[LE] Custom Follower facial modding problems [Dark Face, used CTRL+F4 and didn't work]

[xMik3x]

Greetings, so i made a custom Follower in CK using the base game files and it worked without issues, but once i add a mod to the mix, eyes, hair styles, etc, i get a dark face bug on my follower, opening CK to revert the changes to vanilla fixes the issue.

 

So far my procedure has been:

 

- Creating a stand alone plugin file for this Follower, i don't use one of the mod's existent plugin files to save in them.

 

- When i try to modify anything, i use both master data files skyrim.esm and update.esm plus the follower's .esp file as active alongside the plugin files from other mods but not set as active.

 

- After saving the changes i hit CTRL+F4 on my follower's file and the facegen data is created.

 

The end result is always the same, dark face, anyone knows what am i doing wrong here? Or is it impossible to edit custom followers like this through CK?

 

I did a clean install of Skyrim to avoid other issues but here's what i have installed at the moment:

 

- SKSE 64

 

- The Eyes of Beauty

 

- UNP Female Body Renewal

 

 

Any help provided is much appreciated, cheers!

[AndragonFirefly]

I went through the same thing starting out too. I didn't know. The tutorials are for vanilla skyrim which doesn't make since because if you are modding a new follower then you are modding your skyrim and it is no longer vanilla. Anyway, no, there is no way to create these followers with just the creation kit itself unfortunately. And well, it depends on if your follower will have vanilla hair or not too. If not vanilla hair, then you have to add the new hair as an armor addon in the follower's esp. The hair being added into the game via KS Hairdos or Apachii or something doesn't seem to be good enough unless you want to make it a dependency for the follower mod. And even then, the hair mod has to be an esm. As far as getting all of the meshes and textures to working with the facegendata and all, I recommend using NPC Nif Merge available here on the Nexus. A tutorial for using all of these things would not be feasible in this limited space and time I have just to throw a few pointers your way. Especially when there are already many videos on YouTube for that. But at least you know which directions to look. Seems a lot of this stuff is kept under TOP-SECRET. You really have to dig to find these answers. Nobody really wants to share any knowledge these days. Hopefully this will save you a few of those headaches and point you in the right direction. If you want the follower to be a standalone follower that you plan to upload to the Nexus or something then I would suggest using a follower kit. There are a few out there. Or create your own template and do the same with it. Just replace a few things to accommodate the current unique follower you are creating and change the name of your template and it makes it so much faster to do your 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and onward from there. With a template, it becomes an assembly line. Then you can focus more on the look of your next new follower. NifMerge takes 2 minutes once you have done it a few times.

[AndragonFirefly]

Another thing I have learned is to not use Improved Eyes for a follower. I don't know if more experienced modders out there have a way around this or not but NifMerge won't merge an NPC using Improved Eyes because Improved eyes uses two different meshes for the eyes, one for each eye. Vanilla eyes and Eyes of Beauty for instance, they only use one single mesh for both eyes. I see that you use Eyes of Beauty so you should be ok. I have both of those and I learned the hard way. Never figured out a way to use Improved Eyes but I at least know to avoid using Improved Eyes when creating my followers until I did learn a way around this issue.

[xMik3x]

Hey, really, thanks for the info and where to look for a workaround, it does seem that creating a unique modded follower is top secret stuff, most people run into problems making theirs and none of the post i saw said anything about other programs lol

 

The funny irony of this is that some time ago, i made this custom follower through CK by just creating them in game and then using SPF to port the model to CK, with custom hair, and it worked, recently i went back into the game and had the idea of adding new eyes to her and wham, dark face afterwards, from there all went to hell now, no way i can add anything custom through CK now, maybe it was because of an update to it? Idk.

 

But i'm gonna poke around with this, if anything i have time to learn these new tools.

 

Thanks again for the info, will post my progress at some point, hopefully.

 

Cheers!

[VValentour]

I ran into this issue myself recently and I solved it by using nifmerge

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/40494/

 

It uses the exported Character Gen files (if you use Racemenu) to be imported to and overwrite a specified file in the mesh/actors/facegen/(Your follower .esp Name) file.

It's very useful!

[xMik3x]

I ran into this issue myself recently and I solved it by using nifmerge

 

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/40494/

 

It uses the exported Character Gen files (if you use Racemenu) to be imported to and overwrite a specified file in the mesh/actors/facegen/(Your follower .esp Name) file.

 

It's very useful!

 

 

 

Thanks! I'll give it a shot, cheers!