Cannot get NPC head to stop mismatching and reverting to default face

[Darklocq]

I changed some details in the custom race records and head parts of a downloaded follower mod, to "re-mod" it.

 

I have followed the Ctrl-F4 and NIFmerge instructions in various tutorial for patching up heads.

 

And it's not working.

 

No matter what I do I get:

 

* Wrong head color

* Wrong head geometry. 

 

I get the default head with the default texture.

 

I've even tried exporting the head in my original copy of Skyrim under Steam and using it in the playing copy on my desktop, and I still get the goofy-looking, big-jawed default Nord woman head, with the default texture.

 

When I use NIFmerge (to apply the originally downloaded follower's pretty face to the just-generated export), I get a resulting NIF that looks correct in NIFskope (other than that weird thing with the parts often having mismatched Z heights, which seems to have no effect when rendered in-game).  I put it in place with the ugly head's default filename, and get back into the game, and the NPC still has uglyface.  I can remove the entire ESP and do a savecleaning routine and put it back in, so the NPC is freshly re-generated, and ... uglyface again. It's like the FaceGeom/MyModHere.esp/ material for this ESP is simply being ignored.  It doesn't matter if I have NIFmerge overwrite the original directly, or save to a temp filename and move the original and put the new one in it's place. Always, always uglyface.

 

The stuff about creating a face (or importing and re-exporting) in RaceMenu doesn't apply here.  It's not a face I created, but one I just modified (though it probably was originally created in RaceMenu).  It did not come with a .jslot file.  I've looked at a bunch of .jslot files from downloaded RaceMenu presets, and they've all been radically different, so faking it by making a new one seems out of the question, even if re-exporting the head via RaceMenu and re-NIFmerging it would somehow help.

 

My next guess is that when you "change something" and change it back before doing the Ctrl-F4 that you have to change something specific, not just anything, to get it to regenerate the head properly. ??  I'm at wit's end here.  Been trying to resolve this for over a week, and it'a affecting every NPC I try to modify, e.g. put a new hair on.

 

Revision: One thing in common with the NPCs in question is that I changed the IDs of the NPC and custom race, and edited parameters in them (e.g., gave the NPC better hair, and told the race to use a specific female body by default, that of the follower, and fixed missing Morph Race record to point to the vanilla race the custom race is a duplicate of, to stop CK errors about a race with no morph (.TRI) data.  In one case, I made a copy of both NPC and race (so, both have new hex base IDs and new editor IDs like "DrqWhatever_Follower", "DrqWhatever_Race"), and eventually removed the originals. In another, I just renamed the confusing original editor IDs while keeping the hex base IDs, and am directly editing the original NPC and race. In a third case, I kept the race base ID, but am working with a duplicate of the NPC.

[RW311]

By ugly face do you mean the face is all grey or what? A screenshot would really help explain.

 

Open the facegen nif, do all ninode names match what is added to npc in the esp, all hair and head parts must match name.

Did you generate new facegen for each duplicate, the facegen id must match npc id, is the facegen in the correct folder. 

Does the npc attach actor base (for this you have to edit the base actor id and generate head from that not the named npc).

Is there any other change to npc later in the load order, did the ck confirm the facegen had been completed.

When you change npc race you need a new game to test, this will not clear just by deleting esp, npc needs new id being effectively a new npc altogether to test on existing save. Cosmetic changes to npcs will load on existing game but not changes to race, id, weight, a few other things I've not tested but you can change hair and face parts anytime and just rebuild facegen and it works fine.

[yatol]

On 10/7/2018 at 9:26 PM, Darklocq said:

 

* Wrong head color

* Wrong head geometry. 

 

 

you expect crap kit to generate something that look like what ece or racemenu put in the nif, with headparts that have nothing to do with what there is in the nif?

[Darklocq]

On 10/9/2018 at 9:09 AM, RW311 said:

By ugly face do you mean the face is all grey or what? A screenshot would really help explain.

 

Open the facegen nif, do all ninode names match what is added to npc in the esp, all hair and head parts must match name.

Did you generate new facegen for each duplicate, the facegen id must match npc id, is the facegen in the correct folder. 

Does the npc attach actor base (for this you have to edit the base actor id and generate head from that not the named npc).

Is there any other change to npc later in the load order, did the ck confirm the facegen had been completed.

When you change npc race you need a new game to test, this will not clear just by deleting esp, npc needs new id being effectively a new npc altogether to test on existing save. Cosmetic changes to npcs will load on existing game but not changes to race, id, weight, a few other things I've not tested but you can change hair and face parts anytime and just rebuild facegen and it works fine.

> By ugly face do you mean the face is all grey

 

No, it's just one of the default Nord female heads, with kind of a mannish jaw (at least compared to the intended face) and it looks especially ugly because it doesn't match the body texture. It's like a Frankenstein effect.  It's not the grey/black face problem.

 

As for filenames and folders, I would think they were correct, given how many times I tried and re-tried, and quintuple-checked everything.  But I'm actually just starting all over again from scratch, because banging my head against the same bugs for a whole week makes me want to kill something.

 

I have no idea what "Does the npc attach actor base" means.  I'm editing the base-ID NPC, not a particular instance. I didn't even know there was a problem until I drag-and-dropped an instance into a tavern and found it had the wrong head.  And continued having the wrong head after all the Ctrl-F4 and NIFMerge and so on.

 

I'm just going to re-create the NPC all over again, and destroy the instance if this happens again, and generate a new instance after every single attempt to fix it until I get what's supposed to be there.  And if that doesn't work pretty quickly, fuck it. I have better things to do with my life than try to make the CK for this game behave sanely.  I'm actually kind of shocked they were able to produce this game at all with such a tool.  The CSes of the earlier TES games were kinda shitey tools, but the Skyrim CK is just insanely bad software.  I never use the CK at all for anything I can do with TES5Edit instead!

 

No, there is no change to the NPC by later (or earlier, or any other) mod. It's not a vanilla NPC.  What I've done is taken Mango, a third-party follower, tweaked her a bit (and finally gotten her to work after those tweaks), then duplicated her and changed that duplicate into an older sister (same head mesh, but Mature Skin textures and different hair, and they each have their own custom Nord race variant for complete separation). That's the one that will not work properly. So the solution would seem to be deleting that one and remaking her cleanly.

 

The CK confirms the facegen has been completed even when it hasn't. I learned that from a tutorial video for MAFkit. (The tip-off that it failed is you get the message that it's completed pretty much instantly instead of after several seconds of actual work by the CK. You also won't get new facegen files as output.)

 

> Cosmetic changes to npcs will load on existing game but not changes to race, id, weight, a few other things I've not tested but you can change hair and face parts anytime and just rebuild facegen and it works fine.

 

That may well have something to do with it.  Completely nuking that NPC and redoing her (and her race) from scratch should resolve that, I suppose.  I think this probably also explains why my alteration of Mango's original race (to a duplicate with a new ID and some changed stats) in an earlier test also failed.

[Darklocq]

On 10/10/2018 at 2:49 PM, yatol said:

you expect crap kit to generate something that look like what ece or racemenu put in the nif, with headparts that have nothing to do with what there is in the nif?

I don't understand that question.  I really don't actually care what the CK wants to generate.  I observe that it's not doing what its being told to do (i.e., the CK is exporting, and displaying, some but not all vanilla paths for certain meshes and textures that I explicitly overrode in the ESP with custom ones, and it's doing that for no explicable reason).  What I expect far more importantly is that the game will show the intended head after I go through a head export and a NIFmerge to use the face that was (presumably) originally created with ECE or RM, and the texture paths I have hard coded not only in the ESP but in the NIF file itself, to force the issue.  I am in fact getting the correct textures (I recognize the custom moles), but the skin tone is wrong and so is the head geometry, using a vanilla shape instead of the custom one.  When I look at the merged FaceGen files and see the head I expect and then go look in the game and still see a brown head on a pale body, with the wrong jaw and eyes, there's clearly an issue.  The game is not using the the merged FaceGen stuff but reverting to some weird mixture of a) sometimes its defaults and b) sometimes some paths specified in the ESP, while c) ignoring the NIF data, as far as I can tell.  This suggests that I do have (or did have, in some phase of testing) a mismatch between the NPC ID and the FaceGen files.  Since I've deleted the NPC and am starting over, I can't really tell at this point.

[Lodakai]

When you export it..  check to make sure the editorID and the nif mesh and texture numbers match up.

Also make sure you have all the assets available in your load.  Especially if you are using custom hairs or eyes.. you will need to make sure that the files to supply those assets are ALSO loaded in the CK.

 

If you are testing it in an EXISTING game.. you usually have to brute force the changes by changing the npc weight... then disable and then enable the npc.

Check the nif with nifscope to make sure that it looks about right.

[SirDuke]

23 minutes ago, Lodakai said:

If you are testing it in an EXISTING game.. you usually have to brute force the changes by changing the npc weight... then disable and then enable the npc.

May I ask, what might help, if brute force isn´t working?

 

I tried to use a serana overhaul, whilst midgame.

Had to give up, cause the only change, that happened was her new grey face texture.

[yatol]

5 hours ago, Darklocq said:

 I observe that it's not doing what its being told to do

crap kit generate the head nif from the npc headparts

that have nothing to do with whatever was done in ece or racemenu

so of course the result isn't what was done in ece or racemenu

 

 

[RW311]

On 10/13/2018 at 1:47 PM, Darklocq said:

I don't understand that question.  I really don't actually care what the CK wants to generate.  I observe that it's not doing what its being told to do (i.e., the CK is exporting, and displaying, some but not all vanilla paths for certain meshes and textures that I explicitly overrode in the ESP with custom ones, and it's doing that for no explicable reason).  What I expect far more importantly is that the game will show the intended head after I go through a head export and a NIFmerge to use the face that was (presumably) originally created with ECE or RM, and the texture paths I have hard coded not only in the ESP but in the NIF file itself, to force the issue.  I am in fact getting the correct textures (I recognize the custom moles), but the skin tone is wrong and so is the head geometry, using a vanilla shape instead of the custom one.  When I look at the merged FaceGen files and see the head I expect and then go look in the game and still see a brown head on a pale body, with the wrong jaw and eyes, there's clearly an issue.  The game is not using the the merged FaceGen stuff but reverting to some weird mixture of a) sometimes its defaults and b) sometimes some paths specified in the ESP, while c) ignoring the NIF data, as far as I can tell.  This suggests that I do have (or did have, in some phase of testing) a mismatch between the NPC ID and the FaceGen files.  Since I've deleted the NPC and am starting over, I can't really tell at this point.

 

Make sure you don't have is chargen face preset checked in your npc flags. This will bypass the facegen you create.

[Darklocq]

On 10/14/2018 at 12:20 PM, RW311 said:

 

Make sure you don't have is chargen face preset checked in your npc flags. This will bypass the facegen you create.

Thanks, I will triple-check that.

[Darklocq]

On 10/13/2018 at 5:01 PM, yatol said:

crap kit generate the head nif from the npc headparts

that have nothing to do with whatever was done in ece or racemenu

so of course the result isn't what was done in ece or racemenu

 

 

And NIFmerge is supposed to fix that, and in this case it did not. Otherwise I would not have had this problem and would have not posted about having such a problem.