SSE Help with Transferring Appearance of NPC

[andromeda2785]

I've been trying to copy the appearance of a certain NPC from the the NPC replacer mod. Haelga from Ordinary Women. https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/12376?tab=description

It should go without saying this is purely for private use, and more importantly, teaching me how to use the Creation Kit.

-At first I thought, I could take the already packaged Facegen and use it to replace the Facegen of a different NPC I made. This resulted in the Dark Face Bug.

-I opened the mod in Creation Kit, duplicated Haelga, saved and tested. Same black face bug.

-I opened the mod in Creation Kit, duplicated Haelga AND exported facegen data

-I created a new completely new mod, using the assets to try and recreate the face. I get the black face bug and the mouth no longer properly moves. In addition, attempting to put an expression on it will now crash the Creation Kit

-I used NPC Visual transfer mod in addition . https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/8764 . It also resulted in the black face bug.

-I noticed the version of the mod I downloaded, used my own textures/meshes, so I downloaded an alternate version with the already included face textures. Inspecting the .nif it did include the a texture on the face. However using this facegen to replace another facegen file still resulted in the Black face bug.

Modlist

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Skyrim

Update

Dawnguard

Hearthfire

Dragonborn

Unofficial Skyrim Special Edition Patch

Alternate Start - Live Another Life (For testing purposes)

The Ordinary Women of Skyrim

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I also the USSEP patch .esp file on Ordinary Women of Skyrim

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It should also be noted the when I use the player.placeatme 0001335f (Haelga's base id) They come out correctly and as displayed on the mod page.

I'm not sure if it matters, but originally, the point of this is I wish to use a different NPC replacer mod and still have the NPC(s) I prefer to have.

I have also heard that opening certain NPC faces in the creation kit can "break" them. I suspect this might be the case, but I also think it be getting confused on using taking the appearance from a vanilla NPC which has been modded.

One final thing, is it not a good idea to try and replace facegen files with other facegen files? I remember doing the same thing in LE and it did seemed to work fine.

Thank you very much reading and any advice would be greatly appreciated! At this point, I'm frankly embarrassed about something I thought was going to be easy and only going to take five minutes, but I think learning will make me better at the Creation Kit, in the long run.

I apologize if I formatted or phrased anything incorrectly, or broke any rules in this post.

Edit:

A very kind user on reddit named Syllisjehane helped answer this question:

You can't regenerate an NPC in CK if it's sculpted via Racemenu etc. You absolutely will break it, which is what you're looking at. So there's an extra step that you have to take, which is where you essentially replace the nif and texgen that CK did with the nif and texgen from the mod you want.

Are you trying to make a custom follower with Haelga's appearance from TOW?

If so, once you make the NPC in CK, and have exported its head nif and textures, you need to take one more step with the head nif so that you're using the nif made by TOW with the same file path structure as the nif you made in CK.

In LE, you did this via a program called NifMerge, which iirc isn't working for SE meshes.

I think this is the video that goes over how to do this process in SE.

If not, take a look at other videos that author has done.

If you have LE, and you dont' mind bouncing back and forth, you could make the NPC in LE's CK and use Nifmerge with LE's version of TOW/Haelga. You'll want to find a tutorial on that too.

Just remember that if you do it this way, when you go to convert it into an SE mod, that you have to hide that new nif/texgen you just made... or turn off SE's auto-generate of NPC data... so that you dont' accidentally overwrite all the work that you just did.

Edit: And no, not a 5 minute process, very sorry about that.:

Edited September 17, 2021 by andromeda2785