Custom race CM Companion by Jin1

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As recommended by a friendly moderator :)

The original word document and my CM Companions can be found for download here.

Overview

I’ve had a few questions asked about my custom race CM companions, so, instead of responding in detail to each on how to edit them or create their own, I thought having a tutorial on hand would be simpler.

I’ve divided this into 3 parts so that even if you have no modding experience it will flow smoothly.

I. Creating a CM Partner

II. Making your new Partner a Custom Race CM Partner

III. Editing for sharing

Note: This tutorial is not meant to replace or copy other guides, or in any way besmirch or belittle others, but rather be a means as a ‘quicker’ way to jump straight in to creating custom race companions, as it can be tedious. If you find a problem with this tutorial, just let me know. ;)

Highly recommended

Read or at least skim over the “CM Partners Creating Custom Partners” guide provided in the CM Partners zip file. (as well as the guide it links to, about creating custom race partners.)Those will also serve as a troubleshooting guide should you run into problems.


Part I. Creating a CM Partner

Required Tools: TES Construction Set


First, there is a wealth of information in those two readme’s to keep you entertained with modifying your companion, spells (custom spells!), birthsigns, all that good stuff… but before we get into that, I’ll show you just how easy it is to make a custom companion.


Open up TES Construction Set, check the CM Partners.esm and CM Partners.esp and click OK. When prompted that ‘you have not set an active file’ click Yes to continue (we’re not editing those, but creating a new esp).

Now click on the Nord race on your left hand side. Click male. Find the NPC designated as cmWinden. Doubleclick or rightclick>edit, and change his Form ID to cmNewpartner and just under that give it a new name.

(from here you can edit his class, give him new spells, change his animations, looks, etc. but lets just keep it simple for now since all the AI packages etc are already in the copied Form File you’re about to create.)


Click OK after editing, and when prompted to create a new form, click Yes. This will make your editing a new file. Before we can save it, though, we need to place him into the Oblivion world.


On your right hand side, there should be a window called Cell View, click on that and locate Anvil Mages Guild. Double-click on that and it will open up in your Render Window. Use the up, down, left, right keys (usually just 1 down and 1 left will center it).

Now zoom in using the mouse wheel until you can see the NPC below. Drag your new cmNewpartner form onto the render window and let go, click yes that you don’t care that it’s a quest item. You can now click the character and move him around, center him, and press F, this will drop him down to the floor, or whatever is beneath him.

Click save and save the new esp as cmNewpartner or whatever you want.

Now just activate the esp from your Oblivion Launcher>Data Files (or OBMM or Wyre Bash), load the game, and find your new partner!


Part II.Creating Custom Race Partners

Required Tools:

TES Construction Set

Wyre Bash*

Note: getting Wyre Bash to run under certain operating systems can be difficult, there are many ways to do this, so I’ll let you decide which method you prefer.


On to business…

Now that you already have created a new CM Companion and Wyre Bash installed, this next part will be easy. ;)


Open up Wyre Bash and find the custom race esp of your choice..

For this example, I’ll use Chocolate Elves.esp

Right click the esp and click “Copy to Esm”. And add a check next to your new Chocolate Elves.esm to make it active.

Now that you have a Master file of chocolate elves, we can add the master dependency to our cmNewpartner.

Rightclick your cmNewpartner and click “add master” and find the Esm.

Now open the construction set back up, and set your cmNewpartner as the active file. Click ok and it should load the now dependant Esm as well.

Up at the top, click Characters and go to Race.

Find the Race Chocolate Elves and click Duplicate. Move the slider (at the top of the Race window on the left) over a bit so can see which is now the copy (should be the bottom one).

Now, you can add a voice set to your new chocolate elves if you wish, (it seems that only certain voice sets will work, Imperial and Redgaurd that I know of), or you can change the races height, weight, textures, etc.

Click ok, and go back to your Nord male cmNewpartner, and edit him again, this time change your cmNewpartners Race to the ChocolateElfCOPY000. Click save, and reload the esp again by clicking folder icon, “Load Master/Plugin Files” and just click ok.

That will apply the change for his race and you should now see a chocolate elf race in the left hand side with your new partner listed within. Note that he will look pretty funny since the face was originated from an ugly Nord… change it how you see fit.

Save the file again, and load up Oblivion to check the changes.

If all goes well, there’s your new chocolate elf cm companion. ;)


Now… if you want to keep him just for personal use, it’s fine just like it is (from my experience anyway).

But, if you want to clean it up a bit, and make it so that you can share the partner, we’ll need to go through a few more steps for the eyes and hair.


Part III.Sharing your new custom race CM

Required Tools:

TES Construction Set

Wyre Bash*

First, go into Wyre Bash and select your cmNewpartners esp, in the right hand side you’ll see that it’s still dependent upon that Esm we created, so right click the chocolate elves.esm on that on the Right hand side, and click change. Change it to the chocolate elves.esp and save it.

Now, if you’re going to be sharing it, youll need to copy and add the eyes and hair into your new custom race.

This much is simple, but first, preview and note the names of the eyes and hair that you wish to duplicate from your characters edit window.

Now go to the Characters/Race/Chocolate ElvesCOPY000->Body Data(tab), And open the Characters/Eyes and Charactars/Hair menus, drag the windows around as you see fit to view them all, and duplicate the eyes and hair you like, then drag and drop the duplicated items into the respective windows.

Make sure to open your characters edit window again and select the copied eyes and hair, Click save. Close the progam.

You may want to load Oblivion up from here to make sure everything is going smooth.

Now that you’ve added/duplicated hair and eyes, you’ll want to make sure that there are no dependencies from Wyre Bash (aside from Oblivion and CMPartners Esm’s. Do this by opening Wyre Bash to check if Chocolate Elves is still a depenancy in the right hand side. If it is…

Open construction set again, make your cmNewparter the active and ONLY selected file and click Ok. Once there, click the save button and close it. This should strip the former dependency. Open Wyre Bash to make sure. If all goes well, now you can share your file.


Note: As I was making this tutorial I followed it step by step as well, so I shouldn’t have missed any steps. Also, I am in no way stating this is the best/easiest way to create custom race partners, if you know of any tips, tricks, or better methods, please do share.

This Tutorial was written for the audience at Tesnexus.com.

Related pages

CM Partners How to make one with a custom race