Making Custom Followers

[azmodan22]

I found a tutorial from Natilde ( creating followers from a character and I tried to follow it.

However I have a problem with it. The tutorial is refering to some files that do not exist in my game. Well the whole Fecepart folder does not exist.

 extracted the valina faceparts folder from the BSA and the files femaleheadraces.tri and femaleheadchargen.tri dont exist in there either.

I am using RaceMenu and extracted that mods bsa as well. I have found a femalehead.tri (and an rm_femalehead.tri--guess I'll have to see witch one is the right one) but still there in no file femaleheadraces.tri.

 

Where can I find that file? 

[TheDriedFinger]

First off, what I'm about to say is absolutely based on my experience. If I'm wrong, I'm sure someone will correct me.

 

So, let me just highlight a fundamental problem with Natilde's tutorial for making custom standalone NPCs in this period of Skyrim modding. I'm sure you've read through the whole tutorial by now, and realized that those FaceParts are used in the form that defines your custom eyes, brows, and the head.

 

Now, here's the problem: In the early days, when modders were just trying to figure out how to make these custom NPCs, modders needed these because all the work in making the NPC was in the CK (or by exporting that data from in-game). In any case, it was a matter of making the NPC, customizing them with the custom headparts and getting their head shape to look nice with the like 10 sliders you've got in the CK. Then, of course, work around the brown-face bug and you were aces. The advantage was that changing an NPC in-game in a way that would force the game to reassess their appearance based on the CK data in your .esp would actually work nicely; you could "setnpcweight" all day and they wouldn't get a brown-face bug.

 

Today, the landscape's changed. We're making NPCs in RaceMenu, and exporting their heads from in-game; not the slider data, their entire head as a mesh. This comes with certain advantages. Over time, it became clear that an NPC's head mesh was completely defined by FaceGenData (the "workaround" for the brown-face bug). (For the sake of correctly, I'd like to point out that the color of their skin was still defined in the CK.) This means that we don't have to do all of that cr*p with adding in custom head parts. Because think about what happens. You can not make an NPC in the CK with those few sliders that will look like your RaceMenu-created character. So, sure you could put in those head parts and make the NPC look as much like your character as you can but it's not really going to matter. Why? Because by modifying the FaceGenData's mesh file, you skip all of that stuff and the game won't look at the .esp's data anyway because it looks at the FaceGenData first. The only thing that might happen is you try to "setnpcweight" the NPC, forcing the game to look at the .esp's data on the NPC and now the game doesn't care about your modified FaceGenData and you end up with the appearance that you created in the CK. But you don't want that, because despite the fact that you may have given them the proper head parts, the overall shape is probably not going to look anything like what you want anyway!

 

So, summarizing, you don't need to add in custom head parts (at least using those .tri's anyway).

 

I would suggest that look into this tutorial: http://wiki.tesnexus.com/index.php/Using_a_face_made_with_Chargen_Extension_on_an_NPC_for_Skyrim

 

It tells you how to make a custom, but not standalone NPC. Then you can use Natilde's tutorial to customize the body (i.e. make that part standalone). Then, you have to make the head standalone. To do this, you're already fine as far as the mesh goes. You just need to find the necessary textures for the face and hair and put them in your custom folder and then edit the FaceGenData in Nifskope to reference your custom folder as the texture path.

 

If you'd like an example of what I'm suggesting, my follower mod might help: http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/51174/

 

I confess that at that time I didn't really understand this so I put in some of the head parts.

[azmodan22]

That tutorial looks far more accurate. I will try it. 

I was almost certain that there was a way to export the head from in-game and use it directly on the NPC. Making the NPC in the CK (slider-wise) never sound right? 

[azmodan22]

Right,

Now I am facing another problem. The character I want to copy uses tattoos with the overlays from racemenu. I tried in photoshop to combine them but I cano manage to create the transparency I need (in order to put them over the body texture) as the images are not of that high quality.

Is there any way to extract the texture from racemeny with all the layer included as one texture?

 

*Edit.

Alternatively, if I combine all the tattoo .dds into one, can I somehow apply that dds one the npc in the CK, in a similar way that racemenu overlays work?

 

*Edit.. 

Nevermind.. solved that part with TexBlend :-)

[TheDriedFinger]

Right, yeah, you can't export any tattoos or overlays that affect the body directly from the RaceMenu interface (the face is fine though which is nice). I spent quite some time trying to get the body textures just right for another one of my follower mods using Paint.NET.

[azmodan22]

Found the easy way.. I combined all the tattoos into one dds and used Calientes TexBlend to blend the tattoos to the body teexture. The result looks gorgious but I need to create the NPC and test it. If rember correctly in the old days there was a small problem with neck seems useing such tools but I dont think that this will be a problem with the "modern" bodies and heads :-)

[TheDriedFinger]

I had an interesting problem with seams (not just texture seams but the actual meshes not lining up) when I went to make my first follower mod. I was using the latest version of RaceMenu at the time and I remember having to export the head with the correct weight set that I would set the NPC to have in the CK. If there was a discrepancy, then I would end up having an NPC with a 0 weight head, for example, and a 100 weight body. And this issue was also present for CBBE vs UNP versions of the mod so I had to export the head twice, once for each. When I went to make my second follower, I had updated RaceMenu already, and I only had to export the head once and the result would still work for any weight or body mesh (the neck would just change along with it). I'm not sure if it was RaceMenu's fault or if I was doing something wrong on my end.

[azmodan22]

what you describe does sound normal. The most propable is that in previous versions of RaceMenu, when you exported the head it was exported with the seted weight, assuming that the npc you are going to make would have the same weight. After all, in the early methods of Follower creation (a method I will follow too actually, in part) you had to import the facegendata in the ck from the .npc file you made with the spf command. This process also imports weight and heigh. Racemenu (well, the modder) propably assumed that you had done that before so the NPC in the CK will have the same weight and height as the one in your game.

 

I hope I will not come up with anything like that tommorow when I start making them and to be honest.. I will not be testing it 

[azmodan22]

FINALY :-) Everything worked (kind of)

I run in a bit of small problem though..

Hair colour. The heir of the character I created is darker than the hair of the player. Since it is custom hair, changing the hair colour in the CK does not affect it. And I imagine I am going to have a problem with the next one caus she has red hair. Did I missed a step? Should I have also merged the hair with NifMerge?

 

*Edit

Nope. scrats that..Found the solution.  

 

Thank you VERY much TDF

 

Now I can finaly unistall that CRAP Familiar Faces