Modified Head Mesh Errors

[pEccentric]

Hello,

 

I've been trying to modify the vanilla Khajiit head mesh following (and using material from) this tutorial, and I'm getting some errors I have no idea how to troubleshoot.

 

Despite not touching any of the neck seams, the neck doesn't connect to the body. Furthermore, in the editor, the camera is too far away from the character. I thought this would be an issue with my already-modded game, but after reverting to vanilla, that isn't the issue. I don't know what the issue could be. I'm using this version of Blender to modify the mesh and have not done anything outside of moving vertices with the sculpt tool.

 

The images of this issue can be found here.

 

Thank you.

[Pellape]

I am not a body maker nor editor, but it is the skeleton that decides in the end where the vertices really should end up at. I edited or added a skeleton ones, but that was 2005. Made a GingerAle Cookie walking man from a tutorial. Looked very nice really.

 

I do not add anything useful really but in case no one else know, there is a specific 3D forum here at Nexus you could try. Does not the head also use an egm file?

 

By the way, you do not need to use old Blender if you want to as you can use the latest. I use 2.91 https://blender.org and you get the exporter/Importer from http://www.niftools.org/

Edited April 4, 2022 by Pellape

[pEccentric]

I am not a body maker nor editor, but it is the skeleton that decides in the end where the vertices really should end up at. I edited or added a skeleton ones, but that was 2005. Made a GingerAle Cookie walking man from a tutorial. Looked very nice really.

 

I do not add anything useful really but in case no one else know, there is a specific 3D forum here at Nexus you could try. Does not the head also use an egm file?

 

By the way, you do not need to use old Blender if you want to as you can use the latest. I use 2.91 https://blender.org and you get the exporter/Importer from http://www.niftools.org/

The skeleton? That's interesting. None of the files involve the skeleton, but I'll see if messing with the skeleton will fix things. EDIT: The head disappeared when I tried adding the skeleton.

 

I'm not sure what you mean by the egm. I'm not modifying the egm, and the tutorial I'm following doesn't mention needing to modify an egm. I'm supposed to have a nif result.

 

I don't mind using 2.49, since I've been using it for a while. The version I linked has everything installed correctly, and I don't trust myself to do that :tongue:

Edited April 4, 2022 by pEccentric

[DrakeTheDragon]

I couldn't yet give that tutorial a thorough read, and it's been quite a while since I last worked with custom heads, but I created my dragon's head mesh from reshaping the Vanilla Argonian head myself those years ago, following all guides and warnings current back then.

 

I also didn't feel like recreating from scratch 100+ custom morphed copies of my head in order to be able to create "new" EGM (shape morphs) and TRI (facial animation morphs) files from them. So it was paramount for me to never touch the vertex count and/or order in the process, a lot like what you seem to have done here.

I did have to run the EGM and/or TRI file (can't remember which one anymore) through Scanti's Conformulator once though, as there were still some oddities when using the Vanilla ones directly with my new head. But I'm not seeing any of what I ran into (e.g. exploding teeth when opening mouth) in your case here either.

 

It does look, however, kinda like your head mesh isn't "rigged" to the neck and head armature anymore from the huge gap in its throat. Pictures don't give it away, but does it "bend" when turning left and right or looking up and down?

I remember my first export didn't have rigging info attached (possibly a weakness of the file type I was told to use) and I had to re-rig the resulting head NIF myself first.

 

But heads are a rather troublesome business in Oblivion modding anyways.

Quite often they're lying sideways in their NIF and are positioned at the 0 point. Only rarely did I see any with a complete armature and at their correct place above the neck rotated upright.

 

And did you ever notice the "unapplied" transformation (translations moving them from the 0 point up to the neck connector) these heads have in their NIFs? Those are so inside the NiTriShape/Strips node the internal vertex locations are still around the 0 point, so all morphs (0-based offsets per vertex each) still work, yet it "appears" to be sitting on your neck.

 

If you changed anything about the border line around the neck of your head, these unapplied offsets might also have to be adapted accordingly until it fits.

 

But this is so above my pay grade and I'm only telling from very faint memories of my own attempts, fails and final success here now. So take all I said with a grain of salt and read up more expert guides or knowledge about it than what I got.

 

I was totally unable to re-do what I did the first time around with my current up-to-date new dragon head mesh also multiple times I tried, so... What could I possibly have learned, if I can't "reproduce" the previously successful result?

[pEccentric]

I've been doing some asking around about this and took advice to tear apart mods that were similar to what I was doing.

 

Turns out, I didn't even need to mess with the nif at all for the result I was wanting (which, admittedly, is a pretty minor change). All I had to do was modify the head through the CS' race menu, and I got a result I was happy with.

 

I went through all this trouble for nothing, but I guess that's how modding is. :P