Facial mood morphs - how to make Skyrim use altered TRIs?

[Barbatos]

hmmm, i'm stuck on this issue for several days, getting really clueless    my problem is, i think i'm not aware of all steps needed to alter facial morph used for mood expressions

what i do is basically based on this article
http://wiki.tesnexus.com/index.php/Working_with_Skyrim_head_TRIs

i'm also having SKSE plugin DisableFaceGenCache installed - not sure if it's necessary tho

A.
here is what works for me:

1. i take the Data\meshes\actors\character\character assets\mouth\mouthhumanf.tri
2. i use anton's triextractor.exe on it in working dir
3. i import mouthhumanf_CombatShout.obj into 3ds max 2010, do pro-forma forward extension of some vertices, and reexport. import/export settings as in the article above
4. i clean up the obj's header and comments, remove vertex normal data cos they're not in orig obj either. both orig obj and altered obj have now exactly same strcture and line count
5. i recreate mouthhumanf.tri with anton's triCreator.exe with altered mouthhumanf_CombatShout.obj inside and put it back into Data\meshes\actors\character\character assets\mouth
6. i launch skyrim, trigger script which calls SetExpressionOverride(16, 100) on preped NPC and IT WORKS - the mouth morph really IS altered

B.
here is what refuses to work for me:

i do the same steps with femaleheadmaskleftside.tri. since i got no femaleheadmaskleftside.tri in my Data folder yet, i use the one extracted from Skyrim - Meshes.bsa. i do the same modifications, same updating steps... yet, when i use the combat shout in skyrim from script, there is no new change to NPC's face
i tried the same with femaleheadbrows.tri, but skyrim ignores that altered morph too

now my guess is i'm supposed to do something else, along with just modifying and repacking the affected OBJ. but what? hmm

here's few other things that might or might not have something to do with it

A. when it works for me, with mouthhumanf.tri, the original TRI file already is in my Data subfolders, since a mod placed it there (i think Zaz animation pack does it for its gag support). but in the cases, when it doesn't work for me (facemaskleft, facebrows), i'm actually altering vanilla TRIs from BSA and then just placing them into Data subfolder for the first time. it might be that Zaz does something else to make his new TRI morphs work, something additional to just placing the TRI file there... only i don't know what...

B. i don't do anything with Nifscope or any NIF altering at all. i somehow figured it's needed only when i wanna add morph which is a permanent face feature of a particular NPC. i don't think i'm supposed to anything with face NIFs for just altering the moods universally. am i wrong?

C. dependencies between my single altered TRI and other TRIs i kept untouched? from what've read, the moods should be the last morph that is applied, in any morph chain. so i should be good, touching no other TRIs. or no? when i unpack Zaz AP, he provides both character assets/mouth/mouthhumanf.tri and character assets/femalehead.tri. i do nothing with head itself. cos maybe he changes head for reasons unrelated to moods?... help!

anyways i'm clutching at straws here - anybody with a little bit of experience with morphs could probably save me. pls ppl any suggestion is welcome!

 

i don't do anything with Conformulator, they say i'm supposed to see the result without it first. i tried Triton instead of triExtractor/triCreator, no difference. i don't use CharGen ext or ECE. no other mods that add facial TRIs either. afaik using blender is better choice here than 3DS max, but i never used it and would like to stick with max if someone says it's doable

ty for any suggestion
 

[Anton0028]

In CK you can change path to TRI files so maybe you copy your new TRI-s to wrong folder (altered by another mod).