Lovely Jessica as a Player Preset?

[Daguy]

Hey LL, it's been a while. I don't suppose anyone could lend a hand?

 

http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/27955/?

 

I'm trying to use the above in a personal project, but i need her face as the player, and for some reason I can't seem to get it working. I assume it's because somehow she uses a custom face mesh. When I set her as preset, I just get the fugly base face that shows up in the Creation Kit.

 

Please could someone lend a hand? It would be greatly appreciated.

[Ventus2111]

You could try this tutorial. 

[Daguy]

Thanks, that's actually pretty awesome. Got me much closer than before. Sadly, however, it doesn't work properly. The above character seems to have it's eyebrows and such as tied to the race itself. If you copy the morph you get the general shape; but the face looks bland, and most importantly, lacks eyebrows as the default ones are somewhere in her head.

 

I'm hoping that someone whom this sort of thing is old hat to can lend a hand. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who would love to see this as it's own race. Even the originals creator notes that the only reason he doesn't include a preset is not knowing how.

 

It's not laziness on my part; despite being totally unfamiliar with the process or CharGen mod, I tried that tutorial. It's simply that this NPC and it's morph are utterly alien to me, and I simply don't have the talent or knowledge required. See my sig. It's not as if I'm Toolkit-phobic.

 

So, if anyone is willing and able to help, it would be greatly appreciated. I don't typically ask like this, but having this face as a preset/race I can swap to is vital to a roleplaying project I'm working on.

 

[Daguy]

So, it's been days, and I'm no closer to solving this. The flood of support for an old time (albeit nothing groundbreaking) contributor and supporter of the site has been staggering. I jest, sort of, but I really am surprised. There used to be quite the community spirit.

The best I've managed to do, with Ventus sort-of-help, was use CharGen to get roughly the faceshape using my base textures, which looked distantly close to how Jessica may look if someone beat her with a bag of hammers.

If anyone who knows how to make a preset that looks like an exact match of the companion mod, and they have ever enjoyed or used my texture mod, or one of my tweaks, or even some of my theory/storycrafting back in the day... please could they spare a few moments to either throw together a quick preset or even just give me a short step-by-step how I can make a custom race that looks exactly the same in the kit? For old times sake?

[Levionte]

There's nothing special about the mesh. It's the vanilla head with vanilla morphs. There is no eyebrow mesh, they're painted on the face texture. (That's actually the same way I make my custom followers. When you sculpt the head in a 3d editor it's a pain to align it with everything else.) Getting the head mesh the correct shape is easy, you can just import it with racemenu. But it sounds like you're managing that part.

 

You need to create a custom race that's setup to use the skin texture for the face the mod author provided. There are a myriad of tutorials on custom races. The only additional thing you'll need to do is create a texture set that points to the Jessica face textures and assign it to your race.

[Daguy]

Yeah, no problem there. I actually had a go at the custom race, figuring what you said myself, but it's such a different system to Oblivion/FO3/NV that I quickly got lost among all the little steps, and couldn't track down the texture set in the Jessica mod, as originally I was going to make a preset by expanding the original mod. What puzzled me, and still does, is if you 'preview' the Jessica NPC (or make a preset) out of the face, you just get a fugly Breton.

 

[Levionte]

It may not even have a texture set. Followers don't need one. If you've ever made a follower or tweaked npcs, you know you have to select the actor and hit CTRL + F4 to export the facegen data or you'll get the grey face bug. But that's what the game actually reads. If you go to the NIF in the facegendata folder (meshes\actors\character\facegendata\facegeom\Pluginname.esp\), you can change the textures, change the hair, sculpt the face, and basically do whatever you want and the game will read that instead. There are some rules you have to follow or it'll break, but you can make drastic changes to the point that the preview is completely inaccurate.

 

But I digress. The easiest way to make a texture set is to open up an existing one, make your changes, and rename it so that it makes a new entry instead of saving over the old you. I think the female head is something like "skinheadfemale" but I'd have to open the CK to find out. You can type it in the search bar and select all categories at the bottom. After you make a texture set, you need to make a new head. Again, I think it's something like "femaleheadnord" which you can find under Headparts. You can keep all the folder paths for the meshes the same, and there should be a drop down menu in the upper-right to select your new texture set. Then tell your custom race to use the head.

[zzz72w3r]

BringTheNoise adopted them last year using CITRUS high poly head in the RaceMenu preset share thread but like Levionte said omega99 used custom textures so without them you are not going to get the likeness:

 

http://www.loverslab.com/topic/41228-wip-share-racemenu-v3-presets/?do=findComment&comment=1051218

 

If you are going to make a custom Jessica race (and please DO!!!) then I would strongly recommend using the CITRUS version.