Requesting Error correction on facemask

[Horst]

Hey everyone, I know this is a little jarring and it's probably going to be a shitshow but here it is.

I have three headmasks I ported (Bioshock Elizabeth). No facial animations, though. All are designed to replace the head.

However I have a problem- all of them have an issue of one kind or another.

ElizabethBaStest.nif seems to work fine in-game aside from occasional 'flickering' of the eyes (eyes disappear and reappear seemingly at random, and very occasionally /rarely); but the NPC who wears it tends to tilt their head over to one shoulder (to their left shoulder). Occasionally they undo this themselves but other times, I need to take the mask out of their inventories and re-equip it for them.

Elizabethponytailtest.nif also seems to work fine, same problem as BaStest.nif above (I think) in terms of shoulder-leaning. However, the eyelashes and hair aren't transparent. I'll have to redo this one because when I ported it over, I had to trim out a bunch of vertexes which were giving me a problem when exporting to nif (had no bone assigned or something?).

Elizabethshirthairtest.nif stymies the most. Everything went fine until I realized the facemask was split into two halves. (you'll see how there's two nitrishapes making up the face). Haven't tested it yet, because whenever I try to put it into the GECK, it crashes the thing.

If the info helps I followed the tut on Nexus Wiki, except that when I auto-assigned weights using blender, I weighted it using the vanilla femalehead.nif rather than using a helmet or a mask.

Anywho, if anyone could take a gander or even point me in the right direction on how to fix this damn thing I'd be grateful. Please excuse the rather roughshod attempt. This was more or less my first practice on modding, rather than an actual clean attempt at a facemask.

THE GECK FILE IS NOT INCLUDED, SO IF YOU WANT TO PLAY WITH THIS YOU'LL HAVE TO MAKE YOUR OWN. Otherwise, I'm sure the people who know more about this than I can parse the .nif files or even point out what's wrong just from the symptoms I'm having.

DROPBOX LINK:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/gfv2mciwej17x0f/Elizabeth%20Facemask.zip?dl=0

[Guest endgameaddiction]

I have no experience with this... and I'm going to just assume here on some things and going by the head tilt (90 degrees).

 

I'm assuming the head is treated as a head gear with the head and hair slot taking priority to hide the vanilla head and hair. Like when wearing a BOS helmet and such.

 

 

The 90 degree (head tilt as you mentioned) happens in some cases to head gear that has not been updated to FaceGen availability.

 

Make sure in FNVEdit the Biped data is set correctly. And what ever you do, do not try to do the fix in GECK using the update FaceGen model availability. it's bugged and doesn't work. From my experience. And it will cause more problems from what I read. Do it through FNVEdit. This might fix the 90 degree tilt headmesh treated as a headgear/mask what ever.

 

if not, That's as far as I can assist as I've said I don't have experiencing using mods with face masks or doing it myself.

[Horst]

I have no experience with this... and I'm going to just assume here on some things and going by the head tilt (90 degrees).

 

I'm assuming the head is treated as a head gear with the head and hair slot taking priority to hide the vanilla head and hair. Like when wearing a BOS helmet and such.

 

 

The 90 degree (head tilt as you mentioned) happens in some cases to head gear that has not been updated to FaceGen availability.

 

Make sure in FNVEdit the Biped data is set correctly. And what ever you do, do not try to do the fix in GECK using the update FaceGen model availability. it's bugged and doesn't work. From my experience. And it will cause more problems from what I read. Do it through FNVEdit. This might fix the 90 degree tilt headmesh treated as a headgear/mask what ever.

 

if not, That's as far as I can assist as I've said I don't have experiencing using mods with face masks or doing it myself.

I can't thank you enough for the input! I'll go and give it a try.

 

EDIT: I noticed a significant improvement when I set the flags in the time it takes for the head-tilt to happen / severity of it.

 

Still hasn't eliminated the problem completely, but I'll run more tests and see what's going on. It was true however the biped data was set incorrectly to head rather than head / hair.

[Guest endgameaddiction]

Also, just an advice, this site doesn't take too kindly to ripped content. As in porting models from another game to games we support here due to copyright. So It might get removed by a staff, but I'm not certain since this isn't on the official download page. If anything they'll just ask nicely to remove it or do it themselves and just warn you about it.

 

If you get this working (I'm a little familiar with face mask from dragbody's ports when I saw them on the old VGU community) it would be nice to get facial animation working. I would like to try this out if you manage to get it fixed. Maybe toss me a link in PM.

 

 

Best of luck with your project.

[Horst]

I mostly intend for this project to be a pilot for skills. I haven't even thought of uploading to downloads, because it was intended mostly for personal use- but I guess the rules are more or less the same as Nexus here.

Still, I'll take it down when people give me the notice. Otherwise I'll keep plugging away at this; most of my questions will probably be more related to trying to figure the small details when it comes to working with blender / nifskope.

[A.J.]

I didn't try the third one, but the first twos seem pretty fine to me, and they are so nice.

 

 

All are designed to replace the head.

 

If they replace the head, I doubt that the 90 degrees bug is involved and you shouldn't need to modify the biped values via FNVEdit.

 

The only things to correct I personally have found are these:

- there's a lack of alpha on the second head, so that eyelashes and hair seem ugly - you can add it via nifskope

- the neck is too small, it will create a huge hole between the head and the body

- the texture paths are wrong, they are absolute instead than relative, some normals are missing

- probably the nitristencil property in the second head's hair will have to be removed or it will cause a bad effect

 

I hope it helps.

 

 

[Guest endgameaddiction]

they do look nice. I'm  liking the left one most of all. That pale brings out the doll face. Just lovely. I do hope it can be fixed.

[Horst]

I didn't try the third one, but the first twos seem pretty fine to me, and they are so nice.

 

 

All are designed to replace the head.

 

If they replace the head, I doubt that the 90 degrees bug is involved and you shouldn't need to modify the biped values via FNVEdit.

 

The only things to correct I personally have found are these:

- there's a lack of alpha on the second head, so that eyelashes and hair seem ugly - you can add it via nifskope

- the neck is too small, it will create a huge hole between the head and the body

- the texture paths are wrong, they are absolute instead than relative, some normals are missing

- probably the nitristencil property in the second head's hair will have to be removed or it will cause a bad effect

 

I hope it helps.

 

ah yes, the neckseam was intended as the original material didn't have enough 'length' per se to be compatible with the NV bodies. i hope to rectify this at a later date but it's outside of the scope of what I'm trying to perfect right now.

 

As for the lack of alpha on the second head, thank you. That was exactly what I needed- I was fiddling with a .dds editor and was saving it in DTX5 all this time, but I couldn't have thought of that myself.

 

texture paths are relative, yes- it was because I fucked up (I forgot to set the browse for textures feature in nifskope, used absolute paths, so it'd be broken as shit on your end)

 

normals I haven't fully worked on and once again, hatch job. I'm fully aware of this issue though but right now, squashing the BIG bugs first.

 

thanks for the nitristencil property heads up.

 

  Can't thank you enough for the input. Hopefully I'll remember these things when I start practicing with some original-made content down the road.