Help please! - trying to import Bijin's Brelyna as a preset. Tried everything!

[Forechosen]

Hi there,

Question is pretty much in the title. But I'm playing the Anniversary Edition, and I'm trying to get my player character to look like Brelyna from Bijin's Warmaidens mod.

And frankly, I'm failing at every hurdle.

I've tried copying over the .nif and .dds files into SKSE>Chargen. However, I'm not completely sure exactly which files I should be copying over, as for example, there are three 'femalehead.dds' in different folders. How do I know which one Brelyna uses?

Using Racemenu, when I load the sculpt '0001C196.nif' - (which I believe is the relevant Brelyna one from the mod) lots of parts are shown as red in the import matcher, and my characters face simply doesn't change at all.

So before all that, I was trying to use Alternate Actors to simply 'play as Brelyna' then save the appearance as a preset. But I couldn't get Alternate Actors to even load up in the game, I'm not sure if it's working with the Anniversary Edition.

Since then I've been trying to get Proteus to work, to do more-or-less the same thing, although I'm not having any success with that either. It loads up in game, but when I 'control the npc' - I can't actually control them, it locks me out of everything apart from the 'esc' key.

It feels like this should be a relatively simple thing to do, but I've been messing around for hours now and gotten absolutely nowhere. So any help would be hugely appreciated. Thanks for reading!

[anjenthedog]

Well, it's not a preset per say, and idk if it works with Skyrim SE 1.6x ("AE"), in case that matters, but have you looked at Copy Character Appearance? If you just want to match her appearance, it clones the targeted NPC (Face, hair, makeup, body, arms, feet, etc) onto the player pretty much 1:1, as long as your player isn't using a really tricked out skeleton (ie heavy racemenu scales work, where spinal adjustments can ime alter the outcome)

[Forechosen]

Well, it's not a preset per say, and idk if it works with Skyrim SE 1.6x ("AE"), if you happen to be playing "AE" but have you looked at Copy Character Appearance? If you want to match her appearance, it clones the targeted NPC onto the player pretty much 1:1, as long as your player isn't using a really tricked out skeleton (ie heavy racemenu scales work, where spinal adjustments can alter the outcome)

Thanks for the response!

 

I haven't actually tried this, as on the mod page it specifically states -

 

''You cannot edit the character while the appearance is being copied. Don't open the character edit menu.''

 

Also, in the comments on the mod, one of the first comments (third one down) mentions trouble doing just this - ''At first I wanted it to copy an NPC's appearance onto my character, but quickly found out it's impossible to tweak my char to my liking in racemenu (whatever changes you make are applied on top of the copied appearance, so for example if you want to change your char's hair, it looks like you now have two sets of hair)''

 

So it sounds like a bit of a lost cause doesn't it? Although if you're saying it can work then I can certainly give it a shot!

 

edit: oh right, you're saying I could just clone the appearance, and not have it as a preset. Apologies, I'm tired! Annoyingly though, I would want to make some tweaks, so I really do need a preset to work from.

[anjenthedog]

good luck. and understood.

 

And yes, it has some caveats. one is that the mesh it uses, while somehow attached to the original, is independent and unresponsive to many adjustments (although ime not all. Most of the "scale" adjustments still seem work in Racemenu, as do weapons and others)

[scorrp10]

First, you need to make her heads parts usable. Open SSEEdit, find Bijin Warmaidens.esp (Assumiing you installed the AIO version) or BW Brelyna.esp, and go into her head parts.

 

Say, BrelynaHeadHP. You may notice that in its Record Flags, it has 'Non-Playable'. Edit that, and remove that flag.

You wanna do the same for the rest of her head parts: Hair, Hairline, Brows, Eyes.

 

Then in Non-Player Character section, find Brelyna's record. You are looking for QNAM - Texture Lighting.

Be sure to write down values for red/green/blue from the Bijin Warmeidens.esp column. That's the skin tint, looks like it will be 140/188/200

The hair RGB values are 32/28/28.

 

Next, you wanna scoot over to Bijin Warmaidens nexus page,m and check out their Credits in the description. You pretty much want all the makeup items there.

(Ethereal Elven Overhaul, Seductive Lips, Better Makeup, XCE warpaint and dirt etc) Generally, the more various makeup packs you got, the better.

 

Now, you go into game, and do showracemenu in console. Change to a female Dark Elf,

Now, in 'Head' tab, Face Part - look for 'BrelynaHeadHP' under 'Bijin Warmaidens.esp'.

Eyes Tab - Eye Color slider - fiind BrellynaEyesHP.

Same goes for Brows Tab - Brow Type, and in Hair tab - Hair slider.

 

Once you picked all these head parts, go to Sculpt, Import Head, and NOW you import that 0001C196.nif head.

At this point, you should be getting darn close.

 

Next, you do skin tint and hair color. It can be a touch tricky, since color picker is HSL, not RGB. Here is how you work it.

Sliders are: Hue, Saturation, Lightness, Alpha. You take Saturation and Alpha all way right, Hue and Lightness all way left.

Say, skin tint RGB is 140/188/200. Highest is blue at 200. Lowest is red at 140. Move lightness slider right till red is 200.

Start moving hue slider right till blue is 200. Now move saturation left till lowest (red) is 140. Finally tweak hue slider till green is 188.

 

From here, you need to go into Makeup tab and start playing with various overlays and colors till you get to a satisfactory result.

[Forechosen]

First, you need to make her heads parts usable. Open SSEEdit, find Bijin Warmaidens.esp (Assumiing you installed the AIO version) or BW Brelyna.esp, and go into her head parts.

 

Say, BrelynaHeadHP. You may notice that in its Record Flags, it has 'Non-Playable'. Edit that, and remove that flag.

You wanna do the same for the rest of her head parts: Hair, Hairline, Brows, Eyes.

 

Then in Non-Player Character section, find Brelyna's record. You are looking for QNAM - Texture Lighting.

Be sure to write down values for red/green/blue from the Bijin Warmeidens.esp column. That's the skin tint, looks like it will be 140/188/200

The hair RGB values are 32/28/28.

 

Next, you wanna scoot over to Bijin Warmaidens nexus page,m and check out their Credits in the description. You pretty much want all the makeup items there.

(Ethereal Elven Overhaul, Seductive Lips, Better Makeup, XCE warpaint and dirt etc) Generally, the more various makeup packs you got, the better.

 

Now, you go into game, and do showracemenu in console. Change to a female Dark Elf,

Now, in 'Head' tab, Face Part - look for 'BrelynaHeadHP' under 'Bijin Warmaidens.esp'.

Eyes Tab - Eye Color slider - fiind BrellynaEyesHP.

Same goes for Brows Tab - Brow Type, and in Hair tab - Hair slider.

 

Once you picked all these head parts, go to Sculpt, Import Head, and NOW you import that 0001C196.nif head.

At this point, you should be getting darn close.

 

Next, you do skin tint and hair color. It can be a touch tricky, since color picker is HSL, not RGB. Here is how you work it.

Sliders are: Hue, Saturation, Lightness, Alpha. You take Saturation and Alpha all way right, Hue and Lightness all way left.

Say, skin tint RGB is 140/188/200. Highest is blue at 200. Lowest is red at 140. Move lightness slider right till red is 200.

Start moving hue slider right till blue is 200. Now move saturation left till lowest (red) is 140. Finally tweak hue slider till green is 188.

 

From here, you need to go into Makeup tab and start playing with various overlays and colors till you get to a satisfactory result.

Wow, dang, I really, really cannot thank you enough. It's getting late here now, but tomorrow I'll follow these instructions and finally get it working! Really, I've been fighting with this all night and I never would have done what you've mentioned in a thousand years, so it's a huge help.

 

It feels kinda bad writing such a short response to your long and amazingly detailed post. But yeah, genuinely thank you.

[scorrp10]

Lol, thank me when it actually works.

Oh, you will also probably want to install Bijin skin. (Or use Unique Character if you don't want that as your default NPC skin. For that, you want textures from Data\textures\actors\character\Bijin Warmaidens 00\)

 

Personally, I am not that fond of Bijin's Brelyna... So I reworked her a bit...

 

 

[Forechosen]

Lol, thank me when it actually works.

Oh, you will also probably want to install Bijin skin. (Or use Unique Character if you don't want that as your default NPC skin. For that, you want textures from Data\textures\actors\character\Bijin Warmaidens 00\)

 

Personally, I am not that fond of Bijin's Brelyna... So I reworked her a bit...

 

 

 

Right, I'm on this process now!

 

I've done the SSEE-edit stuff (doing great so far!), and I'm ready to open the game. I do have a quick question though -

 

Do I still need to move over all of the relevant files (such as 0001C196.nif) to SKSE>Chargen? Or has editing the .esp with ssee-edit 'unlocked' them in the game, so I don't need to move any files around?

 

If I do have to move files, which ones do I actually need to move? 0001C196.nif obviously, but any of the other nifs or ddss?

 

Apologies for 'dumb' questions, I'm very new to this!

 

 

Also, heh your Brelyna looks fantastic! How long did that take you to rework an npc like that!?

 

[scorrp10]

You said you attempted importing the head previously, so I take it you already copied 0001C196.nif over to chargen. Should be the only file you need.

The general process is: you make head parts playable so they become available for selection in racemenu.

When you are in racemenu, the head is assembled from parts picked via mentioned sliders. (Face Part/Eye Color/Hair/Brow Type).

 

Using Racemenu, when I load the sculpt '0001C196.nif' - lots of parts are shown as red in the import matcher, and my characters face simply doesn't change at all.

 

 

When you import a head, racemenu matches your currently selected parts against the mesh parts in the imported head .nif.

I.e. if you picked face part 'BrelynaHeadHP' and imported head .nif has a 'BrelynaHeadHP' mesh block, it should show up green in the import matcher, and apply the sculpt.

 

Getting the head parts riight is generally the easy part. A much bigger challenge is the tint mask.

Racemenu takes the skin tone as base, plus any tintmasks from 'Colors', 'Face Paint' and 'Makeup' tabs that have a non-0 alpha, and bakes all of those into a single texture file

(For Brelyna, it would be textures\actors\character\facegendata\facetint\skyrim.esm\0001C196.dds)

Looking at the head, she got at least 5 overlays: cheekbone blush, freckles, purple lipstick, purple winged upper lid liner, black winged lower lid liner.

 

Far as reworkiing an NPC... I usually start by finding a preset that I like, make that my starting point, and work it until I get the wanted look.

After that, it is fairly simple - duplicate the needed head parts, edit the head mesh file for proper part naming, maybe tweak the tintmask a bit, done.