Ganonmaster

I found a script that allows for importing and exporting .tri files (the ones that take care of facial animation) with Blender. I'm not much of a hero in 3ds Max, and Blender is new to me as well, but I'm trying to make my own face morphs for my asari head mesh. Not sure if it will actually work, but it's worth a shot.

Yes, this is kind of what the mod does in its current state. It needs some more tweaking to make the head and body parts get the same shade of blue, but it already matches up to some degree. That's why I opted to make the head tentacles a 'hair headpart', and not make it a new head mesh. This way the facial animation is inherited from the human models and together with the headpart, it works just fine.(as you can see in the package that's up for download right now) It does not fix the clipping issue and I'm still trying to figure out how to deal with that.

That is some impressive work on the facial animations. I'm not sure if those work the same as the face morphs for Skyrim, but if they do, I'd be very much interested in seeing how he did it. Still working on it, but not much progress. If you really can't wait, download the work in progress I posted earlier.

I think most abilities can be recreated in Skyrim. Taking a look at the spells already in the game and those added by the Midas Magic mod, you might find that some spells can be added without the need for scripting. Midas Magic already contains a "Force pull" spell. (which is 6 lines of code total) The effects probably won't be exactly the same as they are in Mass Effect, but they'll probably do fine. I'm thinking about including some Biotic abilities, together with one or two NPC followers. Would make for a more complete mod.

I haven't been able to work on this in the last few weeks. If you guys want me to post what I have now, I'll release them as Alphas and push updates every time I make progress. Edit: I put up a page with an alpha version. I'll try to make some actual progress on the actual model next week. I'll post here and update the page as well. If you have any feedback, you are most welcome to post here.

I've been a little distracted by Mass Effect 3 coming out, but here's a small update: Progress, more progress. Thank you. I'll try some other body types to see if it makes a difference. I'd very much like to see the other races ported over as well, but I wouldn't possibly know how. As I mentioned before, I have very little experience with 3ds Max. I'm already running into trouble copying the Asari over, and that's probably the easiest of all the races to do. I can of course extract the other races from the Mass Effect game files, but to match up all the bones, work out the animations and everything is just too much for me. That shouldn't be a problem as I have my own webspace and there are plenty of other ways to distribute this mod when it's done.

I actually planned on creating a mod like this before the creation kit came out. Although, like you, I'm more of a coder, I have been able to get some things to work in game. Using Gildor's UE Viewer I was able to extract the Asari head model and the appropriate textures out of the Mass Effect game files. After messing around in 3ds Max and Nifskope I got the model into the game. First problem I ran into: things like facial animations don't work (has to do with Facegen) and I have no idea how to make them work. To my knowledge this has all to do with the .tri files that a lot of these face models have. Looking at several threads, there is no way to create the .tri files for custom head models. To me, customization of the face is a pretty big deal, so I started working around the problem. The pieces of skin that go from the top of the head to the back of neck can easily be turned into a 'hair' headpart. (seeing as Asari don't have any hair, it seemed like the easiest way to go) This is the result so far: Screen 1 Screen 2 In these screens I just duplicated the Nord race in the creation kit, and added the model as a headpart. The problems you can see in those screens are pretty obvious: the human ears of the base head model are sticking out, and the model doesn't line out properly.(yet) Not sure if I can cover up the ears at this point. In addition the textures need some work as the body/head models only have the default skin textures applied and the hair part appears shiny as hell when any light falls on it. I've only concerned myself about cosmetics so far, although I have been thinking about the perks/abilities Asari would get as a race. I'm also really curious to see if it's possible to restrict gender selection based on race through Papyrus programming or using other tools. I have only worked on the model and textures so far, so I don't know what's possible with Papyrus. Anyway, glad to see I'm not the only one who would like to see this alien race in the game. I was not aware that there was a similar mod for Oblivion and will consider checking that out too. If you have any input or feedback on what I have so far, feel free to reply in this thread or contact me directly.

I'm actually looking to create a custom race when the CK comes out. Seeing as that could still take a couple of weeks, I was actually investigating if it would be possible to get a custom head mesh into the game with the tools available right now. Doesn't look like it's possible right now, but I'll just read your tutorial while we all wait for Bethesda to release their tools. Thanks.

I've been digging around for some information on this myself and only found that they're more complicated due to the face data like you said. Great to hear you're looking to write some tutorials on the subject.

I'm curious; did you replace the head mesh with a custom mesh? If so, how?