Copying a difficult follower head for the player character?

[Fredas]

This is one of those things I meant to do a year ago.  Well, now that I'm actually fixing to play Skyrim rather than make mods for it, I finally started looking into this.

 

The face in question - still one of the best faces I've ever seen in the game - is the GomaPeroFollower.  The linked version 1.5 uses a higher-poly mesh, and the best-case scenario is that I would find a way to utilize that.  But what I began with was the v1.1 I had sitting around, which looks ever so slightly different, and also uses a traditional, low-poly head.

 

Basically every "guide" I've located with regard to what's involved has said to make use of RaceMenu plus either the face copy spell or the sculpt menu and the follower's head .nif.  Okay, so I tried face copy first.  In the CK, GomaPeroFollower is indicated as being named Rethi, and for whatever reason, this results in the face copy spell stealing Rethi's (vanilla) face and hair, not the actual face being used by the targeted NPC.

 

Fair enough.  I tried copying the head .nif to the relevant spot and loading that up.  This time I got closer.  Half of the mesh components could not or would not be used, owing it would seem to discrepancies in vertex count.  Obviously that's a dealbreaker.  As for the result itself, it was close... but definitely not correct, even after I forced it to find the correct face textures and tint.

 

So at this point, I am guessing that RaceMenu is not going to be the answer, at least not via either of these two methods, and that I will have to make use of a more brute-force procedure if I'm going to make this happen.  That's what I'm after.  The how-to to get it done.

 

Thanks in advance for any advice.

 

[Groovtama]

You need to use halofarms high poly head on character creation otherwise it does not work with the import. Because you can't import different head mesh files on your own one.

[Kastagir]

Not going to happen.

 

That particular head mesh lacks the required morphs. NPCs don't require morphs (sliders), so it works for an NPC but you can't use it for your character.

 

Even if you manage to find the femalehead.nif used by that NPC, it won't work as a playable character without working morphs.

[Groovtama]

Not going to happen.

 

That particular head mesh lacks the required morphs. NPCs don't require morphs (sliders), so it works for an NPC but you can't use it for your character.

 

Even if you manage to find the femalehead.nif used by that NPC, it won't work as a playable character without working morphs.

RaceMenu imports are working without the morph files for the headmesh... the head mesh just needs to be from the same base mesh, vertex count, vertex order etc.

[Fredas]

Thanks for the replies.

 

Tried a different tack and have made some modest progress.  This time I simply made the follower race playable and added the follower actor as a preset.  The good news is that this results in the eyes / eyelashes appearing as intended - something that I couldn't accomplish with RaceMenu's sculpt import or face copy spell.  The bad news is that the game seems determined to ignore the fact that I assigned the preset.  It finds vanilla presets if I leave them to be found, which is how I discovered the eyes will work.  But even though the CK agrees that the additional preset is properly there, it doesn't show up in-game.  In fact if I make it the only available preset, the entire race fails to show.  I cannot identify any difference in settings between the follower's actor/preset and a vanilla preset.  Then again, this also means I do not know how the game knows which head .nif to reference.

[Kastagir]

You won't be able to get it to work without the base femalehead.nif used to create the NPC - and that mesh is not included with the NPC.  The author of the headmesh will not release it publicly because it has no working morphs.  I'm not saying it can't be used without morphs - I'm saying that's the reason the author won't release it.