Ever since seeing the screenshots of good overlay packs, I liked the idea of actually seeing them in-game on more than just my own character, especially since I don't tend to switch them all that often. This can, of course, be accomplished by making custom skin textures and applying them to your favorite NPCs, but that requires a lot of work and makes it incompatible with almost anything else touching those NPCs without patches. Since I was tinkering with the overlay system for a different mod idea, I tried to apply the overlays directly to NPCs and it worked. This mod is the result of some more tinkering from that point on.

Description

This mod distributes the overlays from different mods (currently 12 mods by DomainWolf and 9 by other modders, but I am open to adding others). It does this using SPID, which maximizes compatibility and minimizes running scripts.
The distribution is highly customizable via a MCM menu, where you can select
- which mod's overlays are distributed to which factions and races, as well as which is preferred
- which colors are used in the distribution, which can be completely random or slight variations of defined colors or a mix of both
- wether you want to use face overlays at all (since I can't detect warpaint on NPCs)
as well as various small tweaks to most parts of the system.
Since 2.0.0, skin features in the form of freckles, moles, birthmarks, stretchmarks, scars, burn scars, wounds and tanlines can be distributed in a similarly customizable fashion as well. Both of these systems are working independently and can be turned on or off separately, meaning you can use just one of them if you like, or make the likelyhood of one appearing on an NPC vastly different from the other. Since 2.2.0, (female) body hair is supported as well! The bodyhair is colored to match the hair of the NPC as well as possible through an automated process (simply setting them to the same color does not result in the same look!).
The standard settings should be perfectly fine if you don't want to spend time tweaking of course. The settings can also be saved and loaded across saves when JContainers SE is installed.
If the NPCs get overlays you don't like, no problem! There are helper spells for removing or resetting (i.e. remove all previous and apply a random new one) either all overlays or just the face overlays and even a spell for a complete manual selection of overlays to apply to your favourite follower :).
There is also a helper spell which lists the currently applied overlays (on the body), so if you notice a bright purple NPC, please tell me what overlay it has and I will try my best to quickly remedy that mistake in the script! In the meantime, you can use the reset helper spell to apply a new overlay instead of the bugged one. I should have it all working, but with several thousand lines of code and such a typo only becoming appearant when the explicit overlay with the typo is applied in game...

Requirements

Racemenu and Spell Perk Item Distributor (SPID) are absolutely required for this mod to work properly!
JContainers SE is required for saving and loading MCM settings across savegames, but this mod will run fine without JContainers installed.
The resource packs are optional. If their plugins are active (esp and espfe work if the name is not changed), they will automatically be detected and activated in this mod. Their plugins can be deactivated/deleted, if you wish to declutter your Racemenu overlay texture lists, if you extract all their bsa's and manually activate them in the MCM (if JContainers SE is installed, extracted files should be automatically detected even without their plugins). Activating a resource pack without its extracted resources will lead to bright blue/purple NPC's! This mod is best experienced with as many overlays available as possible!
The following overlay packs are supported (Dunmer Overlays by sorsakas, Freckle Mania 2 by tetrodoxin with CBBE edits by me and Koralina's Freckles and Moles by Koralina are included for NPC distribution in this mod):
Community Overlays 1, Community Overlays 2, Community Overlays 3, Weathered Nordic Bodypaints, Barbarian Bodypaints, Simple Belly Paints SE, Ziovdendian Bodypaint, Yyvengar Bodypaint, Wolfpaint - Face, THeHAG's and BladeSinger's Private Body Tattoos and Overlays, Beast Race Bodypaints SE, Flawn's Argonian Overlays, Skin Feature Overlays SE, Sunstarved, Wounds Overlays, Pubes Forever SSE, Nordic Warmaiden Body Hair and SAM Morphs for Racemenu.

All overlay mods need to have the male and female and face versions installed (UNP or CBBE does not matter), unless there is no gender (or face) specific version. Community Overlays 1, Barbarian Bodypaints and Weathered Nordic Bodypaints require the loose male files found under Miscellaneous files on the respective mod pages, since the original male files overwrite some female files. SAM Morphs for Racemenu has only one file to download. If you don't use SAM body, you need to disable/delete its esp and bsa (see the article). The bodyhair from SAM Morphs for Racemenu seems to also be compatible with SOS and vanilla male bodies.
A detailed list of what files are required from each resource pack in order to enable them in this mod is available in the articles section!

If you want to see a lot of overlays at once on NPCs (i.e. Bodypaint, different skin features, especially bodyhair), you should raise the available overlay slots for the body (and less critically the face). This can be done by changing the value of iNumOverlays= under [Overlays/Body] and [Overlays/Face] in the skee64.ini file in skse/plugins. The body hair options take up to 4 body slots, bodypaints take 1-3 (with a few exceptions) and the other seven skin features take up to 1 bodyslot each. With the standard settings, around 4-7 overlays are applied most of the time, such that the standard number of 6 slots is tight. If NPCs are likely to get multiple skin features 10-14 or even more would be recommended. There are far fewer face overlays and no bodyhair for the face, so a value of 6-7 would probably fit comfortably. Having too few slots would just result in less wounds, bodypaints and possibly body hair being applied to an NPC.




In principle, this mod is compatible with everything else.
The overlays are applied via an ability that deletes itself after its execution and is distributed via SPID, so this does not interfere with anything touching any NPCs. They also look for the first open overlay slot, so it should in no way interfere with any other mod applying overlays onto NPCs unless they fill all available slots or mess with other slots. Since there were issues with the overlays reapplying themselves after reloading the game, the auto-application of overlays does not happen on NPCs with an overlay in the lowest slot! The helper spells can still be used to apply overlays with the caveats described below.
The helper spells are unfortunately not as compatible, since the reset and remove spells remove all overlays applied to the actor. This was done because I apply overlays to all NPCs and didn't want to store them in Formlists, which might cause issues at some point (when this many actors are stored at least) and would definitly be slower. Most mods that do apply overlays do however reapply them at some point, so this should still work out. The manual application helper spell only adds overlays, so it can be used in this case for compatibility.
The mod is an esl flagged esp (espfe).
Decapitations on actors with face overlays cause CTD's! Apparently, enabling face overlays will cause any NPC with an overlay, even just a body overlay, to cause a CTD upon decapitation. Either deactivate decapitations (can be done via various combat/killmove mods) or disable face overlays in the skee64.ini from racemenu, i.e. set bEnableFaceOverlays=0. This will however also disable face overlays for the player! NPCs with scripted decapitations can be excluded from distribution via the DistributedBodypaints_DISTR.ini.
Individual NPCs can be excluded from getting face overlays (usefull if have their face geometry changed by mods in ways that make overlays incompatible). To do this, open DistributedBodypaints_DISTR.ini and add their name or their ActorBase name to the DBNoFace Keyword distribution with a separating comma and no spaces, i.e. Keyword = DBNoFace|Roggvir,Lydia,Nazeem,Brenuin



A big thank you goes to DomainWolf for his awesome overlay packs, without which I would not have been inspired to make this mod (and whose mods contribute a very large part of this mods full experience).
I am also thanking sorsakas for her Dunmer Overlays mod , tetrodoxin for his Freckle Mania 2 mod and Koralina for her Koralina's Freckles and Moles and their permission to include their texture assets in this mod.
Further thanks go to TheHag, BladeSinger and reconcool for their THeHAG's and BladeSinger's Private Body Tattoos and Overlays mod, JaySerpa for his Wounds Overlays mod, Flawn for his Flawn's Argonian Overlays mod, AncientKane for his Pubes Forever SSE, dePog for his Nordic Warmaiden Body Hair mod , as well as to Rainbowknight2, who spent quite some time bug hunting for errors in the overlay paths.