Creepy Zombies Visual Update

There are two mods that add in new enemies that I think are severely underrated:  Creepy Zombies and Ring Summon Faithful Gear Knight. Unlike the

latter mod, Creepy Zombies does not utilize whatever retexture mods you have installed, so the zombies use gear and clothing with vanilla textures.

Additionally, the textures used in the mod are very low resolution and can look extremely out of place in a heavily modded setup.

So, my first step was redirecting all the texture paths in all the nifs to reflect vanilla skyrim locations, so retextures for clothes, armor, hair, etc. for the zombies would be HD after you install retextures.

However, for the custom textures more work was necessary. I initially tried combinations of Automatic Texture Upgrader (using Skysight Skins as a

base) and ESRGAN AI upscaling. The results were pretty good, but the gore kept losing a lot of detail, making the increase in resolution not worth it IMO.

I finally tried Gigapixel AI, and it did an amazing job at upscaling all of the textures except for the male faces (which in CZ are lower res than the female faces). Even so, the gore parts of the texture were much cleaner than with ESRGAN or Automatic Texture Upgrader. So I decided to go with it. Using Automatic Texture Upgrader on these upscaled male faces yielded great results, but still had their own artifacts (e.g. epidermal skin patterns and hair detail showing in the wounds). IMO, it was not worth the effort and the artifacts would not be to everyone’s “taste”, so I decided the upscaled male faces were good enough, despite still being lower res than everything else that is now also upscaled.

Automatic Texture Upgrader did a fantastic job transferring the detail from Amidianborn Skeleton textures to CZ, however. The artifacts are minimal since CZ’s skeleton textures were basically just red colored versions of the vanilla skeleton.

Also included are some assets from The Eyes of Beauty (the blind eye textures), mature skin (for everything but the diffuse maps), and Skysight Skins (also for everything but the diffuse maps). These were not redirected to vanilla texture paths because body mods are so prevalent and could cause issues

with the zombie meshes (they would need to be altered as well).  Eye textures have a much lower risk of this problem, but I didn’t feel like going through all the nifs to redirect the eye textures and the Eyes of Beauty have asset use permissions open… so it was easier just to use them.

In conclusion, I think my mod is a definite upgrade visually from the original CZ (which is required because my mod is only edited meshes and

textures). However, it would be really cool if a texture artist either recreated the zombie textures from scratch, or used the upscales as a base and touched them up.

Permissions:

Everything has open use permissions except for one (maybe two) p