In the previous tutorial, we laid down everything in the new room by hand, selecting each object individually, placing it, and detailing by eye. I'm going to introduce an alternative method for much faster room-building now.

Instead of building everything from scratch, we're going to copy and existing room from somewhere else in the world, paste it into the working cell, and then customize from there. For complex rooms that need lots of objects (furniture) this is a real time-saver in getting started. For quick jobs where you're not necessarily concerned about having a room that looks exactly like someone else's, this saves you the time of having to do everything by yourself.

Since we're working in Vivec, I'm going to stick with the Vivec style, and direct you to a little shop just across the way from your cozy abode, the cell named Vivec, Jeanne: Trader.

Open up that cell, and move over to a top-down view of the back room. Now use your mouse (left button) to drag a selection box around the entire back room:

So that you select everything shown:

You may grab a few extra objects you don't want, but go ahead and stick with me for now. Hit Ctrl-C to copy all of the objects you have selected. Now open your cell (My First Room), give yourself a top-down view of the empty space near the bottom of the ramp, and hit Ctrl-V to paste in everything.

Let's leave everything up in the air for a moment, and get rid of the objects we don't actually want to keep, before aligning the new room with the ramp. Hit D to deselect everything, first. Start with the door and the door jam - select them each, and hit Delete. Now delete the ghost hangin' out by the bed; we certainly don't want any uninvited guests (least of all some old haunt) stinking up the place. We're going to do some work with the other objects, but now that we've got the architecture as we want (with an open entrance that can be aligned with the ramp) let's get the room set into place.

Re-select everything. To make sure you only grab the new room, simply give yourself a camera angle that doesn't include your old room below:

Now, with everything selected, snap the new room into place, aligning with the bottom of the ramp. Do not use F to Z-align, since F works on distinct objects within your selection - some objects will fall, but others won't. This part may take some patience, and you might need to set your snap increments down to ridiculously low figures (just makes sure you're always using a power of 2: 16, 8, 4, or 2). Here's the process I used: I roughed everything close to its final position (including Z position), then aligned for X and Y using a snap of 16, then 8. Finally, I aligned for Z, finding I had to go way down to 2 before I got things lined up just right. I stuck with top-down for most of the first part, then used a camera angle really close to the floor helped with the last (Z) part.

You'll probably want to save your ESP at this point, and if you'd like, jump into the game to have a careful look around. Visual defects are generally more obvious in-game than in the editor. Just make sure you carry a bright light with you (or use the Eye of Night enchantment) so as to help you scrutinize. (Note that you may get a warning if you load a Save that was previously using your ESP, before you updated it. Don't worry, it's safe to continue.)

You may notice while you're sniffing at all of your new furniture that the containers are for the most part populated. The containers we sto- er, copied from Jeanne were already set up to have some random contents. Unless that's what you really want, we're going to swap out these containers for their empty equivalents.

This is accomplished simply as a series of Search&Replace edits. Start with the closet, which is at present com_closet_01_jeanne. You're going to replace it with com_closet_01_empty:

Make certain you select the option for "Current Selection Only" when performing your S&R, and of course make certain you've got the container you want to replace currently selected. (The exception is with the com_sack_02_chpfood3 - there are two of them, so you could select both of them, and perform a single S&R on the two of them at once; you'd still use "Current Selection Only", of course. Use the Ctrl key, held down, to select multiple objects one mouse click at a time.)

The beauty of Search&Replace is that the object maintains its position and rotation, so everything is still nicely arranged for you. There's a drawback to this, however. Because the object maintains its "individuality" (its Reference Data, to be precise), it also maintains such information as its "owner". Since we grabbed all of this stuff from Jeanne's place, much of it is still set with Jeanne as the owner.

Next we're going to clear the ownership on all of the objects, which is accomplished with a nifty little trick shown me on the forums. Why is it important? Well, say you just so happened to remove some of these objects and try to sell them to Jeanne, in particular. If she were still the owner of said objects, she would complain about the items being sold her having been hers in the first place, then the guards get involved, things get messy... take it from meow, you just don't want to go there.

Let me start by showing you a separate trick for selecting multiple objects. In your Cell View window, on the right side (all of the objects in your cell), sort the list by Ownership. Now you'll have all of Jeanne's objects lined-up for you. Start at the top, click on the first one. Now scroll to the end of the list of Jeanne's objects, hold down Shift, and click the last one. (You could also use Ctrl to select, of course, one at a time.) You'll fine that all of those objects have become selected, in the Render window.

In the Render window, double-click on any one of said objects. In the drop-down box for Owner, change the entry to the 'blank' owner (at the very top of the list). You can get there quickly by hitting Home, once the list is open.

Now click the button (immediately below Owner and Global Variable/Rank) 'Apply to Selection'. You should get a confirmation that your change was applied to 18 objects.

Click the X in the top-right corner. Don't click Save.

You may briefly wonder if you should (or could) set the Owner of these objects to yourself (the player). It's not necessary. Ownership is designed to keep you from selling objects back to their owners and making a killing. Since this problem doesn't really apply in reverse (NPCs swiping your own loot and selling it back to you), there's no need for setting the ownership of an object to you, the player. (Who, by the way, is actually the NPC named "player"!)

All done? Good - save up your ESP, and take a look around in the game if you like, just to make sure everything's to your satisfaction. If you want to add a few extra details or change the existing ones, go ahead. Just leave the bed alone. We're going to be giving it some "special attention" toward the end of this tutorial.