There has been a lot of discussion of hair mods in my
picture and video topic, so I decided to copy some of it here to make it easier for folks to find.
First off,
Apachii Sky Hair is one of the big hair mods. I am not an expert on it, but it seems that in addition to the 1.5 Full version, there are also extra hairstyles in a separate 1.4 Female version farther down the Downloads page, and a 1.2 Male version as well. I tried adding the extra female hairstyles, and it gives me a CTD whenever I open the race menu and change the character from male to female though. Turns out this is a known issue caused by the sheer number of new hairstyles causing the game to choke.
ShowRaceMenu Precache Killer fixes it.
I will admit that I am not a huge fan of Apachii, as the hairs tend to look plastic and fake to me. But I have also never been a big fan of the vanilla hair in Skyrim either. In fact, hair has always been a bit of a disappointment for me in Skyrim all around. So I am getting used to the Apachii hairs, and just started using them with my character Persephone in her latest evolution.
A plus side I found to Apachii is that it does not edit the Race entries. It only alters the Headparts. So if you have any mods that change the vanilla races, they won't conflict. However, the downside is that if you have a custom race that was not created with Apachii built in, you will have to manually add every hairstyle into your race mod. Since I use a lot of custom races that I created myself, this is an issue for me. It is not difficult, but it is a long, tedious process that I do not look forward to doing.
So an alternative is wig mods, that treat hair as a helmet, or some other item, which you can equip and unequip just like any other piece of attire. These work just fine with custom races, as technically they are not hair, but clothing/armor. The downside is that typically you cannot wear a helmet and the wig. Equipping the helmet usually unequips the hair. Same as if you were changing two different helmets. Sometimes wigs won't play nice with some hooded articles of clothing as well. It all depends on what body slots the wig modder used. The plus side is that you can enchant your hair.
Grits uses
ApachiiSkyHair Wigs plus Tutorial which turns some of the Apachii hairsytles into wigs. I don't think all of them however. Some of them will also work beneath helmets, but I think only the Iron and Nordic Carved Helms. I never tried it because it sounds limited and the modder says to use the next mod in this post:
I just started using
Apachii Sky Hair Wigs by Evenstar. It adds some, but not all of the hairs from Apachii, in about 6 basic colors for each hairstyle. You do not need Apachii Sky Hair to use it. But it does not conflict with it if you do. It is huge though. It was over 2 gig in size. I had no idea that TES Mod Manager had a limit to the size of the .omods it could make until it tried to make one of Sky Wigs. I had to break it up into two separate .omods of about a gig each.
Grits also uses
The Hairstyler, which requires the regular Apachii mod. The plus side to Hairstyler is that it allows you to change your hair - or that of NPCs - without having to open the console and use the showracemenu command. This also means it works with custom races. Instead it gives you spells which you can use to select a hair. Like Apachii Sky Wigs, there is a limited number of colors you can pick for each hairstyle. I also noted that after using it, your hair shows up in your inventory like a wig. However, you cannot unequip it like you can with Sky Wigs, or put on a helmet at all (you can put on a helmet with Sky Wigs, but it unequips your wig).
I tried it out, and in the end decided not to use it. I found Apachii Sky Hair Wigs to be more convenient, as you go to a custom cell where the hairs are in a few barrels. It was easier for me to just add a hair of every style in the color I wanted to my inventory, turn around so I could see my character, then go straight down through the list of them in my inventory to see what each looks like. The Hairstyler requires you to cast a spell to pick them, and I started forgetting which ones I had picked before. It also means that by casting the spell, your character automatically turns their back to you and hunches over. So after every hair I had to 'sheath' the spell, then turn around to see what it looked like. Just a few simple nits, but it was enough for me, given the number of hairstyles to go through.
zzjay and Grace Darklings Hoods with hairs is another Grits contribution. I have tried it in the past as well. It gives you a bunch of hood that your character can wear, that have built in hair spilling out of them. So it looks like a person with long hair wearing a hood.
Hoods with Hairs - Crafting is a companion mod that allows you to craft the hoods at tanning racks and forges.
This post has been edited by SubRosa: Aug 29 2014, 02:14 AM