Question about body texturing

[Sepherose]

Hello all! I figured I would ask here:

I am wanting to create a new custom body texture for CBBE, although the way I want to do it may not be feasible.

What I want to do is get all of the base body meshes for FO4 characters merged into a single mesh and then bring that unified mesh into Substance Painter to work.

After that I want to then back out the then seamless, matched up maps for the whole body, the separate the merged body mesh back out with the new UV mapping, and bake the new textures with xNormal from the modified meshes back to the original.

That doesn't seem like it would be too difficult to do, but I do have the problem of not being able to find one mesh I need, the back of the head.

If my plan seems like it's just a generally terrible plan, do let me know, but if it sounds like it'll work and you know where I can find that last nif file and it's name, I would greatly appreciate some help!

[AWP3RATOR]

You can find femaleheadrear.nif and maleheadrear.nif in ..\Data\Meshes\Actors\Character\CharacterAssets\FaceParts  - but you will need to export the BA2 mesh archive file to get them.

 

I'm not familiar with the Substance Painter tool - but it sounds feasible, given what I just read about it.

[Sepherose]

Thank you for the response!
 

I had actually found the mesh I needed a bit ago and got wrapped up in prepping things to do what I was thinking. I have found I can even go the extra mile with the combined mesh (I merged the vertices along the splits too, so here is to hoping I can make a texture set that doesn't have the seam issue!) and sculpt a higher poly version of the mesh with detail work and bake it out in Substance as a baseline.

[Badtanker]

It will be interesting to see how it turns out.  A body texture that has no seams.

[Sepherose]

Well, if it works, I may look in to making it a modder's resource. I have to tweak the UV scaling since everything is no on the same UV map though, so some refinement is still needed.

I think it'll work though, or at least I have high hopes.

[AWP3RATOR]

I think you'll be able to do it, with the tools you mentioned (at least as a POC in desktop).  Getting the game engine to like it is another story.  Currently, there are at least 4 or 5 references to various textures baked heavily into the game's engine:

 

Body, face, back of head/neck, hands, hairlines, etc.  I'm looking forward to this - because everytime I've tried to do some new body textures, they never turn out quite the same colors and seams are apparent as a result.

 

Even if this was just a combined mesh resource that could ultimately be split up into the separate necessary game files - that would be a huge leap forward for people trying to make textures.

[Sepherose]

Thankfully, preserving the seams while merging the meshes was easy enough:

 

 

The biggest issue I am coming across is the texel density where the neck and body meet. When experimenting with Substance Designer last night I found that the differential was causing some very noticeable blur in the base of the head mesh and in areas like the forehead. I'm currently trying to tweak the combined UV to compensate. I may have to remerge the meshes and alter the combined UV from the get go to avoid these issue.

[rispetto02]

Im looking forward to see how it turns out.