Padded Gambeson
with Arming Caps

Oblivion Leather Armor Sucks

• Oblivion's leather armor is ugly as sin and conspicuous as hell. 
• It's ahistoric. I know, it's a fantasy, but I have my preferences.
• The design is just impractical. The seams literally make a crosshair on your vitals.
• Leather needs to be boiled to be hardened and protective. This also makes it rigid. So, there goes your mobility.
• The hat just looks silly.
  

Coats of scale, by contrast, look less stupid, are completely flexible, easily maintained and are surprisingly protective. Padded wool gambesons—cheap, inconspicious (almost everyone would have one), flexible and fairly resistant to slashing when layered. Padded arming caps—not nearly as silly looking, cheap, quite historic and protects your head from your helmet! All of this would offer more mobility and be far better at protecting you than stiff leather plates sewn together with lace. 
What's more, you can pull off looking sneaky without your appearance screaming "I specialize in Security, tRuSt Me".

Description

This mod does the following:

• Replaces the leather armor set and retextures the vanilla leather boots and greaves to match.
• Optionally replaces any relevant vanilla helmet with new variants that include an arming cap! Each cap has been colored to match the armor it pertains to. Extra textures are provided (more on that in the readme).
• Provides an extra optional sallet to replace the steel helmet since it was also an available resource.
  

No new items are added to the game.

This is a personal resource installation turned modding project. What started with replacing leather armor with assets from Wikinger9048's Medieval Armor Resources turned into this.
Unfortunately, Wikinger's resources had some issues. They didn't play nice with other assets or each other. I saw that the collar of his gambeson was clipping through the arming cap, so I taught myself some basic blender and fixed it. Easy. Yet, I wasn't satisfied with the texture quality or color. It also occured to me that anyone would be snagging their hair on these helmets (steel and elven helmets are I think the only helmets that have padding in their texture, oddly).
I realized in short order that I just started something that might be nice to share with others, so I got on the grind stone and started resolving clipping issues between the arming cap mesh with each vanilla helmet and armor mesh that I could see being used.
Later on I made some fixes to include compatibility with a few favorite mods of mine, generated missing .egm files, and now here we are.

Known Issues

• The egm files I generated aren't perfect.
  To largely circumvent this, I strongly recommend using the head meshes that come with an OCOv2 installation. The Argonians and Khajiit in OCOv2 have heads that are much more similar in proportion to standard races and therefore fit more nicely in helmets by default. I did what I could to address the issues that are present in vanilla, but taking it further than what I did would just ruin the arming caps and make them look terrible with other armors or the standard non-beast races. For now, this is something I'm just going to overlook until I have a better understanding of how to generate better egm files. If anyone has particular wisdom on this subject, I'm open to feedback.
• There will be clipping.
  I did what I could within my own reasonable frame of expectations and ensured that there should be minimal clipping with most head meshes and armors. However, some, like the glass helmet and armor set, are troublesome because of the shape of the collar. I may revisit this in the future, but for now, if it bothers you, it's easily disabled in Wrye Bash. I also can't account for every Oblivion variable, let alone others introduced by mods. What I can say is that I took extra time to ensure that these meshes fit nicely with the armors presented by Vanilla Gear Redux, Assorted Protective Female Armors, and Naihann's Elven and Mithril armor.

Accreditation

All meshes and textures were built on original assets provided by Bethesda and Wikinger9048. Aside from the sallet textures, all textures were in some way heavily retouched by myself. You'll notice the gloves no longer resemble a potato. The helmet and arming cap meshes are the result of me combining meshes from vanilla Oblivion and MAR. Aside from the sallet, each mesh was readjusted to reduce clipping as much as possible.
A special thank you goes out from me to Wikinger9048 for the original resources and LieutenantHawk for giving me the inspiration to do this with what I found in his mod. I am perfectly fine with others using the meshes and textures I created as they see fit, but strongly suggest they read the addendum found at the end of the readme.

In short, just don't pass off what's done in here or in Wikinger9048's mod as your own. Don't be a dingle.

Installation

This mod has no requirements.
That said, the meshes were created to fit best under certain conditions, and those are satisfied by installing the following:

• Roberts Male v52
• HGEC v1.21 (Probably works just as well with Roberts Female, but I've yet to confirm this)
• OCOv2
• Vanilla Gear Redux
• Assorted Protective Female Armors - Ebony, Glass & Iron
  

Straightforward BAIN installer package provided. Follow your standard installation process. Read the readme if you need more details.

Uninstallation

Uninstall, anneal and reorder to your hearts content. If you choose to not use Wrye Bash, stop, you need an intervention, read the readme.

Incompatibilities

None. Refer to Known Issues for an explanation on the clipping that you may encounter with other mods. If you want to use another replacer mod with this one, just turn off the offending segment in the BAIN installer.

Plans

Revisiting the glass helmet version of the cap to reduce clipping and scaling down textures for optimization when time allows.

Thank you!

Special credit goes to SARS CoV2 for forcing me to do something like this to keep me from going insane.
Take care, stay safe and strive on.

-Jojo