Adapting the Romance Mod for a Custom Race
It is possible to adjust the Romance elderscrolls nude patch for use with Custom Better Bodies Races. Doing so requires several free programs and some knowledge of modding or willingness to try. If you need more information on any of the topics this walkthrough covers, other tutorials are available.
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Customizing Races: What is Possible and What is Not Possible
The following will not work for complex Custom Races, including ones with hand-painted details (like AlienSlof’s), asymmetrical markings, glowmapped bodies, and features such as wings. The mother will look pregnant, but the process described below will not help you make the babies look like the mother. (We don’t have instructions for adding baby wings, for example. 😉 ) For races like these, you have two options: use the race of the father; or post a help thread on the Elder Scrolls Morrowind Mod forums, and hope that someone decides to create an add-on for that race. No modder is obliged to do so, however, and many modders have left Morrowind. You are probably better off picking your PC’s race carefully and making sure the father is of a race you can also easily adapt for the mod.
The following tutorial was written by Mandamus with some edits by Larissa Mem:
An Introduction to Customization:
I will start off with a general description of what we are going to do, and then describe things step by step. Those who have experience with texturing can skip this part of the tutorial.
Every object and person in Morrowind is made up of a mesh and a texture. For our purposes, you can think of the mesh as a wire frame that creates a certain shape. The texture is the covering draped over the frame that gives the object color.
To create the illusion of pregnant women, the romance mod uses seven different meshes for the various stages of pregnancy. These are all better bodies meshes (which incidentally explains why the mod does not support beast races. In France, Better Bodies for Beasts apparently is not a commonly used mod.) The textures go on top of these meshes. The mod already includes the seven meshes for the different stages of pregnancy attached to the textures for the standard races (except for Khajiits and Argonians.)
The mod also has a baby mesh and a texture for the head and neck, visible in the little bundle the baby is wrapped in.
If you want to change the race you are using, you will need to attach the custom race’s texture to the seven meshes (drape the special coloring for the race you want over the pregnant bellies, so the female PC from your custom race looks pregnant) and you will also need to add some color to the baby, so that the baby matches the mother. Obviously, you can do one of these and not the other—you can make the mother look pregnant, but leave the baby’s color alone. It’s your choice. This tutorial shows you how to do both.
Okay, let’s continue.
What You Will Need:
You will need the following programs:
NIFTexture (used to attach textures to meshes)—get it at
Irfanview (used to view and edit textures in .dds format)—get it at
.dds converter (used to turn a .tga file into a .dds file)—get it at
Changing the Appearance of the Mother:
I am going to explain what I would do if I wanted to use Faylynn’s purple Twilamer race with Romance.
1. When you finish the first step of the installation of the Romance Mod as described in the readme, the compressed “Other Races” folder should be in a temporary folder on your desktop. Extract the contents of that folder.
2. You will find a lot of subfolders inside, like “Dark Elf”, “High Elf”, and so on. You need to modify one of them make a “Twilamer Pack”. For this example, we are going to modify the “Orc Pack”.
3. Open the folder. You will find a folder called “Data files” folder, and inside it will be three more folders: “Icons,” “Meshes,” and “Textures”. Open “Meshes”, then “TLR,” and then “V”. Here you will find the 7 meshes that represent the bellies for the pregnant female PCs.
So, you will need to use NIFTexture to replace the textures on the seven pregnancy bellies. Using NIFTexture, open each of the seven (*nif files) in Other Races\Orc Pack\Data Files\Meshes\TLR\V and change this line :
“textures\bb\bb_skinf_br.dds”
(That line is the original orc skin texture.)
You will want to replace it with the name of the female skin texture for your new race, because you want that female skin on the meshes instead. To find that skin texture, look in the texture file of the race mod you are using. The name of the female Twilamer skin is:
“FAY_Twilamer_f_skins.dds”
and it looks like this :
How to Use NifTexture to Change the Texture for a Mesh—a Quick Tour
Open NIFTexture by clicking on NifTexture.exe and go to File: Open. Navigate to the Meshes in the Orc Pack in the temporary folder. You will see this:
These are the seven meshes mentioned. Click on “mand_ventreBR07.nif”. You will see the texture that is attached to it: “textures\bb\bb_skinf_br.dds”.
If you have installed the custom race you want to use, the replacement texture you are looking for will be in your own textures folder in your c:\Morrowind\Program Files\ Files\Bethesda Softworks\Morrowind\Data Files\Textures\ [modmaker name?] sub-folder (perhaps in a subfolder inside your textures file, or even a subfolder of a subfolder.)
Find the texture you want inside your texture folder, making sure to type in the entire path name (for example “textures\[subfoldername]\customracename.dds”).
When you are done press “Save as” and save it with the same name the mesh had before (i.e. , “mand_ventreBR07.nif”) but with the new texture attached. Repeat this for all seven meshes.
If you have trouble finding the name of the body texture for a custom race, post your question on the Elder Scrolls Forum and someone will be able to help you.
Creating a New Texture for the Baby
4. Now, open the “race pack”\Data files\textures\TLR\ folder. The next step is one of the difficult parts of this tutorial. You should see two *DDS files. These are the textures for the baby. As we said before, you have two options :
– if you think that the baby doesn’t need to have the Twilamer skin tone like its mother and can have the same skin tone as its father, who belongs to one of the stock races, then use the textures files included in the mod and choose the race pack for the father. It is the simpler solution, even if lore says that the baby is of the same race as its mother…
– if you think that the baby must have the “lavander” tone of a Twilamer—erm, cool—but it isn’t simple. You will need to recolor the two texture files for the baby.
Download the program “Irfanview” at Irfanview.com, and also the plugin needed to read DDS files at
Using this program, you can now open the texture files. For each one, you need to use this function of Irfanview : “images/enhance colors”.
A new windows appears. Play with all the settings to recolor the texture so that the skin tone is what you want it to be:
The new problem is, Irfanview can open dds files but not save them ! So, save each texture with the same name as before, in .tga format.
Now, you need to convert the files back to .dds format. If you don’t know how to do this, then download this :
http://rapidshare.de/files/28681331/dds.zip.html
Extract, and put the two little programs in the same folder than the two .tga files you need to convert. Double-click on the prog with the green icon, then on the other one. A new folder called “dds” is created, with your two textures in dds format !
5. You are almost done now. Open the “race pack”\Data files\Icons\TLR\ folder. The icon here is for the baby in the inventory. Honestly, it doesn’t really matter if it doesn’t have the same skin color as your baby, since the icon is so small… You can use Irfanview to change it, but you may lose the transparency by doing this, so it’s not worth the work I think.
6- Now, you should have finished your custom race pack. Finish the installation as it is explained in the readme and you should be able to enjoy the mod with your Twilamer pack—or whatever custom race you are using.
Again, feel free to ask for help, and remember, because of limitations of the mod, the pregnancy meshes included don’t support glowmapped or asymmetrical bodies. If you want to use races that have glowmaps or asymmetrical markings, you will probably need to see if the modder or someone is willing to adapt the race for the mod (or vice-versa. J)
Hope this helps!
– Mandamus and Larissa Mem