[Idea] Hair under Helmets but shrink the top vertices to avoid clipping/ or use IED

[BubberMans]

Hullo, not sure how feasible this would be but applying the idea behind the 'No Over penetration' mod, could you shrink/flatten the hair meshes on top of the head when you equip a helmet? The goal is to hide the clipping issues that modded hairs have while equipping helmets, but still having hair and not being completely bald. I was looking in the KS HDT Hair mod's file and they used three parts for building hair and two others for physics. The three parts were the actual hair itself, the hair's hairline(which is identical to the hair but without the xml node), and a generic hairline. The generic hairline seemed like a buzz cut that could at least save the completely bald option. Even if it were possible to just push the bangs/ponytails against the body without physics when you equip a helmet I think it would be huge.

 

Another idea would be to create the long bangs/ponytails as a wig armor and just having it in your inventory. Then you could use the 'Immersive Equipment Display' mod to display those bangs/ponytail in the right spot to create a pseudo hairstyle. For those not familiar with IED, it reads your inventory for items and shows them attached to your body without taking any equipment slots. For example, Mura's quest items presets display the golden dragon claw on your belt as soon as you pick it up. It is mostly used for showing all your favorite equipment on your back at the same time.  The neat thing is that you can also add physics to them so I have the quiver and 2-handed weapon jangling on my back. Is it possible to do this with hair?

 

The current solutions I know of are creating custom helmets with each hair but it takes a ridiculous amount of work, doesn't apply for npc's, and has to be distributed across all enchantment variations of the helmets. But if you are just sticking with one unique helmet with one unique hairstyle this is the best option.

 

Other options are to just allow your hair to clip through the helmet and live with it. I've seen mods for this as well as changing the hair files in CK to a different slot.

 

Thanks for reading my ramblings and I don't really expect much to come out of it.

[BubberMans]

Other options are the apachiiskyhair wigs that equip wigs under your helmet.

 

There is also the editing of the hair in CK. Credit to RedGuardMage on their Reddit comment:

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Technically what you are asking for can be done. What it would take is editing the hair meshes in a 3D editing program, adjusting the dismember partitions (also done in the 3D editing program) and changing the slot assignments in the CK.

The way hair works is you have 2 hair meshes - the hair and the hairline, and each of these meshes have 2 dismember partitions - hair and long hair. Some of the helmets are set to remove both the hair and longhair partitions, while others like the iron helmet only remove the hair partition but not the longhair partition, allowing long hair to show under the helmet.

What you would have to do is decide what parts of the hair meshes you want to show when wearing a helmet and adjust the partitions so that the parts you want to show are in the long hair partitions and the parts you want to remove (that would otherwise clip out the sides or top of the helmet) are in the hair partition. The procedure for doing this is very much like weight painting, if you are at all familiar with that.

Then you would need to make some adjustments to the meshes so the hair sticking out from under the helmet looks natural with the helmet on or off.

Lastly you would make changes to all helmets in the CK so they do not remove longhair - that’s the easy part.

The devs probably intended to do exactly this, and that’s why the mechanics to do it are there. However they may have run out of time and decided they had other priorities. It would be a time consuming project, though maybe worthwhile for anyone with the skills to do it.