Concept: HDT-Enabled Mouth Mesh as a Wearable Item?

[meatslinger]

I just had an idea come to me during a recent round of tweaking MFG batch files in the hopes of making a proper blowjob mouth for an Argonian (I don't recommend it), and I'm hoping someone who knows a bit more about Skyrim's actual handling of 3D meshes and models might be able to offer some insight or at least shoot down an idea for me (so I stop wondering about it). I'm told that the problem with blowjobs in SexLab is that the face can't actually have HDT or CBPC collision data applied to it, only expressions and morphs. As a result, you can only sort of approximate how open the mouth should be when depicting a blowjob, and for the most part the best you can hope for is editing the posture manually in SexLab > Expression Editor or by using the MFG command to manually set phonemes. Even then, it can't react to things like the position of the penis, or the size of it.

 

That being established as the cause of "the blowjob problem", I do know that third-party meshes can support HDT/CBPC data, such as clothing, jewelry, hair, etc. For instance, I can make a character look like a Twi'lek and the lekku (the "head tentacles") move around and collide with other actors correctly. So that makes me wonder: could it be possible to clone part of the head mesh, take the mouth out of it as a separate component, and rig it for HDT/CBPC interactions? Then, the remainder of the head could have the mouth area deformed with morph data, or just flat-out removed from the model. On the start of an animation, a trigger could equip the "fake mouth" wearable item, and it would respond to collision info during animations, just the same way something like hair or piercings would track the player body and other actors in the scene. It could either be given simple CBPC controls to just control how open it needs to be, based on the colliding object, or could have full HDT support with lips wrapping around the collider, skin elasticity/suction, etc. We know that face wearables can have HDT interactions because the Ahegao HDT Tongues mod exists, so I could imagine a larger sort of "Hannibal Lecter" mask that covers the whole lower portion of the face and allows virtual lips and a jaw to stretch and widen as much as they need to. Throw in some scripting to get rid of the floppy lips when the scene isn't oral, and you're set (I'd think).

 

I know that removing/morphing the head's mouth area would undoubtedly break other expressions (and look like a horror monster when the fake mouth isn't equipped), but I think that might be a trade worth making if it improves the fidelity of SexLab scenes. Or some other workaround could be used to transplant the expression data to a second wearable that equips for ordinary walking around.

 

I'm familiar with Bethesda game modding from a data-oriented viewpoint - that is, I can create maps with assets, change data values, write scripts, etc. - but I've never gone too deep into the complications of its NIF models, morphs, and so on in the 3D side of things. Can anyone with experience in that realm tell me if this is an idea worth pursuing (in which case I'll teach myself the modeling stuff) or if this has been visited before and ran up against an engine limitation, or something (in which case, no point trying)? Or - "hail Mary", here - does this mod already exist and I've just missed it?