x117 Head Conversion

[puddles]

Is there anyone familiar with the creation of x117 heads? I'm working on a mod that has nothing to do with anything sex-related, surprisingly! I'm trying to work out how to make an x117 version of Nuska's Khajit and Argonian heads. It can't be as simple as just scaling it by x1.17...is it just not feasible with beast-folk heads, hence the Argonoid race?

 

http://www.loverslab.com/topic/20635-how-to-edit-a-117-head-for-oblivion/

 

Myst42 apparently managed it, but I can't figure out any cohesive instructions from his posts.

 

Any help appreciated!

[varenne]

The most extensive I've ever seen were in Japanese (some of which are no longer on the 'Net), such as the one on narulivion in Myst42's post.

 

There was, many years ago, an LL member that did some extensive and detailed editing for a custom shorter sort of bunny race, but I don't recall if it was also x117 based.

 

I think you may be forging new ground here; beast-folk, if you pursue it.

[myuhinny]

You mean Izumiko the author of the x117 Rabbit Mini Race? http://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/37515/?

 

On a different note while looking quickly for the mini race I came across some rabbit textures that I might have to put into my game as they look pretty cool and are pretty funny. Venom and carnage rabbit textures. http://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/37912/?

[movomo]

Making x117 isn't hard - as long as Blender allows importing and exporting and you're not totally new to head/hair stuff. You can just import it, resize it to the desired scale (but do not apply change), align the neck seam, export and apply 1.17 scale in nifskope as skin transformation.

 

Good news - my Hiyoko Generator GeneForge could provide various 125, 117, 110 scale heads, including the Khajiit's and Argonian's. I think you can apply OCO textures on them?

 

Bad news - if I remember correctly, *one* of the heads in OCO was refused by blender. I think it was one of Khajiit or Argonian.

[puddles]

It's the Khajit OCO head I'm most after for the x117 version, because it...like, doesn't look like an elephant. The Argonian OCO one isn't quite as remarkably better.

[varenne]

You mean Izumiko the author of the x117 Rabbit Mini Race? http://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/37515/?

 

On a different note while looking quickly for the mini race I came across some rabbit textures that I might have to put into my game as they look pretty cool and are pretty funny. Venom and carnage rabbit textures. http://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/37912/?

 

Yupper, dat be da one!

 

[iamnoone]

Sorry to piggyback on this, but seemed a waste to start a new thread for a similar head conversion problem.  I've got the nifskope scaling figured out from examining the existing 117s, but the neck seam is where I am stuck.  I am completely new to modeling software in general.  Blender is setup with nif import/export and I have done some very basic scaling. So far what I've tried just looks like shrinking the whole neck.  I'm not sure of the procedure/tools to do the alignment so that it looks nice. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[movomo]

Sorry to piggyback on this, but seemed a waste to start a new thread for a similar head conversion problem.  I've got the nifskope scaling figured out from examining the existing 117s, but the neck seam is where I am stuck.  I am completely new to modeling software in general.  Blender is setup with nif import/export and I have done some very basic scaling. So far what I've tried just looks like shrinking the whole neck.  I'm not sure of the procedure/tools to do the alignment so that it looks nice. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

Are you having any problem in game? First you must know about the specific procedure to import head mesh into Blender.. just in case, since you've said you're not very familiar to Blender works. Before importing, you must export the head object as a .obj file (from Nifskope). That way you will not mess up head/facial morphs. Import THAT .obj file to Blender, not the .nif one. You must copy vert weights again since .obj does not hold the vert group informations.

(or use the modified script that can be found in this post: http://www.loverslab.com/topic/61269-how-to-make-a-head-from-scratch-with-expressions/?p=1546076 so that you can directly load up .nif files on Blender.

Knowing the old hard ways doesn't hurt, though.)

 

Aligning the neck seam is easy, or can be relatively hard if you want a seamless one.

Anyways, the first thing you'd want would be to scale the whole region of neck *smoothly*. Though I guess it's not different from shrinking the whole neck. If you hit 'o' in edit mode you can switch to the proportional edit mode. Mouse wheel will adjust the area of influence.

So, snap the cursor to the head bone's position (rclick head bone in pose mode, then shift+s->4 to snap 3d cursor to there), select the neck seam verts, and scale them until you're set. Pivot mode must be set to by 3d cursor.

 

Actually, it's pretty much done at this point. But you can go further. Import other head mesh, and snap your editing head's each neck seam verts to the other imported head's corresponding ones. One by one, vert by vert, doing this may look dumb but not a hard work actually. And you can skip this part if you'll use Seam Mender.

 

If you want a seamless head... then you need to deploy Seam Mender. The old version of Seam Mender can be found on the Nexus page of SetBody Reloaded (my sig). It also contains Junkacc's neck seam templates.

[Myst42]

*Summoned*

 

-Clears throat-

 

In the old thread I mention a way to alter the scale of the head.

It's been a long time so I dont exactly remember where, but with a bit of digging, I think I can find the exact place...

 

The exact place to what? you might ask...

 

Ok, the secret of x117 heads is that the enlargement of them doesnt happen through modeling, but though nifskope instead.

It's not the head what's bigger, it's the bones.

Somewhere in the nif structure there is a parameter one can alter from 1 to ??

That controls the bones' scales

I believe that old thread contains the exact location of it... and if it doesnt, I might look for it later

Anyway, the number, was also 1.14, not 1,17. Donty ask me why, that's the way it was in the original x117 heads

And, then the hair and other items got bigger by a different nifskope scale controller.

Surprisingly, the hairs actually were set up to 1,17.

 

EDIT: Ah!

Found it.

 

There are different ways to alter scale for the rest of the items like eyes, mouths, hairs etc... but those alter scales in different places.

The rest of the endeavor is about editing the head as if it were a regular one, but without scale changes. Editing a regular head is already complicated but if you can do it...

 

Which reminds me I have to do my own x117 races so i dont have to deal with pesky MBP requiring mods...

[iamnoone]

@Myst42

I did read through that thread and followed the Japanese blog link as well.  Changing the bone scales did do the trick.  Since I'm playing around with a different scale I also had to change hair, eyelashes, etc.  It all turned out better than I expected, except I did end up with same neck gap as that blog, and I couldn't quite figure out what the solution was from the pics.  Google translate didn't help that much, the best I could figure is it involved scaling the neck to 1/1.XX (scale inverse) so it scales to 1 after the whole head scales to 1.XX.  My make-shift solution was to only scale the head bone and not the neck, spine, and clavicles.  It didn't look completely right, but I didn't see the obvious gap, either. 

For your 117s did you end up using 1.17 scale or 1.14 since that was what was in the existing files? I thought for sure I also saw some with 1.17, too. I just figured that they had a custom head and tweaked the scale to whatever was necessary to get it to work with 117 assets.

 

@Movomo

Thanks for detailing that out for me.  It's a bit over my head right now, but I'll work through those steps (a few times) and see how it goes.  In my head, I had this concept of trying to using an unscaled head/neck to be the guide and somehow(?) manually scaling each row of neck faces to get a smooth transition.  That seemed rather daunting for a noob and I wasn't even sure if I was going about this right.  Now I at least have an actionable plan.  Oh, and yeah, I didn't know about exporting as an obj file.  So thank you for including that as well.

I just know this sort of editing/tweaking is going to leave me with a "does this look right?" feeling and have me fixated on looking for artifacts.

[movomo]

Most known x117 heads other than made by Myst or me are based on the stock imperial head mesh. Most use 1.17 scale, except for the lop ear elf 06 which is 1.14. The exact number isn't important anyway. It doesn't need to be 1.17 to be x117. I think I had used like 1.10 for my Evy x117 and 1.05 for Evy x110. The point is that they must look right in game. Though, I don't see any particular reason for it not to be 1.17. Perhaps the original author accidentally made the head too big while sculpting and later realized that and decided to apply 1.14 instead of 1.17.

 

Open up a vanilla head mesh on Blender, scale it by 1.17 from the head bone and that is the hard standard of all x117 heads. Adjust your head until it roughly fit that thing. Top, side, ... so the head will fit the hair. If 1.14 is what makes your head look right, so be it. Then shrink the neck. Once you're set you will apply that number in Nifskope to where Myst showed.

 

What you do in Blender is merely to align the neck seam and resculpt the head if necessary. That is, you worked it out with fake 1.17 scale in Blender even though you know it will not actually apply, but you know the neck seam will match once you properly re-scale it in Nifskope.

 

You must apply the same scale to all five (usually most likely five) bones, by the way.