extended absence. I recently took on new employment, so it's been eating away a lot of my free time. Shouldn't be a huge problem after this week, though.

Today I'm actually going to talking about a mod that I'm not completely fond of, which is kind of a first for me on here. I generally only like to give recommendations, but I felt compelled to cover this one in detail anyway since I sadly will be forced to use it until I find something better. Both mods I'll be discussing are body and face enhancers. I didn't have any major complaints with the default bodies (a first for The Elder Scrolls), but the improvements that mod authors have made to them are just too astounding to ignore.

The first of the two that I'm going to talk about is the one I'm not entirely happy with. The mod is called UNP, which is a body replacer for females. The author did a lot of previous work with the Fallout modding community, and I liked the images I've seen of people using the mod, so I figured that I would enjoy it. And it's true that the body is very nice and much more beautiful than the vanilla one. However, installing a body replacer comes with the sad consequence of finding a good face replacer to match. If the two don't work well together, you find yourself with a dreadful neck seam that always feels impossible to ignore. Because of this, I found myself with no better option than to use the author's face textures. Sadly, I was very disappointed. I wanted the faces to have less worry lines and bags under the eyes, but these textures make the characters look more like plastic dolls than actual people. I have no problem with semi-artificial beauty when it comes to in-game characters, but when all the lines on the face are completely invisible, the image takes a turn for the worse from pretty to shocking. Needless to say, I intend on making another blog post in the future that will feature female faces with realistic detail.

On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, I was amazed at how much I loved the improvements made by Better Males. The author compiled the perfect combination of face and body mods for men and arranged them beautifully. Each of the races are improved in such a way that their original feel is maintained. I couldn't be happier with the result. Take a look at the video to see what I mean about both of these mods.

I know I just focused on the faces, but that's generally what I look at to determine whether the mod makes enough change to make the mod worth installing. The body improvements for men that I chose to install only affected the skin texture and the detail of the hands and feet. There are things that I definitely pay attention to in-game but generally don't when looking at screenshots and the like. If you disagree with what I said about UNP or are wondering what the body looks like, you check that out and download it from here. And if Better Males looks like just what you were looking for, you can get that from here. Neither are available on Steam Workshop due to the nude options for both body replacers.

I would love to say that next time I'll be covering a better female face replacer that works well with the UNP body, but I'm not sure how likely it is that I'll find one or whether it'd be a good idea to waste a whole blog post on it. I'll probably include my findings in a compilation post at the end of the month. I'm almost done covering atmospheric enhancements, so watch out for posts about new content for the game in the very near future. Until next time.