Creating a race - looking for a head to use ;p

[Asterra]

Working on creating a race out of the Type3F body, a-la the race creating guide that can be found on the Nexus. Haven't (yet) encountered any technical stumbling blocks which absolutely stump me. But I did eventually realize that I have no head for the race. I don't even know what would happen if I tried creating the race without a head. (Nightmare material?)

 

Not really sure where to even begin, but I really like the head/face/hair in the images used here: (adult content)

 

http://fallout3.nexusmods.com/mods/16043/?

http://newvegas.nexusmods.com/mods/45445//?

 

Same body, different games. Ideally, the whole package responsible for that superb head would be what I'm after. Suggestions would be very welcome.

[Asterra]

Okay, since the time I made the first post, I realized two things:

 

1: Creating a race with no head results in the default (vanilla) face when building one's character in-game.

2: I have no solid idea what my options are if I want to use a custom head or face.

 

The tutorial by LadyMilla only says you can't add a head to a custom race because doing so will result in a white albino effect. So I don't know what my options are. I have tried taking a look at existing races-with-heads (Shojo, MoonShadow, etc.) to see if I could reverse-engineer whatever they did to accomplish having a custom head, but every one of them does something different, with different arrangements of directories and files, the utility of most of which is undocumented.

 

Point of this exercise is to have a unique look, different from the NPCs. I got the body and now I have the hair. The confounded head+face absolutely eludes me.

[DogtoothCG]

Heads are a bit touchy, but not very difficult once you know what you want. So, what do you want?

[Asterra]

Heads are a bit touchy, but not very difficult once you know what you want. So, what do you want?

Here's my ultimate goal: My character uses Type3F body (a la http://newvegas.nexusmods.com/mods/45445//?), everyone else uses Type6M. My hair matches that link. My face either matches that link or uses a unique head, or at least a unique texture.

 

Accomplishing all this requires me to use a custom race, which is a problem for two reasons:

 

1: In-game armor is off limits because it is not flagged for a custom race, and if it is forced to be flagged, that conflicts with other mods, such as bugfix overhauls that happen to also do anything with armor.

2: It can be devilishly difficult to accomplish if one is basically Googling their way through the whole process, particularly as key procedures (implementation of heads) aren't documented in any obvious fashion.

 

As it happens, #2 may be taken care of in my case. I managed to modify one of the races provided with Mojave Delight to achieve the look in the above link, and so far so good. Point of doing so was to make use of one of said mod's custom head textures (Bombshell #1) which is a very nice alternative to vanilla (though I will be removing the "beauty marks" in PS today, just as I corrected the "hair problem" that the poster of the above mod refused to fix).

 

This does not remedy the situation with vanilla armor, however. I'll be looking into it - basically trying my luck to see what conflicts arise among the many mods I'll ultimately use.

[Subject96]

I seem to recall reading in the comments section of the guy that ported that body to NV that the original author would/could not release the head or skin that is depicted in those screenshots. I know quite a few people were upset that the race that came with the body did not look like the one in the pics.

 

If you are looking for a head in the anime style I suggest checking out the Shojo race mod. There are a few adult female heads/faces included with that.

[bethjunkie]

I'm not sure what you mean by vanilla armor being flagged. Armors are fitted to specific bodies so if you put on a Type6m armor, your character will magically morph into a Type6m body and when you strip naked, you're back to Type3f.

 

Adding a head to your custom race is the same process as adding hands or a body. If you need an example of how to set it up, open up the Willow mod in the geck. Llama used Throttlekitty's head fixes for making her.

[Asterra]

I seem to recall reading in the comments section of the guy that ported that body to NV that the original author would/could not release the head or skin that is depicted in those screenshots. I know quite a few people were upset that the race that came with the body did not look like the one in the pics.

 

If you are looking for a head in the anime style I suggest checking out the Shojo race mod. There are a few adult female heads/faces included with that.

 

The head depicted in the screenshots looks, to me, to be just a very nicely tweaked vanilla head, but with a custom texture that I haven't been able to find anywhere, and hair that was acquired from one or another set. The body skin that the package comes with does appear to be what is shown in those hyper-idealized screenshots, but the body normal most certainly isn't (crinkled nipples, for one thing). Also the pubic hair was something that was added - possibly by the poster - and in doing so, they allowed the quality of the entire texture to degrade further.

 

Not really looking for an "anime" head. Nothing against anime, but it's just not a very good fit for this game. The woman in those screenshots? A-OK in my book. (Barring the fancy getups.)

[Asterra]

I'm not sure what you mean by vanilla armor being flagged. Armors are fitted to specific bodies so if you put on a Type6m armor, your character will magically morph into a Type6m body and when you strip naked, you're back to Type3f.

 

Adding a head to your custom race is the same process as adding hands or a body. If you need an example of how to set it up, open up the Willow mod in the geck. Llama used Throttlekitty's head fixes for making her.

 

I had some help with the T3F armor flagging in another thread. Basically a modder who worked up vanilla armors for COTW suggested checking his mod out to get an idea of how it's done. I was pretty well overwhelmed with the details. Considering that I plan to use the custom armor in the T3F package 99% of the time, and only wanted the functionality for the occasional armor - stealth suit, patient gown, stuff like that - I had to say farewell to the whole idea. If I had exactly as much know-how as was required right now, it would still almost certainly take longer to implement than the span of time I'd be able to enjoy it in-game. As it is, I would probably have spent literally weeks trying to get it all going.

 

The exact process for adding a head needs a tutorial, since it is so famously not identical to hands/body. I did laugh when the tutorial I was reading pointed out the albino-head problem, and then just left it at that, like nobody was ever going to want to add a head.

Edited October 18, 2013 by Asterra

[bethjunkie]

I'm at the hospital and on my phone so I can't look at your links and give you a step by step but honestly it really is not as hard as you think. Dissect a race that uses a custom head and build yours the same way. As for the albino head thing, that must be referring to what is commonly known as head/body mismatch. You can get around that by making your esp an esm but I haven't had issues with needing to do that with custom races.

[Asterra]

I'm at the hospital and on my phone so I can't look at your links and give you a step by step but honestly it really is not as hard as you think. Dissect a race that uses a custom head and build yours the same way. As for the albino head thing, that must be referring to what is commonly known as head/body mismatch. You can get around that by making your esp an esm but I haven't had issues with needing to do that with custom races.

I've come a long way since yesterday. I solved two huge time-killing problems and have my character model almost 100% satisfactory:

 

1) There was an issue of lines and blotches manifesting on BNB models I grabbed here: http://newvegas.nexusmods.com/mods/45445/? For starters, the main body is not BNB-converted. What was converted was the various armors, including the shoes, which come packaged with a replacement body mesh since she stands tip-toed when wearing them. Said body mesh exhibited the weird corruption. It took me pretty much two solid days to narrow the problem down to Blender's nif import/export, which is flawed.

 

2) For eyelashes, I deconstructed MikotoBeauty and basically just modified my existing character by hand, based on one of Mikoto's custom races. Took most of a day to arrive at that solution. Also replaced the teeth with something non-yellow. ;p

 

Only things left to do are cosmetic. See if there's a body normal that actually makes the body look better than it does with a completely featureless normal. (So far, featureless wins.) Try to replace the hair texture with elements from one of the far superior "Cool Hair" textures (even though they don't match in the slightest). Continue looking for the face in the above link.