Trouble exporting face from RaceMenu to use on vanilla NPC - Help Please!

[TheHermit84]

Could someone please help me?

 

I’m attempting to create a face using Race Menu and export it so that a vanilla NPC can use it.

I Googled some tutorials and I found this one:

 

http://wiki.tesnexus.com/index.php/Using_a_face_made_with_Chargen_Extension_on_an_NPC_for_Skyrim

 

The tutorial was written back in 2014 with Expired's CharGen Extension in mind, but I’ve been told that, since then, Race Menu can perform the export face (as *.nif) function as well so Race Menu users can follow the tutorial as well.

 

So anyway, I made the face I wanted, which I’d planned to give to Gregor, one of the Hearthfires Housecarls. I followed the tutorial to the letter and it hasn’t worked. I tried again from scratch for a second time and it’s produced the same results. The *nif and everything is okay after using the NifMerger tool. It looks as the character should. But when I put the files into the correct folder structures:

Meshes\Actors\Character\FaceGenData\FaceGeom\HearthFires.esm\0000521E.nif
Textures\Actors\Character\FaceGenData\FaceTint\HearthFires.esm\0000521E.dds

I can see in-game that the NPC doesn’t look right. Yes, he has the right eye colour, hair, brows, but the character gen morphs are all off. The nose and eye shape and general facial structure remains at whatever the original Gregor was set to.

 

http://8.t.imgbox.com/AGKjGxU9.jpg

 

The tutorial doesn’t say anything about this though. It tells you not to mess with it and only select right eye colour, hair and hair colour. The difference in the images above may be subtle at first glance, but look at the eye shape, mouth size, jaw line, nose size. You can see they look very different. What am I doing wrong? And yes, I did the whole Ctrl + F4 thing in the CK. The warpaint I used also doesn’t show up.

 

Is there an easier more guaranteed method of going about this without having to start my character’s face from scratch? Is it not possible to forward the morph values contained in a jslot preset to an NPC in TES5Edit or something? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

[AndragonFirefly]

Apparently, nobody ever answers these forums when a valid question is asked. It seems whenever I have an issue like this, I find hundreds of questions about it and nobody has ever answered. Some year old questions without a single IDK or anything. Even if an experienced modder would speak up and say, "hmmm, IDK" it would at least ease your mind that you are not completely nuts. It validates your valid question. Or sometimes you do get an answer but it is from a mod author who has taken offence to somebody having a problem with their "perfect" mod. It gets frustrating. I hope you find your answer. I am having trouble exporting mine as well. It exports the mesh and texture but the head is missing valuable information when I open the final result into nifskope and the head is invisible because it is not all been exported correctly. It does it 80% of the time. I have exported several and made follower mods and replacers. The one I am currently working on I have tried exporting about 20 times now. Usually, when it is doing this, I can get it to finally save right after about the 3rd attempt and swapping tint, eye color, and brows sliders back and forth before exporting. A trick I had to learn on my own because of all the secretive information not being released to others on how to fix this or get it to work. Your guess is as good as mine. But I at lease wanted to give you a respectful IDK. Because I know how it feels to never get even that.

[TheHermit84]

Well, almost two years from the date of my OP, I thank you for getting in touch. I'm sure I'll figure it out one day ;)

[Feradiera]

I figured something out that kind of helps... since I am running into this problem as well, and STILL haven't found a 100% working solution, but I did find that once you have sculpted your character in RaceMenu, use the console command

savepcface [filenamehere]

 

 

and then importing that data in CK. To clarify, When you open your character in CK there is the tab where you select warpaints and scars and colors etc, there is an "Import" button at the top. By clicking that you can import the face geometry and that will give you a much closer result.

However, I still haven't managed to figure out why any of the sculpting I do in RaceMenu isn't also transferred. It's very very close, but not 100%. Still looking for a solution that doesn't require me opening NifScope and sculpting it there XD

There is also the matter of "headparts". RaceMenu has a TES5Edit script you can use on your plugins to generate additional headparts that should make the transfer more complete, but I find I am still not getting all the headparts to transfer, usually scars and ApachiiHairs and stuff, but that's not even a main concern for me.

 

 

Edit: One more thing that many tutorials fail to mention that when exporting nifs with RaceMenu, or similar, your character should be naked. All armor and weapons etc unequipped. Apparently they can interfere somehow.

Edited June 15, 2018 by Feradiera

[Grospolina]

The link (URL updated, but content is the same) in the OP is a bit outdated, but mostly accurate. The only things I see wrong are:

1. RaceMenu has moved the export function to the Sculpt tab. You should be able to go to the Sculpt tab (top-right corner) and press F5 to Export NIF. Don't add the .nif extension because it will add it for you. Make sure it's the Sculpt tab, NOT Presets.
2. You don't need to add any lines to the nif.xml file in NikSkope anymore. It works right out of the box now.

Otherwise, NPC Nif Merge works great. The NIF exported from RaceMenu (Data\SKSE\Plugins\CharGen\) should be on the left, and the NIF exported from the CK using Ctrl+F4 (Data\Meshes\Actors\Character\FaceGenData\FaceGeom\MyPlugin.esp\) should be on the right. If you skip the Nif Merge step (by just copying the NIF over), you'll get the dark face bug.

 

For stuff like ApachiiSkyHair, you'll often run into the problem that the CK won't let you use ESPs as masters. For the workaround, see my post here.

 

Edit: I think that ApachiiSkyHair has an ESM. However, you may encounter this problem with other mods.

 

The reason that the SavePCFace (SPF) command isn't 100% accurate is that RaceMenu has morphs (sliders) that vanilla Skyrim doesn't. SPF is a vanilla console command and it only exports things that it understands. Stuff added by RaceMenu is simply omitted. It doesn't really matter though, because the FaceGen NIF overrides it.

Edited June 18, 2018 by Grospolina

[Feradiera]

Yes @Grospolina, I'm merely suggesting that savepcface be used prior to nif merging. Apachii hairs can be imported to your own mod via copying the necessary files (there are separate tutorials for that). If you know why even with the savepcface and nif merge used the face still isn't accurate, let us know!

[Grospolina]

The slider values in the ESP (whether imported through SPF or not) are really only used to create the FaceGen NIF. You can skip that step and it won't make any difference. The important part is Nif Merge.

 

If Nif Merge doesn't seem to be working, then you may want to take a closer look at your import settings. Just using the "Match by Vertex" option doesn't always work perfectly. That option means that the head parts will be imported by matching up the number of vertices in each mesh. With some things like modded hairs, you could have two meshes (usually hair and hairline) with the exact same number of vertices, and it could match them up incorrectly. I've done this before and it causes hair that looks like it's partially transparent or inside out. Also, different hair styles have different numbers of vertices.

 

In the case of the face itself not being imported, maybe you're using a modded head mesh? For example, if you're using CITRUS Heads, then the number of vertices won't match and you have to match it up manually. Another reason could be that the NIF just didn't get exported properly by RaceMenu. I've had that happen before. Examine the exported NIF in NifSkope to make sure that it's all there.

 

It could also be because you're missing some of the head parts. I'm not sure how exactly it works, but sometimes when the game detects some kind of mismatch, then it won't use the FaceGen NIF and will use the slider values instead. You usually get the dark face bug in that case though. For instance, if you use the "setnpcweight xx" console command, it will do this. Sometimes this can be fixed by doing a "disable" and then doing an "enable" in the console.

[AbyssalSpark]

A year and a half later, does anybody have any updates on this process? I've been hunting around the internet for a couple days now for a clear, concise, step-by-step on how to transfer a RaceMenu created face onto an NPC (w/o using the NPC Visual Transfer Tool, since I can't get that to work). The Nexus is full of amazing NPC retextures, so why can't I find a legit tutorial anywhere about how to create these retextures?

[tuckingfypo2]

A year and a half later, does anybody have any updates on this process? I've been hunting around the internet for a couple days now for a clear, concise, step-by-step on how to transfer a RaceMenu created face onto an NPC (w/o using the NPC Visual Transfer Tool, since I can't get that to work). The Nexus is full of amazing NPC retextures, so why can't I find a legit tutorial anywhere about how to create these retextures?

Kalilies has an amazing tutorial over on her nexus page https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/30041