RUSTIC CHILDREN

RUSTIC CHILDREN is my attempt to retexture the children of Skyrim in a way that makes them more realistic and more lore-friendly. It's obvious to anyone who's played Skyrim, that children were a very low priority for Bethesda. Why that is, is anyone's guess. What's always bothered me about the children was not only their unattractiveness, but how they didn't really resemble the adults at all. Not just their faces, but their clothing as well. The children look as if they were ported from another game entirely.

In fact, that is exactly the case. These are not the children of Skyrim, they are from the older generation of Bethesda games. The children don't have model-space normal maps for their heads and bodies like the adults, they have regular normal maps, like the older Bethesda games. These children have the same textures as you'll see in Fallout. What's worse, Skyrim doesn't even have unique sets for the two sexes like those earlier games did. There's a reason all the kids look alike... they're all using the male child textures. There's only one texture in the female child folder, and that's the male body texture with a different style of underwear. Therefore, the females are using the male body normal map, which is awkward to say the least. Fortunately, your children should be clothed at all times, so this will go unnoticed.

There have been a number of excellent children overhaul mods on Nexus, and they have been popular for obvious reasons. Who wouldn't want to be rid of those cabbage patch/troll doll abominations? But, these mods have not worked well for everyone. They tend to be rather complex, with new meshes and textures that require an .esp and often multiple patches. Even then, they won't be compatible with certain other mods you may be using. I personally tried a number of these children overhaul mods, but I always ran into problems.

That's what led me to create RUSTIC CHILDREN. I wanted to see if it was possible to improve the appearance of the children significantly by just retexturing them. No new meshes, no .esp files, just a simple retexture that anyone could use. Something that wouldn't require a bunch of patches for other mods. That is what I've done.

UPDATE: I added download options for just the face and body textures for people who are using the children clothing textures in my RUSTIC CLOTHING mod.

Gone are the pubescent Klingon head ridges, the bulbous noses, the swollen lips, and the perpetual frowns. These are lore-friendly children that look like that might've actually come from the same species as the adults. Since the boys and girls share the same