Nordic Muscles

Nordic Muscles

Hey hey, Teslov here.

I spent the last few hours reverse-engineering, testing, importing, exporting, changing settings etc to figure out a way to modify characters in Oblivion Remastered. It's not that hard, if you ever made mods for other Unreal Engine 5 games the only thing you need to know is to import and export vertex colours in linear colorspace as these are used for hiding pieces of a mesh. Anyway, more about the process later.

This simple mod increases muscle definition of Nords slightly, makes them bulkier, and pretty much caked up. Why? I just thought it's the best way to showcase the process really, you can apply it to do any changes you want.

How?

Chapter 1 - Preparation and exploration

First, tools. To mod Unreal Engine 5 games, you need Unreal Engine 5. Oblivion uses UE5. 3, so grab UE5. 3. 2 from Epic Games Launcher.

For viewing, importing and exporting I use FModel, which is so good I genuinely thought it's a scam at first. But it's absolutely perfect.

Grab mappings from https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivionremastered/mods/47

Now you can open up FModel, click "Directory" in the top bar, choose "Selector", and "ADD UNDETECTED GAME".

Give it a name, and select base directory. Then press the nice, blue + button.

Now, when you choose it in the list above, switch UE Versions to "GAME_UE5_3".

Archive containing all data you are interested in is the ".utoc" file.

Now, Blender, just grab the newest version available, then download Unreal PSK/PSA extension, you can do that from "Edit->Preferences->Get Extensions".

That's it for the setup.

Chapter 2 - Exporting the files and editing them

Let's try doing the same exact kind of mod as the one posted here, so, character models are located in "Content->Art->Character->".

Find "nord" directory, click on it, and switch to "Packages" tab above.

There you'll have a lot of files, based on the prefix, you see:

• []MIC_ - Material Instance Constant

  []SK_ - Skeletal Mesh

  []T_ - Texture

Then, out of the important ones ( in "Content->Art->Character->Humanoid" directory ) you have:

• []PA_ - Physics Asset

• SKEL_ - Skeleton

Our goal is to edit the Skeletal Mesh WITHOUT touching any other files, especially not the shared ones ( PA_ and SKEL_ ).

Nords use underwear material from imperial directory btw, you can check that by double-clicking "SK_Nord_Body_m" and checking the "Sections" box.

Or, if you're feeling brave, just reading the file information