Converting Skyrim Hairs?

[Arghden]

Thanks for the help! Only one thing more(it doesnt have to do with hairs but i feel i should ask) is there a way to port gloves with bodyslide without they becoming like spaghetti? Or do i HAVE to use blender/3dsmax?

[Guest]

Thanks for the help! Only one thing more(it doesnt have to do with hairs but i feel i should ask) is there a way to port gloves with bodyslide without they becoming like spaghetti? Or do i HAVE to use blender/3dsmax?

There's no possible way as far as I know. You have to use another software as you suggested. Huge pain in the ass.

 

TO EVERYONE ELSE:

 

Tutorial will be released this upcoming Tuesday!!! Thank you all for the patience.

[sankojin]

 

Thanks for the help! Only one thing more(it doesnt have to do with hairs but i feel i should ask) is there a way to port gloves with bodyslide without they becoming like spaghetti? Or do i HAVE to use blender/3dsmax?

There's no possible way as far as I know. You have to use another software as you suggested. Huge pain in the ass.

 

TO EVERYONE ELSE:

 

Tutorial will be released this upcoming Tuesday!!! Thank you all for the patience.

 

 

I hope you come out with the rest of it soon. Thanks for doing this.

[Guest]

Have not heard of complete step-by-step tutorial yet, this would be third person to promise it. Still amazed the lack of hair mods in F4, when there are million high/quality hair mods in Skyrim. And I have set my eyes on specific hair I used in Skyrim, and as cant ask anyone to port me one, wanted to at least learn to do it myself for personal use (all credit to original hair mod creator obviously): Alexis-hair is just the best there is, my char in F4 wont be complete without it >.>)a

[Guest]

Holy shit I completely forgot about this. Okay okay okay. There will be a change of plans since I was able to optimize the steps that I previously posted before. For now, I will make a text based tutorial and be as descriptive as possible. I can't do a pictorial version because my life has taken a busy turn.

Programs You Will Need and Why:

 

1. Bethesda Archive Extractor - This will be used to extract the head mesh file so that we have a point of reference when we position our hairs and apply the bone weights.

 

2. Outfit Studio - This will be used to for various things that will be explained later.

 

3. Material Editor - This will be used to be able to apply material textures to the hairs.

 

4. paint.NET or Gimp - Either one of these programs will be used to edit the texture files of the hair. In Fallout 4, the texture of the hair needs to be in black and white mode and brightened so that hair colors can show up appropriately.

 

5. Fallout 4 Creation Kit - This will be used to add the hair in the game which includes giving it a form ID, naming it, and specifying whether males, females, or unisex.

 

Before We Get Started:

 

Please download and install all the programs mentioned above. I have zero knowledge in using FO4Edit, so I'm sorry if you prefer that but I can't help you there. Make sure you downloaded the Skyrim hair....or any hair for that matter and placed it somewhere where you can find it easily.

 

I also recommend getting your file paths ready for your meshes, textures, and materials. I'll show an example of mine:

 

meshes: Fallout 4\Data\meshes\actors\character\characterassets\Hair

 

textures: Fallout 4\Data\textures\Sun's Hepsy Hairs

 

materials: Fallout 4\Data\materials\Sun's Hepsy Hairs

 

Next, edit your hair textures so that it is in black and white mode. Once you made it black and white, adjust the brightness and contrast so that it looks decent, not too dark and too bright. Here is an image for reference in my own mod. **NOTE:** Please make sure that you retain alpha values if there are any transparent spots when you save the texture. There will most likely be transparent area near the ends of the hair. If you're using Photoshop with the Nvidia plugin, remember to save it as a .dds file AND enable explicit alpha. Regardless, all the texture files should be in .dds format. You hair may come with normal textures (something that looks like kinda purple blue) and specular textures (a texture that's a darker). Convert all these textures if you have them as they will make your hair look better. Save these textures wherever your textures folder is in the Fallout 4 files. Hopefully the hair pack you have will all be able to use the same hair texture, if not, then you'll need to convert them all the B&W and into .dds format if it isn't already.

 

Some notes: the main hair texture is called the diffuse texture and the file name will usually have a "_d.dds", the normal texture is the bluish one and that one ends in "_n.dds". And the specular texture may be there and ends in "_s.dds". The diffuse texture is NECESSARY to have, the other two not so much and you can usually get away with not having them but it may impact the hair quality. 

 

Image reference of one of my hair textures in B&W and slightly brightened.

 

Next, we need to set up the material file(s) for you hair. Each different hair style texture will require its own material file. Some hair packs can use the same one but some can't. It's very dependent. I will outline how to do that here.

 

When open material editor, a dialogue window will pop up with various tabs and settings. I will show an image of each tab/setting so that you can copy it as I found out that these settings work best regardless of the hair:

 

 

Remember to do this for all the hairs that don't share the same material file.

 

Once all the materials have been set up we are about 33% of the way finished! Now we can start messing with the meshes and boneweighting (the hardest part of this but not that bad). ON TO THE NEXT SECTION!

 

Setting Up the Meshes and Bone Weighting:

 

There are a few things you need to note. Skyrim .obj and .nif files are incompatible with Fallout 4 as is. However we can still use them in the Fallout 4 version of outfit studio so don't worry! Anyway follow the next steps!

 

1. We need to extract our Fallout 4 female or male head mesh using the Bethesda Archive Extractor. I don't want to get into specifics of doing that but basically open up the Fallout4-Meshes.ESM file located in your Data folder and extract it somewhere easily accessible....like your desktop. We will leave that aside for now.

 

2. Open Outfit Studio.

 

3. Go to File > Import > and choose the format the hair is in, most likely it is a nif. You might get some warning that Skyrim nifs don't work with Fallout 4 nifs (told you so). Ignore that and proceed to the next step.

 

4. On the meshes tab with the name of your hair, right click on the name and go to Export > Export as .obj. Save this .obj file somewhere easily accessible like your desktop and repeat steps 3 and 4 for all the hairs you want to convert.

 

5. Once all your stuff is in .obj format and saved somewhere, go back to Outfit Studio to start a new project.

 

6. Go to File > New Project, and a dialogue window will pop up asking you for a reference shape. Go to browse and choose the head mesh we extracted. In the next dialogue window, it will ask you to load an outfit. Ignore that and click continue/okay.

 

7. Your head meshes will have loaded in and it will be in the correct position that it is in. DO NOT move or rotate the head mesh. Go to File > Import > Import from .obj and load in your first hair.

 

8. Several things can happen. The first one is that you may not be able to see the hair because it is either located higher above or lower below the head mesh OOOORRRRR the sizing is way off (most likely it is huge). To fix this, either change the position or resize the hair mesh by right clicking on the mesh name and either choosing "Move" to move it or "Scale" to resize it.

 

9. Once your hair is visible and normal for the most part, start positioning your hair onto the head the way you want it to appear in game. You have to do slight modifications of the mesh like expanding or collapsing certain vertices and I will briefly show you in the next image generally what you should be seeing: 

 

10. Once the hair is positioned where you want it and it generally looks good. Right click on the bones tab and delete all the bones EXCEPT the Head and Head_skin. The reason for this is because bone weighting of the neck and chest may occurr which will start to become a problem whenever your character does certain movements or poses. the hair will try to move with the neck and chest if we keep those bones, better to just leave the Head and Head_skin. Next, right click on the hair mesh name and choose Copy Bone Weights. A new dialogue window will pop up with some settings. Generally the default settings will work but if you have a hair that has some crazy parts sticking out then you may want to increase the "5.00" into something higher. The reason for this is because when you copy bone weights, certain parts of the hair may not be weighted since the range of "5.00" may not be big enough. This all depends on the hair style though. The hair style in the above picture used 5.5 without issues.

 

11. Once we copied the bone weights and let it load,  let's check to see if the entire hair mesh has weighting. To check this, right click on the hair mesh name and choose "Mask Weighted Vertices". After choosing that option, parts with bone weights will be shaded black and parts without bone weights will be unshaded. This means that we have to manually apply the boneweighting.

 

12. To manually apply the boneweighting, make sure the hair mesh name is selected, navigate to the bones tab, and I recommend choosing the Head_skin bone. When you choose that, you will be given a brush and all you have to do is brush the areas without weighting and it should be a blue tint to let you know you are brushing. Once all the parts are done, go back to the mesh tab, right click on the hair mesh name, choose Mask Weighted Vertices, and everything should be shaded black.

 

****SPECIAL NOTE REGARDING PHYSICS****

 

Steps 9-12 will work with hair styles that are relatively short and close to the head like most male hairs, short bob cuts, etc etc. You may have a hair that's longer, has a ponytail, has twin tails, or has some other part that will no doubt look better if it had physics. Adding physics to the hair isn't difficult. What you have to do, which is the easiest way, is download (if you already don't have) another Fallout 4 hair style that has been created already and that is similar in hair shape to yours and that has physics. To do this here is how:

 

A. Follow step 9 exactly how it is in terms of positioning your hair based on the fallout 4 head mesh.

 

B. Once the hair is positioned well enough, right click on the head mesh name NOT THE HAIR and choose Set Reference. This will disable the head mesh as the reference shape and it will no longer be highlighted green. Once that happens, delete the head mesh by right clicking and choosing "Delete".

 

C. Go to File > Import > Import NIF and choose the hair that is similar to yours and that has the physics.

 

D. Once the hair is loaded in, right click on that hair's name and set as reference. 

 

E. Go to the bones tab and delete all the bones EXCEPT: Head, Head_skin, and all the physics bones which is signified with the word "cloth"

 

F. When all that is done, make sure YOUR hair mesh is selected and follow steps 10-12.

 

G. Please make sure that the parts sticking out only have the physics, otherwise hair parts that shouldn't move will move. To remove bone weighting, hold the Alt key and brush the areas that you want to remove weighting. I suggest setting the strength of the brush to max, otherwise it will take forever.

 

Detour over.

 

13. At this point, your hair should be positioned correctly and have the proper bone weighting! Yay! We are about 75% done! The next step is to double click on YOUR hair mesh. A dialogue window will pop up and you need to assign the material file for that hair so that it has textures. Navigate to the location where we created the material file and choose it. Once exiting the dialogue box, your hair should be textured and look kinda white/very light gray. Any spots that are pure black (most likely the ends of the hair) is okay and it means that that spot will be transparent in the game (which is what we want to make the hair look realistic with loose ends).

 

****WARNING****

 

I forgot to mention this crucial piece of information when it comes to hairs. Your hair should only be made up of ONE object. What do I mean? What I mean is that when you load your hair in Outfit Studio, there should only be one name for the mesh of the hair and not made up of multiple parts. What I mean by parts is like  one mesh for the bangs/frills, one mesh for the pony tail, etc etc. This is an issue because Fallout 4 only loads one mesh when it comes to hairs. If you fail to heed this warning, nothing bad will happen except that your hair will look incomplete once loaded into the game. This issue is NOT easy to fix. To quickly explain why, we will have to go to a 3D program like 3DS Max or Blender, attach all the meshes together into ONE shape and redo the textures for the hair. You will need extensive knowledge of the modeling program to do all this. If anyone knows of a work around or easier solution, please let me know.

 

14. Anyway back to the tutorial......after the material files has been added we are done with our first hair! Now go to File > Export > Export nif, DO NOT USE EXPORT WITH REFERENCE! Make sure to save the nif file in the mesh folder we created. IF you get an error about unweighted vertices, we can do several things: we can go back and try to add weights to vertices we may have accidentally missed or we can sometimes get away with missing a few vertices. That all depends on the final result of the in the game.

 

15. Repeat all the necessary steps for your other hairs!

 

Adding the Hairs Into Your Game Using the Creation Kit

 

I will assume you are at least a beginner in the Creation Kit. These steps aren't hard and honestly they are quite fast depending on the number of hair styles you have. (My Hepsy hairs mod came with 46 hair styles......took forever T^T)

 

1. Open the Creation Kit. Let it load because this program takes forever to load.

 

2. Once it is loaded, go to File and choose Data. Double click on Fallout4.esm and hit okay. Let it load.....this may take a while since it will load all the vanilla assets onto the CK.

 

3. Once THAT is loaded you might get some warnings which we can ignore. You will also see several windows. The only one we are concerned about is the one titled "Object View". We will not be using the Cell View or the Render Window. Go to the Object View and head to these branches: Character > Head Part > Female, Male, or Unisex depending on who your hair is for (just make it unisex if you plan to share this mod......) > Head Part.

 

4. Once you are at the final branch of Head Part, you will see a list of all the head parts available. Here's quick image of what is should look like (I choose the Unisex option):

 

5. Right click anywhere where the hard parts are and hit New. A dialogue should pop up to add in your new hair. You will need to give it an ID, Name (the name as it will appear in the show looks menu), and.......just follow my picture example below:

 

 

6. Once your info looks similar to mine, we are done with that hair!! Do this for all your hairs! And when we are finished adding all our hair to the CK. Go to File > Save, and it will prompt you to choose the location and name of your newly created ESP file for your hair! Make sure that the location is in the Fallout 4 Data folder!

 

AND WE ARE DONE! MAKE SURE THE ESP IS ACTIVATED IN YOUR MOD MANAGER AND LOAD UP THE GAME TO SEE THE END RESULT! YIPEE!!!!!

 

 

 

I'm really sorry for forgetting to do this T^T, life got busy when I moved to America.

[Guest]

@ Sun Jeong, thanks for the guide, you did it as you promised regardless of how busy you are in real life! You are a wonderful person to this community, thanks again and keep up the good work!

[Raytor]

Woohoo thanks so much. Any chance of making a tutorial on how to edit the hair to work with hats?

[Mercenary666]

@Sun Jeong

 

Thanks so much for posting this and for sharing your beautiful mods with the rest of us. It's now time to convert some of my favorite hairs from the old SG Hair pack (remember that?)

[Guest]

@Sun Jeong

 

Thanks so much for posting this and for sharing your beautiful mods with the rest of us. It's now time to convert some of my favorite hairs from the old SG Hair pack (remember that?)

Ah yes wow actually I was thinking of converting that mod as well but if you're going to do it by all means! I give myself too many projects lol.

[Guest]

Woohoo thanks so much. Any chance of making a tutorial on how to edit the hair to work with hats?

 

To make it work with hats there are two ways to do it depending on the hair style.

 

The first one requires only the use of Outfit Studio and the second way requires knowledge of mesh/vertices editing of the hair and hat.

 

Are you familiar with 3DS Max? If so, this is the most sure fire way to edit with this program to make all hairs work. If not, then Outfit Studio will work about 80% of the time.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

At the moment I don't have the time to type it out a full detailed step by step instruction but you basically do this IF you don't know how to use 3DS Max or a similar program:

 

0. I will assume you followed the tutorial I posted and have a few hairs that are ready to be used for Fallout 4.

 

1. If the hat you want is a Fallout 4 hat, then you will need the Bethesda Archive extractor to extract the meshes and textures of the hat. So go ahead and extract those two types of files and save it somewhere like your desktop.

 

2. Open outfit studio and go to File > Load Reference > Click browse on the dialogue window and look for the nif file of the hair you want with the hat.

 

3. Once the hair is opened and loaded, it should be green in the meshes tab indicating that it is the reference shape.

 

4. Next load in the nif file of the hat. You do this by going to File > Import > Import as .nif

 

5. Let it load. If you don't see the hat then there is an issue with the sizing (most likely too big) or an issue with the position (most likely way above your hair). In this case, adjust the size and position of the by right clicking on its mesh name and messing around with the "Scale" and "Move" options. Position and resize the hat until you are satisfied with its appearance on the hair.

 

6. Once the hat is in a good spot, you may notice that there may be clipping on the hair. You can do two things to remedy this. You can either a) use the expand tool to expand parts of the hat so that it hides the hair or you can use the deflate tool to deflate parts of the hair so that it fits within the hats. Play around to see what works best. 

 

7. Once that is finished, right click on the hat's mesh name in the mesh tab and copy bone weights. The default values are usually sufficient. Once the bone weights are copies you NEED to delete the physics bones from the hat if your hair contains physics. To do this, make sure that the mesh hat name is selected in the meshes tab, then go to the bones tab, highlight all the physics bones indicated by the word "cloth", right click and choose delete from selected shapes NOT from project (otherwise the hair will also lose the physics). Once that's all done. Export the nif with reference since it contains the hair.

 

**DISCLAIMER**

The following steps have not been tested by me as I have not attempted to add hats in with hairs but I understand the gist of the process.

 

8. So to be honest there are one of two things we can do to make this work and unfortunately haven't tested. So this will be hard to kinda explain coherently:

 

The Fallout 4 Creation Kit has the option in the hair settings to add "extra" parts to the hairs and let's you choose the extra nif parts. In this case, then we have to export the hat without the reference and then add the hat to the hair as an extra part. We must first create the hair add-on similar to the way we created the hair add-on. Load the game to see if this method worked or not.

 

If it didn't work, then we can try something else. We can export the hair with the hair as reference and in the hair add-on we can attempt to add the nif file containing both the hat and hair mesh as one without the use of extra parts. For me personally this has not worked in the past but that may be because I may have done something wrong when exporting my nif file.

 

If none of those options work then I'm sorry : < 

 

I think it would be beneficial to message someone who has done hats with hairs, like the author of Misc hairstyles (but they were banned from Nexus....)

[Raytor]

Thanks a bunch! I only have some mesh modelling knowledge with Blender, and I'm just getting into texturing.

[Andy14]

Check the path and filename of the Materialfile in BSLightningShaderPropert.  With # ???

[Guest]

Check the path and filename of the Materialfile in BSLightningShaderPropert.  With # ???

I'm not sure what you're talking about. Is that in Nifskope?

[Andy14]

 

Check the path and filename of the Materialfile in BSLightningShaderPropert.  With # ???

I'm not sure what you're talking about. Is that in Nifskope?

 

 

Ignore my post. It was an answer to a question here.

The question was deleted after I had answered.

 

The question was with screenshot of Hair in Nifskope with incorrect data for the BGSM in the shader.

[VonHelton]

Here's a hair that ALOT of people have been wanting.......

 

......Myself included.

 

?

 

 

 

MarieRoseHDT.7z

[Phelps1247]

Well, I can't make the material file correctly it seems. All the pictures are gone so I don't know what to do. Everything I've tried has resulted in "Fatal exception has occured, the program will terminate" when trying to apply it in outfit studio. I can do everything else right as I've successfully loaded it into the game and can put it on my character but it doesn't have any textures.

[VonHelton]

9 hours ago, Phelps1247 said:

Well, I can't make the material file correctly it seems. All the pictures are gone so I don't know what to do. Everything I've tried has resulted in "Fatal exception has occured, the program will terminate" when trying to apply it in outfit studio. I can do everything else right as I've successfully loaded it into the game and can put it on my character but it doesn't have any textures.

Zip up what ya got, I'll throw it in the game & see if I can get some textures for it.

 

This is a famous hair! It needs to be in the game!

 

?

 

 

[Phelps1247]

Oh, I wasn't trying to convert that one. I just took a random one from the overall pack I was trying to convert to see how it's done.

[VonHelton]

25 minutes ago, Phelps1247 said:

Oh, I wasn't trying to convert that one. I just took a random one from the overall pack I was trying to convert to see how it's done.

Damn..........Oh well. It's a famous hair, and someone should convert it.

 

?

 

 

[Zuranamee]

On 12/1/2018 at 7:06 PM, VonHelton said:

Damn..........Oh well. It's a famous hair, and someone should convert it.

 

?

 

 

I agree 200%.... I've been trying to convert it myself, but I can't seem to get physics on it. All I can do is make the mesh work in F4 but it's completely static and clips through you if you move

[Oomph]

Is there any chance someone has the images for the examples Sun posted? I'm trying to follow his tutorial but I'm stumped on the CK part.

[WaSiren88]

On 3/13/2019 at 2:53 PM, Oomph said:

Is there any chance someone has the images for the examples Sun posted? I'm trying to follow his tutorial but I'm stumped on the CK part.

Same here. I need the images to be able to follow the tutorial. If anyone has them please share them. 

[WaSiren88]

Well, I tried my best to follow SunJeong's guide without the pictures, but I didn't get the result I want. I got a hair that's like 85% white and a bit tan on the side, but it's completely uncolorable:



I couldn't follow some steps, because the images in the guide are gone. Like... I have no idea how to make a material file. The Skyrim hair pack that contains the hair I want to port to Fallout 4 doesn't have a material file, yet it's completely colorable when I play Skyrim. Also, this hair only has 2 textures, one is the _d.dds, the other is the _n.dds and that's all it comes with. I dunno if it's the lack of a material file that makes it uncolorable or if it's something else. 

I was also getting this: "TEXTURE ERROR: Unable to load file 'Data\Textures\DarkGray.dds'" (among 525 other warnings) when I was doing the CK part.

If anyone has any suggestions on how to solve this I'd be very grateful. 

EDIT: I think it definitely is because of the lack of material file that I can't change colors. I just tried adding a material file from another hairstyle to see if it'd change colors in the game and it did, but it looks all messed up:



I just don't have a clue on how to make or get a material file that works. The hair pack this style came from doesn't have a material file.

EDIT 2: Okay, I figured something out and made it work. I looked up some videos related to the Material Editor, then to make things simple I just loaded another hair's material file, changed the _d.dds and _n.dds paths to the ones I needed, removed some other paths, saved it and it worked! Finally! Now I just need to try to add physics to it, but this is what it looks like now:

[bongo88]

Oh wow.  I had been following this thread forever and was all disoriented when i saw the notification and came over here.  haha.  Wasn't sure what forum i was in, haha.  You made great progress.  When you get more familiar with the conversion steps, if you could make a guide, then i would appreciate it.

 

the hair looks great.  very good job.

[bongo88]

On 4/2/2017 at 12:44 AM, SunJeong said:

Okay I have about 33% of the tutorial done. Taking screenshots of all the steps I think are necessary and I hope I didn't miss anything. I'll also be including a list of required programs (pretty much just Nifskope, Body Slide, Blender, and the Creation Kit).

 

I think the tutorial will come out rather nicely! Here's a small preview to show you guys. Keep in mind that this tutorial is being written for those that are absolute beginners to modding pretty much. What I won't be explaining is how to install the programs and plugins (I dont think they require plugins) necessary and I will assume they will have basic knowledge of their Fallout 4 installation folder and stuff. 

 

I will condense all the images into one PDF file for better viewing and to keep it clean.

 

Be patient friends I'm working on many things as well. If any of you are following me you'll know that I'm also working on clothing conversions and another pose mod. So I apologies for the delay. Also, English is my second language so excuse the grammar, run-ons, mispellings, and everything.

 

Step 1

Step 2

Step 3

Step 4

Step 5

Step 6

Step 6a

Step 7

 

 

 

Imgur doesn't seem to be working for me today.  I am not a fan of photobucket, but here are some links to imgBB as well as the pictures attached to this post.  just for backup purposes.

 

https://ibb.co/nf34fCp
https://ibb.co/R2G65Z0
https://ibb.co/8swQtW3
https://ibb.co/yYyrdgc
https://ibb.co/bdxhzh0
https://ibb.co/9ZBLYBV
https://ibb.co/BtR3qXX
https://ibb.co/5LLqkQJ

 

 

7 steps images backup.zip