Oblivion

About this mod

A comprehensive, all-in-one revamp of Oblivion character heads. New head shapes, skin textures, normal maps, eye textures and some new hairstyles covering all races in the game, including Dremoras and Shivering Isles races, all built to a single unified art direction that adheres to the styles of Skyrim and TESO. Affects both player and NPCs.

Requirements
Permissions and credits
Translations
  • Spanish
  • Russian
  • Polish
  • Italian
  • German
  • French


READ THE DESCRIPTION AND INSTRUCTIONS CAREFULLY BEFORE YOU EVEN DOWNLOAD THIS MOD.
OCOv2 is a completely rebuilt, bigger, better and more extensive Oblivion Character Overhaul. It's a complete revamp of the character heads with a new visual direction closely inspired by Skyrim and Morrowind.

OCOv2 is a very complex mod, so read all instructions carefully before you install it - it affects a lot of things at once and is built to cover a lot of ground, so there are quite a few things that can clash with it. The upside is you get the most complete visual experience possible.

Mandatory requirements for the mod:
OBSE - latest version
Blockhead plugin

These are absolute unnegotiable necessities. OCOv2 will not work as intended without them. Period. You NEED them.

Installation TLDR:
-Completely remove OCOv1 if you still have it
-Use NMM
-Seriously use NMM
-Install body replacers, OBSE and Blockhead first
-Then v2 core
-Then v2 body replacer patches
-For the love of God use NMM or OBMM for installing, don't do it manually, I've warned you


Before you install:
*Make sure you have your body replacers in place BEFORE you install OCO. OCO needs to overwrite their components.

*If you've previously used OCO version 1, remove it completely and delete the ESP and all of its folders.

*Take your time to read through each installation step to know what you're putting where. This is a simple out-of-the-box mod if you run it practically standalone without other mods, but things can get conflicted pretty easily.

*Things you CANNOT run together with OCO:
-Hair/eye packs that affect vanilla races
-Any mods that affect vanilla NPCs
-Mods that change racial stats

*OCO comes with its own body textures for each supported replacer and vanilla. They're tailored for the mod, and using any other texture replacers on top will result in more prominent model seams and possible colour disparities.

*OCOv2 only works with an English language copy of Oblivion as it alters race records and NPCs. Users with other languages will get mute NPCs. It can be patched for other languages, but I'm unable to do that for anyone. Feel free to make your own and I'll gladly link to it from here.

*All NPCs and player characters in the game are affected by the changes. Any mod that uses vanilla races for additional NPCs or races will also take after OCOv2 modifications. They can have varying results as OCO heads generally need to be custom made to work best with the mod.

*OCO comes in one big package encompassing all the changes. It's not possible to split into more customizable pieces while keeping the broader visual integrity as many parts are interdependent. Currently the whole mod comes as-is. It's intended to be run by itself without many other cosmetic mods as it does in one go what has usually been done with a large number of different mods.

*For best results, run OCO with a nice ENB config and/or OBGE with subsurface scattering, skin shaders and colour correction enabled.

The nitty-gritty

On a practical level OCO gives every race and gender their own head mesh and textures. They all also have age slider variations and a couple of new hairstyles replacing vanilla ones. Visually the heads have been prepped with up-to-date character modeling conventions and have proper sculpted normal maps and lively skin textures. I made the head meshes unique for every playable race and gender and there's a lot of distinction between them - you can tell them apart at a glance. In some cases I've made bigger adjustments to multiple head parts, such as scaling down Orc jaws and repositioning Khajiit teeth in the head.

Dremora, Golden Saints and Dark Seducers have also been restyled.

Included are also junkacc11's skin tint EGTs, Throttlekitty's eyelashes and eye textures from Iridum Eyes by Halendia.
Texture compatibilities available for HGEC and it's billion variants and Robert's bodies.

OCO has taken a total of 8 months to build from ver1 up. ShadeMe's Blockhead plugin made it possible to create v2, as before Blockhead it wasn't possible to have the same race use different head models by gender. Everyone go slam his 'give kudos' button hardcore, honestly, he set that thing up so quickly and has been super helpful.

The development has been exhausting sometimes. I wrestled against the FaceGen engine's deformations a lot and scrapped and reworked things multiple times over. Everything was trial and error all the time. I kept hitting my head against it until it started looking decent. The amount of fine-tuning involved in the last 2 months has been plainly ridiculous and OCO has been my second job for a while, and while I'm not totally happy with all aspects of it, I just have to push it out at this point to give myself some free time again.

So I hope everyone enjoys the fruits of my labor. This is the craziest project I've ever taken up on my own and it blew completely out of proportion.


CREDITS

ShadeMe - OBSE development and Blockhead plugin, without Blockead there would be no OCOv2
Halendia - For letting me use her gorgeous Iridum eyes: http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/30823/?
junkacc1 - EGT files
Throttlekitty - Eyelashes
Exnem - HGEC resources
Robert - Body replacer compatibility resources
Bethesda - Oblivion head models and character framework

Special thanks to beta testers:

crazyslothlady
MacKom
annon-in-gelydh
mage116
tehcoffeezombie
lyliumxwolfxchild
senexys
andarix
amhrancomhrac
Savvie
d4rk0wn4g3
churibman
tea-and-kimchi

I cannot stress enough how valuable the beta feedback was! It helped root out a lot of bugs that I'd have missed myself. Massive love for all of you.

Special shoutout to Kokomiko and TheMinttu for their inspiring artwork. I looked at their gorgeous, highly characteristic TES works many many times when I was developing v2.