Facial Expressions? Maybe

[A.J.]

Two days ago I received the wonderful answer I was needing, today I gave a try and yes, it seems working.

I'd like to post it here because I know some of yours could be interested in a possible implementation on SO.

This is the result I just grabbed:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHW3wuZNpc4&feature=youtu.be

 

Where essentially I'm invoking a FE after triggering a SpecialIdle, which wasn't possible before

 

- Few cheap concepts behind this

 

If you've read my blabbering about animations, essentially I was saying how Facial Expressions like FAFF weren't impossible on a framework like SexOut because the engine doesn't allow two AnimGroups of the same kind triggering together, because the second one will replace the first one, i.e. OR you run OR you walk, OR you shoot OR you reload, and in the same concept OR you play a SO animation OR you play a FAFF (which is still a Special Idle). On the other side, there's a hierarchy on AnimGroups made by bone priority, which allows different AnimGroups to blend togheter based by their bone priority, so you can shoot (Fight AnimGroup - higher priority on arms) and run (Movement AnimGroup - higher priority on legs), or for example you can even move while a special idle is playing (if you tried the internal PickIdle with tokens, or triggering a special idle in TFC and then remove the TFC, you know what I mean)

 

The exception was the fact that you can still trigger a FAFF before SO triggers (and not viceversa), the engine glitches and your expression remains stuck on the last (clamped?) frame, so that you can then trigger SO: the engine doesn't know your face is morphed, so it will allow it, for the engine you are not running animations so there's nothing to replace.

 

All these tries are valid on FONV, FO3 has a slightly different system, but I'm not really interested in that so I won't go deeper on that.

 

Anyway, I wasn't seeing this last "glitch" case as something viable, so the only solution I saw was using a different AnimGroup for FE. Problem is they are hard coded, when you pass a parameter to PlayGroup you must stick on some special words and you can't define new ones. Without Jaam I wouldn't ever find something like this on my own: he exctracted the list of these parameters and I noticed that there were some unused ones. At this point all I needed to do was putting some random FE inside the AnimGroup folder (\_male or \_male\locomotion) and try that. It wasn't important the file name, nor the file itself (animations are the same, they are not "special" or what), the only thing that counted was the nif name on the header, the one where you put SpecialIdle inside or the animation won't be played (it's the parameter the engine needs to pick the correct AnimGroup)

 

PROS

- Does this work on SO? it works everytime another Special Idle is involved, so yes. You could even change your FE when you are playing, let's say you are happy because Mojave is beautiful and you want your character shows that with a smile while taking a walk, it will work.

- Does this screws vanilla? it shouldn't. I'm not aware of any possible consequence since I assumed these AnimGroups are unused. Still, my assumptions could be wrong of course. But for example I used Dodge, the only dodge I found on Fallout meshes is related to cazadores, and it's a special idle. Could this be used in some hard coded way while for example you are fighting melee? tell me, please, I'm not playing anymore and... oh god I really can't play anymore in this period, even for testing some hours things like that...

- FE can be stacked together, so for example with one you move eyes, with another one you move the mouth.

- This is SO related: you wouldn't need to modify any source kf to add FE, it isn't that bad. Only poke around with a script and trigger the FE you want with a timer or in whichever way you want.

 

CONS

- Limited number of avaiable FE, which could even not be a problem.

- Some AnimGroups like Stagger have a certain hierarchy which requires some tests. I assume AnimGroups have fallback animations like SpecialIdles (the famous "Knockdown" effect...), and it seems for example that if I'm playing a certain AnimGroup and then I trigger Stagger, it will fall back on Walking Forward. The workaround is resetting the previous one with Playgroup Idle 1 (which DOESN'T reset the face because no bones are involved, but still resets the AnimGroup itself replacing it with mtIdle) and then trigger safely Stagger, it should be enough

 

I include a package if you want to take a look.

Essentially, what that ESP does is triggering 4 different FE and a reset at the end. If you want to try it, all you need to do is keeping O pressed for 1-2 seconds and a message on top left will appear when it will take the command (I inserted a cooldown). This should be done in TFC mode, because of the Stagger supposed fallback.

Now if you take a look at FE 4, you will notice that it's different by the other ones, it is smoothly animated. It only moves the eyes, so if you already opened the mouth with a previous FE, it will remain opened (to show how it stacks). Doing these animated FE is very very fast and easy, I assume that someone who doesn't mod could do them following few steps, so for example figure to create a pattern of different open / close / eyes / mouth and you will see you don't need to involve a lot of FE (which obviates to the "few avaiable FEs" problem)

 

But... even if this is less interesting and quite OT... these AnimGroups opens to me a new possibility to make a better horse, so a big Thank you to Jaam that made this possible.

 

Feedbacks and comments are appreciated

FE.7z

[t3589]

Does this work during sex, or do they stand up?

[A.J.]

yes it's supposed to work. It works with every special idle, even if you trigger it before or after SO animations, because it uses another AnimGroup

[t3589]

So you can change expressions during sex from one to another, or you're stuck with one for the duration?

 

You rock btw!  That's an excellent bit of problem solving you've done there.

[A.J.]

you can change whenever you want, and you can stack them too (i.e. you have 4: one open one eye, one open another, and two open the mouth in 2 different ways, well you can mix them all)

Sorry I guess the wall of text is imponent, I wrote it so that modders could be interested in use this

[t3589]

Oh I read it.  I'm just asking straightforward questions out of disbelief.  lol

 

EDIT: So let's say two mods try to do this at once?  Whose realm should this belong to?  Should this be left to animators (though it's scripting)?

[panthercom]

 I just found out that if I loaded a facial expression with FAFF and then hit 'R'

to cock my fists, that the facial expression will stick, but only while my fists are cocked.

I can apply a static pose, however, and have the FE stay on. This might at least provide

a temporary workaround for using various poses and expressions. I'll try it before a sex

animation and see what it does.

[A.J.]

and why you would do something like that

[panthercom]

 Well, I don't have much of a choice at the moment  

 You mentioned something about posting a file in your OP, if I understand

it correctly, but I can't seem to find anything, and I'm not sure if I would be

able to use it correctly if I did. Mostly I wanted to share how I found a way

to trigger the glitch that allows FAFF to function (that it's not random as I first

thought) in case the information would be useful.

[A.J.]

oh DAMN... thanks for make me notice it. I was sure I had attached it and only now I notice it's not there... *laughs*

 

I did it for modders if they wanted to take a look at the dumb structure of the files, but if you think it deserves I can modify it as you want to make some tries. But in the meantime you can already install it, just unpack it in the same way you manually install a mod. Then, you enable the esp and when you are in game if you hold O a couple of seconds you will see a message on top left appearing, at that point your face expression should change. There are only 4 expressions inside, and a reset, so if you press again O a couple of seconds the expression changes again, and again etc. They work better if you are in TFC mode (like the fly cam when Sexout animations are triggered), but yes the concept is that you are free to use it whenever you want, even when you are walking, you just need to hold that key a couple of seconds. So even when SexOut is already running, the face should change and not interrupting SO animations as FAFF does. It also shouldn't conflict in any ways if you have FAFF or Groovatron or whatever installed, so don't worry to unflag things.

 

The downside is that there are not many avaiable "slots" for animations, so essentially the concept is choosing few of the best FAFF and use them in this way. But also, this system allows to create an animated facial expression that could even don't require to have many FAFF. If you take a look at that called FE 4, you will see that it has eyes (only the eyes but I can include mouth etc.) that are animated, and they open, then close a little, then reopen etc.

Basically you can create a 10-20-120-how many seconds you want of a facial animation where the actor changes expression, laughs, cry, closes the eyes, scream, etc. and makes it in a smoother way than simpy sticking the expression on the face.

 

Anyway I stop blabbering... it's better if first you give a try and tell me what you think

[panthercom]

 Downloaded and tested; works great!

 

 The expressions do seem to be resetting themselves

at the end of the sex animation, is that intentional?

 

 I'll let you know if anything strange happens.

 

Thanks!

[A.J.]

I think yes they are resetted by sexout itself that triggers a "reset" at the end, but I didn't checked. Still, if you trigger again another FE after the act, it should work again, these are supposed to work at any moment.

 

Nice to hear that they work for you, thank you for testing that

 

If you want, we could do this, you tell me the FAFF you like more and I adapt them, so you tell me for example FE22, FE12 etc.etc. and I put them. At this point I could even not use a reset since SO resets them, so you would have 5 avaiable different FE. But also, I can mix them, so you tell me use FE22 for 3 seconds, then switch to FE 12 for 1 second, then switch to FE06 for 2 seconds, etc.etc. all this "pattern" uses a single animation and I can make it move smoothly and not istantly. After that, if you are interested, I can make you a SO plugin that triggers them randomly at the start of the act, even on both actors if you think it's good. The hotkey was just a way to try them but... well tell me what you think it's better, it takes me very little to make these modifies

[prideslayer]

Thanks for the link, AJ. Maybe I can get this worked into the current version of sexout. I haven't looked at the plugin yet, but it certainly sounds good.

 

So you're saying all I need to do to start testing (if I don't use your file) is edit the morphs in nifskope and change their anim group to something else that we won't need during sex? Or do I need to move the FAFF files already in sexout to a new location (like loose, or in the locomotion dir?)

[A.J.]

if you use my file it already has animations already ready to use, and the only thing the script does is IsKeyPressed on O, it's just for your practicity.

 

But yes you got the point. And during sex the only anim group you use is Special Idle, so you can potentially change with anything else (excluding Idle and dynamic idle), but for the nature of anim groups you would replace vanilla, so you must use the not used ones. You can find the complete list of the avaiable AnimGroups in FONV at this link, it's on the bottom of my OP, under Spoiler. You can easily see which ones are not used, like the four Dodge, Stagger and Stomp.

Stagger sometimes falls back on Forward if I'm not in tfc and I don't reset the previous one with playgroup Idle 1 (check my script)

You only need to put a random FAFF inside skeleton folder or the subfolder locomotion (not any difference), change the name on nifskope with the name in that list (i.e. DodgeRight) then invoke it with playgroup DodgeRight 1, in any moment since they are not special idles.

 

And just to be in subject... if you think this method is good, in my opinion the best would be creating only a couple of them, maybe three, etc. like one happy, one quite scared, one angry. They can be very long, changing eye movements and mouth, keeping their expression. So you only need to trigger the right one, based by the situation (if victim, consensual, etc.) and they loop, but since they are animated you wouldn't notice they are always the same. Oh well, at least... it's better than not having them. Let me know what you think.

 

PU gives me an error loading DodgeBack. But PU gives an error in other animations too, even vanilla, so I'm not sure if it's really important.

[prideslayer]

if you use my file it already has animations already ready to use, and the only thing the script does is IsKeyPressed on O, it's just for your practicity.

Understood, but I'm not trying to 'use' it, I want to *integrate* it into sexout. If you've already modified all the .kf's, I could certainly use those!

 

But yes you got the point. And during sex the only anim group you use is Special Idle, so you can potentially change with anything else (excluding Idle and dynamic idle), but for the nature of anim groups you would replace vanilla, so you must use the not used ones.

Well I think I could use them as long as they are groups that won't play during sex -- mainly what I'm thinking is if we have some setup for basic 'sex faces' in one group, we can stack them the way you describe to further customize the look.

 

You can find the complete list of the avaiable AnimGroups in FONV at this link, it's on the bottom of my OP, under Spoiler. You can easily see which ones are not used, like the four Dodge, Stagger and Stomp.

Stagger sometimes falls back on Forward if I'm not in tfc and I don't reset the previous one with playgroup Idle 1 (check my script)

You only need to put a random FAFF inside skeleton folder or the subfolder locomotion (not any difference), change the name on nifskope with the name in that list (i.e. DodgeRight) then invoke it with playgroup DodgeRight 1, in any moment since they are not special idles.

 

And just to be in subject... if you think this method is good, in my opinion the best would be creating only a couple of them, maybe three, etc. like one happy, one quite scared, one angry. They can be very long, changing eye movements and mouth, keeping their expression. So you only need to trigger the right one, based by the situation (if victim, consensual, etc.) and they loop, but since they are animated you wouldn't notice they are always the same. Oh well, at least... it's better than not having them. Let me know what you think.

 

PU gives me an error loading DodgeBack. But PU gives an error in other animations too, even vanilla, so I'm not sure if it's really important.

I do think it looks like a good system.

 

We will need a few groups you're right, I think at least we would need these groups:

Oral - consensual

Oral - noncons

Sex - consensual

Sex - noncons

 

We will want different expressions for cons vs. noncons, but it's also important that the mouth is never 'closed' during oral. Does that make sense? Do we need more?

[prideslayer]

Oh, you may not be aware, but I have chest morphs as well to change breast size -- and they work perfectly. They always had the same problem as FAFF though -- they would reset -- probably due to the same reason.

 

A lot of people will be happy if we get face expressions during sex *and* can change breast size through mod 'adventures'. We could probably get some morphs for penis size made as well.

[t3589]

If the method is good?  Hell it's the only thing I've seen actually work on the player.  Which then begs the question... shouldn't this only be applied to the player?  If applied to NPCs, won't it override any emotions mods have set up for said NPCs?

 

Not for nothin, but I would be willing to drop emotions during sex on NPCs in favor of this if it's integrated with a fair selection.

[A.J.]

Oh yes stacking different groups you can not make them resetted too. But I would like to see a kf of your morphs to understand if I can foresee something unexpected during vanilla. Because I guess you would like to morph not only during sex but even later when you play. The pros on sex is that after SO finishes you can reset everything and if something glitched you don't need to care about that, but I can't say the same in other cases.

 

Also don't forget that you can call fallback, so if you simply need to open mouth you could maybe invoke a spell with only mouth opened just 0.2 seconds before you invoke SO animations, it will still clamp on the last frame for that I suppose a glitch (as FAFF were already working before), so essentially you could have an anim group only for eyes and it won't affect the open mouth. The spell fallback when SO finishes could reset everything

 

With those unused anim groups you can figure you really can do A LOT of things, downside is you can't stack all these things together since they still are a limited number. My other attempt in the previous weeks was trying to change skeleton on the fly. I didn't need to do continuous drastic changes, I was only trying to figure if a custom race could have a custom skeleton (so custom animations). But with the help of jaam the result was that you can do that, but engine won't do that. Engine seems to be hardcoded to always fallback on the original skeleton, funny thing is if you check the path it will point to the new one, simply it won't affect the player (or a NPC), it is like if it's kidding you.

I just thought yesterday that maybe that function could be used for creatures, since they can have a different skeleton for every creature, while every actor shares the same path.

 

EDIT: T I noticed that in some ways they "stack" too. If you are using a sad emotion by dialogue, and then you invoke an anim group that opens only the mouth, you will have a sad expression with an opened mouth. But I didn't do a lot of tries in that

 

EDIT AGAIN. T Let me explain a little better how different facial can stack because I was quite confusing. If you close eyes and in the last frame eyes are still closed, they will remain closed because they don't reset. So if you invoke another expression, and it doesn't modify eyes, yours are still closed. so nothing overrides nothing until they don't touch the same "things" (eyes or mouth), in that case the second one will override the first one, until a third one will override the second one, etc.

[t3589]

EDIT: T I noticed that in some ways they "stack" too. If you are using a sad emotion by dialogue, and then you invoke an anim group that opens only the mouth, you will have a sad expression with an opened mouth. But I didn't do a lot of tries in that

 

Oh that's just too cool.  I really hope this works out.  It would go a long long way to spicing up scenes.

 

[prideslayer]

Oh yes stacking different groups you can not make them resetted too. But I would like to see a kf of your morphs to understand if I can foresee something unexpected during vanilla.

I'm looking for them, can't find, can't remeber where I got them either.

 

There was a FAFF type mod I found somewhere that had some playidle morph targets that changed the breast bone scale on a BNB compatible skeleton. I had it working, and it even works if you're wearing BNB compatible clothes, so no more boob growth/shrinkage when dressing or undressing. I had some problems getting them to stick though, just like the FAFF morphs.

 

Now I'm having trouble finding my download, or the original source, OR the thread I made here about it (with screenshots!)

[A.J.]

Oh I think I understand what you are looking for. I think they scale using geomorph nodes. I saw a tutorial about shapekeys in the tutorial section, I was curious to learn about it. But while I understood how to do that, I can't understand how to use it ingame. I contacted the author but I had no luck.

[prideslayer]

AJ, check here. I lost the files, but this looks like the right one. The esp has a 'breast growth hormone' drug and morphs for it in the idleanims 'bgh' directory.

 

The mod is setup to apply to Cass, but when I found this on the nexus (I can't find it now) the permissions were open for other modders to use the assets.

 

At one time I had it working similar to the FAFF stuff without the ESP or anything but the files in bgh and maybe the 'grow' one, I can't remember what that does.

[Loogie]

AJ, check here. I lost the files, but this looks like the right one. The esp has a 'breast growth hormone' drug and morphs for it in the idleanims 'bgh' directory.

 

The mod is setup to apply to Cass, but when I found this on the nexus (I can't find it now) the permissions were open for other modders to use the assets.

 

At one time I had it working similar to the FAFF stuff without the ESP or anything but the files in bgh and maybe the 'grow' one, I can't remember what that does.

 

It wasn't on the Nexus. Some anonymous guy contacted me years ago and asked me to put it up here. The original was lost when I had my freakout and asked for my original account to be deleted. The anonymous author's wish for anyone to use it how they saw fit.

 

Glad someone had it!

[A.J.]

Thank you, I'll take a look as soon as I find some time.

 

About permission, no worry, I just need to figure out how it works and reproduce it, like for facial animations.

 

On a side note, if someone is in touch with OP here, I would need an information I can't figure on my own, about that tutorial... or, if someone can tell me if you use or used the same tecnique for pregnant body?

[prideslayer]

Thanks Loogie.. no wonder I couldn't find it anywhere.

 

I lost my local copy when my disks crashed and then my backup restores failed a few months back.