Facegen, and changing texture paths for a large number of .nif files

[geraldtheherald]

Hello folks. So the mod in question is Unique Everything, which I'd link to but it has nude screenshots despite not necessarily being an adult mod. It allows the player to have unique meshes and textures for each race. After a bit of tweaking in TES5Edit I got it to play nice with my assortment of mods, but one problem remains. The head meshes for NPCs, and only NPCs, refuse to pull from the race specific folders, and will instead pull from the default \male and \female texture folders. Figuring out why this was occurring was the easy part. NPCs get their head meshes from:

 

actors\character\FaceGenData\FaceGeom\

 

...wherein the nifs are unaffected by the mod and naturally point back to the default texture folders. So I got the idea that I would generate all the npc head meshes in the Creation Kit (by race) and then, with NifSkope, mass edit the nifs to point to the correct diffuse, _msn, _s, and _sk files. The example picture below belongs to an npc with the id 000551b0, a female Breton necromancer. I want the head mesh to pull the relevant .dds files from \actors\character\Breton instead of actors\character\female.

 

 

The only problem is that NifSkope can only edit files individually, which would be insane since I am attempting to edit the texture paths of every npc head mesh not otherwise already affected by another mod. I could even do the edits in a hex editor, since all I need to change are the strings that represent the folder directories. Of course, the only hex editors I've found that do batch edits cost money and I'd really rather not have to do that.

 

So I guess my question isn't really about the mod, since I think I have it working as intended. But the only way unique texture sets are going to work for each race is if I can get the npc head meshes to point to the right folders. Are there any utilities that will help me accomplish this? Like I said, I need to be able to edit large numbers at once. Alternatively, is there an easier solution to my problem that I haven't considered?

 

I should mention that I've already tried the NifTextures mod:

 

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/19266/?

 

This created more problems than it solved. It wasn't made to point to the _s or _sk files, and it seemed to corrupt (or otherwise alter) other data in the mesh, leaving the head looking almost shiny and with things like hair color and various facial features changing or being lost.

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[MrStoob]

If you get a response on batch editing nif paths, PM me lol.

[DarkRudra]

This may be a little bit old now, but I recently found a solution that might help you out if you still need it. I was looking for something to batch edit NIFs like this myself to fix a mod conflict. I learned from a post on reddit that xEdit now includes a script that handles this. The script is called "NIF - Batch textures replacement" and seems to work quite well.