Please help, CK clueless noob alert - translation and body mod alert

[Ginnyfizz]

Hello TESAlliance people - I know there's a lot of knowledgeable people on here and you were able to really help me last time I asked a stupid noob question, and you were all really nice too!

Generally, I managed fine with the Oblivion CS and even the GECK for FO3 and New Vegas to some extent. But I have been unable to find a tutorial anywhere that explains quite what I want to know, a lot of them assume more knowledge of the CK than I have.

How this was all sparked off was by the fact that I decided to change my female body mod. I had been using the beautiful e55 which I beta tested, but the support in terms of clothing was not there. One of the great things about Skyrim is that you can have different bodies for races if you like, I have some custom races that use UNP but I decided to settle on the Lady Body by the Russian modder KrisTi for my vanilla race replacer.

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/15416

This mod has an .esp because the female body meshes are called "Ladybody_0.nif" etc. It's good in a way because it means that if you were to want to change back to your previous mesh, you would only have to overwrite the textures and also the clothing replacers. However, let's say that the English .esp is somewhat "lost in translation". And it does not work unless it is at the very bottom of the load order - I've tried.

The most fundamental issue this caused was that all vanilla races were missing their text data and the race name, which showed up in game as "Lookup failed!" This issue I managed to solve by using Maborishi Daikon's marvellous little Skyrim string localizer utility to embed the Skyrim English strings into the plugin. Emilie is now proud to be a Breton again, Inari a Dunmer and Aredhel a Bosmer.

However, I still have some not game breaking, but thoroughly annoying issues. All the road signs and all the inn and shop signs are still in Russian, Cyrillic script. As I see it I have some alternatives;-

1) Find out how to make the signs in English again - but I cannot work out how to do this in the CK. Can anyone advise me, or link me another tool that will translate everything fully?

2) Somehow remove everything except the body edits from the esp (advised to me by a modder who does not mod Skyrim and doesn't know the CK) - so again, I would need a walkthrough

3) Make a totally fresh plugin from the Skyrim.esm that will be in English and makes the same edits to the female body as the ones that the original plugin does. Unfortunately, I cannot for the life of me work out how you assign meshes and textures in the CK - another walkthrough needed.

I haven't been able to find tutorials anywhere that can tell me what to do, starting from the very beginning. Like, right after you have loaded the plugin in the CK. Sorry for the wall of text, but I know that the really knowledgeable folks hang out on here, so I am appealing to you!

[ThomasKaira]

In the CK, body data is stored in the Race records. What you can do is open the mod's Details up in the CK (click Details instead of Load at the plugin load window), and it will provide you a list of all the records the ESP contains. If the mod contains any records that do not belong to the group RACE, select them and press Delete to Ignore flag those records, than load up the plugin in the CK. The CK will delete any records that are Ignore flagged automatically.

[Ginnyfizz]

I'll load the CK and try that.

The mod also alters some clothes, what about those records?

[ThomasKaira]

I'd keep those, too. Clothing is part of the ARMO group.

Edited June 25, 2012 by ThomasKaira

[Ginnyfizz]

Urgh.

Clueless noob strikes again.

Well, I have managed to actually create a race mod with some new custom races. My girls are playable and looking good. But there are a few things I obviously am not getting.

I have set up some new custom hairs within my esp and made them for AllRacesMinusBeast.

But they are not appearing on my custom races.

Also, how do I add additional headparts such as eyebrows?