How to make custom followers with their own femalehead.tri animate facially?

[applepie123]

I'm sorry if the question's similar to the one I've made in the technical board, but I'm not really getting any response there. I've did a quick run down of the follower mods I've installed and it seemed like the ones that come with femalehead.tri files are not affected by Female Facial Animation and Mfg console mods regardless of my load order. Is there something that I'm missing here? Is it because I was also using a 'All in One Face v4 0a Face Pack for CBBEv3 body' mod that contains the tri files? Anything I could do about that?

 

 

[Akzyra]

If they have their standalone TRI files, they will use those instead of whatever you installed.

You can try to patch the "Female Facial Animation" files over custom followers, but it may brake the animation completely.

Because some have custom TRIs and NIFs.

[applepie123]

If they have their standalone TRI files, they will use those instead of whatever you installed.

You can try to patch the "Female Facial Animation" files over custom followers, but it may brake the animation completely.

Because some have custom TRIs and NIFs.

Yeah, standalone TRI. I  tried to hide those standalone TRI from the standalone followers in favor of that provided by Female Facial Animation, but that just ended up making the character having zero expression in the end.

 

Is there no way to work around that? Actually have bunch of nice custom followers that I want to use, but many of them comes with their own femalehead.tri. And it'd be a shame to see animations like bj being awkward to look at with their mouth only opening slightly.  

[CEO 0S]

I'm not sure exactly how Tri works but a majority of things in the CK in terms of face creation are not used by the actual game but are only used to generate a nif of the head and after that the game looks at the nif for all information it needs regardless of what is set in the CK. I'm not sure if TRI information is included in the nif or not.

 

No promises here and make sure you back up the followers first but If it helps I'd try a few things:

 

Attempt One: Open CK and repoint all their faceparts to the default tri locations, save, and see if that fixes it (It sounds like you might have tried that already but just incase.)

Also check in their actor form to make sure you are repointing the head parts they are actually using. It will be the same page as the one you set up their face tints on.

 

----------------------------------

Attempt Two:

 

1. Find their FaceGeom head nif: 

 

meshes\actors\character\facegendata\facegeom\ModName.esp\ActorFormID.nif

 

2. Copy it somewhere Safe we'll need a copy of it soon.

 

3. Go back in CK and set the TRIs of all their head parts back to Skyrim's default locations. Open the actor form and make sure it's using these face parts you just pointed back to Skyrim Default.

 

4. Export the head, (It will prob export the default vanilla style head with no fancy morphs)

 

5. Use NIF merge to inject the face shape you copied earlier over the new you one just exported into "FaceGeom" 

 

Nif merge is here: http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/40494/?

 

Basically you can't overwrite a head in facegeom simply by pasting a new head over it (Naming conventions and special nodes it requires I think.) you have to use nif merge to inject the shape over the exported head to make it work.

 

Hope that fixes it!

 

[RomeoZero]

TRI files are morph animations of facial expressions and phonemes for the head mesh you use.
For Custom Race that you made in CK ( that can be made in custom follower via console export )  with head mesh (ripped from any game) you must specify a location in CK - headpart  to use it facial animation . (actors>chars>yourchar>facepart > head\mouth\brows\eyes.tri that came\made* for this head from ripped game \3dmx*)
In vanilla character assets folder, are files that use your current* player races morphs of head.nif

If custom follower you made , use your current*  morphs, add Tri files to the follower headpart folder for independent use, when you'll update RM\ECE. Or you can point path to files for CK headpart in char assets folder instead if a solid no update. So if Follower use their headpart folder it does not effect mfg.You need to update them manually.

Overall info

* - RaceMenu or ECE or Vanilla

[applepie123]

 

I'm not sure exactly how Tri works but a majority of things in the CK in terms of face creation are not used by the actual game but are only used to generate a nif of the head and after that the game looks at the nif for all information it needs regardless of what is set in the CK. I'm not sure if TRI information is included in the nif or not.

 

No promises here and make sure you back up the followers first but If it helps I'd try a few things:

 

Attempt One: Open CK and repoint all their faceparts to the default tri locations, save, and see if that fixes it (It sounds like you might have tried that already but just incase.)

Also check in their actor form to make sure you are repointing the head parts they are actually using. It will be the same page as the one you set up their face tints on.

 

----------------------------------

Attempt Two:

 

1. Find their FaceGeom head nif: 

 

meshes\actors\character\facegendata\facegeom\ModName.esp\ActorFormID.nif

 

2. Copy it somewhere Safe we'll need a copy of it soon.

 

3. Go back in CK and set the TRIs of all their head parts back to Skyrim's default locations. Open the actor form and make sure it's using these face parts you just pointed back to Skyrim Default.

 

4. Export the head, (It will prob export the default vanilla style head with no fancy morphs)

 

5. Use NIF merge to inject the face shape you copied earlier over the new you one just exported into "FaceGeom" 

 

Nif merge is here: http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/40494/?

 

Basically you can't overwrite a head in facegeom simply by pasting a new head over it (Naming conventions and special nodes it requires I think.) you have to use nif merge to inject the shape over the exported head to make it work.

 

Hope that fixes it!

 

Ah, thanks for the detailed write-up, but I'm actually quite new to modding, and I haven't used CK before. How exactly do I repoint their face parts to default tri locations? 

[applepie123]

TRI files are morph animations of facial expressions and phonemes for the head mesh you use.

For Custom Race that you made in CK ( that can be made in custom follower via console export )  with head mesh (ripped from any game) you must specify a location in CK - headpart  to use it facial animation . (actors>chars>yourchar>facepart > head\mouth\brows\eyes.tri that came\made* for this head from ripped game \3dmx*)

In vanilla character assets folder, are files that use your current* player races morphs of head.nif

If custom follower you made , use your current*  morphs, add Tri files to the follower headpart folder for independent use, when you'll update RM\ECE. Or you can point path to files for CK headpart in char assets folder instead if a solid no update. So if Follower use their headpart folder it does not effect mfg.You need to update them manually.

Overall info

* - RaceMenu or ECE or Vanilla

 

You see...I did not make the follower myself. I simply use the ones uploaded here or from Nexus. Around half of them come with their tri files, the other half don't. The ones that don't come with their own tri files worked as female facial animation and Mfg console would affect them, but if they do, then they're not affected.

[CEO 0S]

 

 

 

Ah, thanks for the detailed write-up, but I'm actually quite new to modding, and I haven't used CK before. How exactly do I repoint their face parts to default tri locations? 

 

 

Hi AppliePie,

Without having used CK there will be a bit of a learning curve wall depending on how adaptable you are in terms of doing my solutions. If it helps you can think of CK as a giant spread sheet, you enter "Forms" of various types into it which are armor, quests, spells etc.  Head parts is a type of form.

 

Rant of information if it might help: (There might be an easier way this is just what I would try to do what you are trying to do)

 

 

The followers most likely have forms for their head, eyes, brows, hair. The forms look like this:

For testing purposes you can try just doing the head first as that might give you effects right away and require you to just learn that one. It might not give you all the expressions but at least show if it is working.

 

 

(Disregard the huge 1, this is a graphic from a guide)

 

You're going to want to change the one labled "Tri" on the left to point to the default Skyrim location and you'll want to do this for any tri's that were packed with the follower. I can't promise this will work but it would be the first thing I would try to fix the problem.

 

I don't actually believe tri's ever really need to be packed or pointed to with followers and the vanilla ones should always be fine so it should work.

 

 

This will be hard, it's one of the simpler things to do in CK but it's a lot to take it all at once if you have to get your feet on the ground too, I'll try to keep an eye on this. I'm worried about recommending but posting this in case you want to give it a shot, just know that I think lack of comfort and practice in setting up the forms in CK and how things connect could make this solution quite frustrating for someone fresh to CK.

 

Attempt 2 is going to be a bigger undertaking if you're really determined to try this I'd take on making a custom follower first and seeing if you can complete one with ECE or Racemenu morphs (beyond vanilla). If you know that process you'll know how to fix the specific problem you want to change. It's a bit to learn though.

 

Here's a guide I wrote on a different subject making custom followers it will cover in a backwards engineering way the elements you will need to change and does cover the faceparts so it might help get your bearings. Do note that this is for creating custom followers and not what you are trying to do (it just might shed some light on the lay out of the land is what I mean)

 

http://0s-mod.tumblr.com/0S/G/CustomNPC/PerfectFidelity

 

 

-------------------------

 

To load into CK:

 

File > Data > click the follower mod you want to start with and click the "Set as Active File" then hit ok and it loads the forms for that follower. (It will also load all of Skyrim's vanilla forms so it will still be a mess.

 

If you go back to the data panel. You can click details and it lists all the forms in the follower mod organized by form type. You can find HeadParts which is designated as "HDPT" there to at least see their form names to find. You can take these form names and put them in the search filter on the top left of the object window to find those forms. (Make sure you select all at bottom of the list of form types in the object window or it will only search whatever category is currently selected)

 

One last note:

 

It's important to understand that all Skyrim's vanilla files are in a BSA which unpacks when Skyrim is run and it's a replica of the structure modders make. For example the tri might not exist in an actual folder in your Skyrim but it might be in the BSA at the directory it's located at. If you're pointing to a tri that only exists in the BSA you'll basically have to point to a blank spot in your Skyrim Directory which can be tricky to find and input tri's due to this (more so just a pain)

 

 

 

[RomeoZero]

 

TRI files are morph animations of facial expressions and phonemes for the head mesh you use.

For Custom Race that you made in CK ( that can be made in custom follower via console export )  with head mesh (ripped from any game) you must specify a location in CK - headpart  to use it facial animation . (actors>chars>yourchar>facepart > head\mouth\brows\eyes.tri that came\made* for this head from ripped game \3dmx*)

In vanilla character assets folder, are files that use your current* player races morphs of head.nif

If custom follower you made , use your current*  morphs, add Tri files to the follower headpart folder for independent use, when you'll update RM\ECE. Or you can point path to files for CK headpart in char assets folder instead if a solid no update. So if Follower use their headpart folder it does not effect mfg.You need to update them manually.

Overall info

* - RaceMenu or ECE or Vanilla

 

You see...I did not make the follower myself. I simply use the ones uploaded here or from Nexus. Around half of them come with their tri files, the other half don't. The ones that don't come with their own tri files worked as female facial animation and Mfg console would affect them, but if they do, then they're not affected.

 

The one that don't have own tri files are using vanilla folder path then in CK ( character assets ) .I mentioned above it.

2 options for you.

1 - you copy tri files from char assets to follower folder

2- in Creation kit add manually it. There are wiki on Custom followers in CK.

 

[applepie123]

Thanks CEO  0S, it worked now! I love you.

 

Thanks to you as well romeozero.