New to High Poly head and confused.

[anjenthedog]

New to HighPoly head, and for that matter, racemenu head-swapping (ie sculpt) in Skyrim as well.

Bottom line, they never look like the mod snapshots, even when I've installed every soft dependency they list. Sometimes closer than others, but most often they don't even come closer to resembling the author's intent than a "fourth cousin", and often a deformed one at that...

I hate to be obtuse, but with respect to the skee64.ini section noted below,

do I need to set bExternalHeads and bAllowAnyRacePart to 1 in order to handle loading "foreign" racemenu presets (ie, applying a new, random HP head racemenu preset I find at Nexus or elsewhere) and actually seeing what the preset author created?

(and wrt the second value, obviously only when said author has noted that they made it to be race independent AND in those cases where I intend to apply it to a different race)

My values, never changed. Yet

[FaceGen]

fSliderMultiplier=3.0

bDisableFaceGenCache=1

bExternalHeads=0 ; Change this to 1 to generate external heads

bExtendedMorphs=1 ; Enables extended morph hooks and loading of extended morph assets

bAllowAllMorphs=1 ; Enables use of all preset morphs across all races

bExportSkinToBone=1

bAllowAnyRacePart=0 ; When using face parts, allows using parts not normally valid for the race, not recommended may not persist

bAlloyAnyGenderPart=0 ; Similar to above but does not restrict gender

[scorrp10]

Do not mess around with those settings.

A lot of HPH presets have 2 files: the .jslot preset file and a head .nif.

Assuming you got High Poly Head 1.4 installed:

 

In Racemenu:

1. If you load one preset and do not like the results much, it is often not the best idea to try and load another over it. You can get leftovers from prior preset messing things up. Which means if I want to create a new character, I will start the game, and at main menu, use 'coc qasmoke' to load into test area as a brand new character.

1. You generally want to set the NPC to proper NPC race and sex. I.e. if preset says she is a Breton, you really best off making her a Breton. You can usually interchange between humans (Nord/Imperial/Redguard/Breton) but Elves are different.

2. Then you go to Presets, and F9 to load the preset. Oftentimes, the result will look quite deformed. Oh, and if you don't have requisite head parts installed (eyes, brows, hair etc), those parts will stay default.

3. Next, go into 'sculpt' tab and use F9 to import the head. Ideally, all parts should be green and have same names. Green means they are vertex compatible and can be morphed. Once you load the head, you should be close enough to mod page look. Note that it is still very much dependent on which skin you use and which ENB.

[anjenthedog]

Well, I'm doing something wrong, because I have yet to see any of them actually resemble what the preset authors show in their images

 

I load the jslot, then go into Sculpt and load the associated head model. But even when it's all green, it still doesn't look right. Most times, as if there's vampire or elf thrown in (that pointy chin narrow face thing). like I said, sometimes ~close (ish), but usually far from close

 

(btw, it look no different when I sculpt than right after I had already loaded the jslot. the face and head change immediately o jslot load)

 

It "feels" like the preset is morphing with another model. If I examine the preset's nif in NifSkope, it looks correct (ie, like the author's snapshots) But once applied to the player, it's like someone squished it (basically like the difference between the "round head" and "long head"). so a fox becomes a shrew, if you get my drift

 

So...this is why I'm grasping at straws like

 

bExternalHeads=0 ; Change this to 1 to generate external heads

 

since I still don't even know what that does, let alone if it can impact racemenu model swapping

 

PS> thanks for the reply. I *am aware that missing dependency eys/makeup/brows/skin/etc can affect it. But this is even with matches on every front. All I can think at this point is that I must be doing something stupid in one of my ini files

[scorrp10]

You really should not need to change any of those settings.

 

Tell you what, link me 2-3 presets that you can't get to look right, I will see if they work for me.

[anjenthedog]

Thanks @Scorrp

 

Ok. Here are two recent examples

 

1) Dagonet Face Preset

2) Mikasa Ackerman Face preset

 

For me, the outputted faces are far more "pinched" than the snapshots used for "advertising"

[scorrp10]

Ok, that Dagonet preset is gotta be one of the absolutely WORST packaged presets I ever seen.

You see, when you create an NPC mod, and select whatever makeup/tintmasks you got install in your game, all of it then gets baked into a single facegen texture. On a preset, that texture is useless. When you package a preset , you have to specify which makeup mods everything came from. This one lists NONE.

 

Let's see the requirements list:

You'll need high poly head from vector plexus, the eyes of beauty, ks hairdos, kalilies brows.

HPH - ok

KS Hair - ok.

 

This preset does NOT use Eyes of Beauty - the Eye are from 'Improved Eyes Skyrim' High Elf variants of the eyes in that mod have horridly yellow whites.

This preset does NOT use Kalilies Brows. It actually uses vanilla.

 

The skin tint in this preset is listed as 183/186/125, which makes her skin look yellower than American cheese. Even the baked tintmask (useless for a preset) has base color of 182/173/152.

Still yellow, but it is an acceptable Altmer yellow. But the mod screenshots don't show even a HINT of yellow.

Admittedly, I use Fair skin, the preset specifies BnP skin, which can make a fair bit of difference. But not THAT much.

 

Now, back to those makeup textures.

Looking into the .jslot, some of the textures listed are:

Actors\\Character\\Overlays\\FMS\\EyeShadow\\Lid 2.dds < this one I got

Actors\\EmpyreanCS_F_9_B.dds < I guess from Empyrean warpaints

Actors\\makeup by kai\\kai-kaiShadow layering upper.dds < I think from Oldrim

Actors\\makeup by kai\\kai-kaiShadowLower.dds

actors\\character\\Overlays\\Koralina\\Lips\\lips_08.dds < got that

Actors\\Character\\character assets\\Overlays\\ZMD78MAKEUP\\cracks 1.dds < guess those are freckles, no idea where from

 

So, no mention of Empyrean, Koralina, FMS, and whatever sources of the other textures. And yeah, after loading preset and importing the head, she looked like this:

 

 

 

I tweaked her skin tone a bit, chose some random blue eyes from (actually)the eyes of beauty, and dropped in a few makeup tint masks.

 

 

 

Still not quite the look from the mod page. But that's cause about the only thing in the preset that does match the mod page is the head scuplpting.

[scorrp10]

The Mikasa preset comes from the same guy, so not much hope there either.

 

Let's see...

You'll need high poly head from vector plexus, the eyes of beauty, Sg hair, diamond textures basically

 

Looking at .jslot: "Cherry's Eyes.esp", Eyes of Beauty my ***.

At least this one does not have any 'exotic' makeup textures.

 

Skin tint color: "color" : 4291743180, That's 0xFFCECDCC or 206/205/204 Which should be a decent color. Ok, lets load her up.

 

 

Well, well. I'd say that's about right on the money. Sure, the skin is different (Fair instead of Diamond) Specifically, the glossy version of Diamond...

[anjenthedog]

Yep. that looks correct (Sans the texture, but whatever. that's not an issue)

 

Yes, all installed, (sans diamond skin, since I've chosen to let her have my default skin texture to avoid altering other player instantiations).

 

I don't think anything's wrong with the preset itself (nor the many others I've tried with similar facial distortion). I can see the "correct" output when I look at it in NifSkope. It's being applied incorrectly in game and resulting in a narrower output than I'd expect from either your snap, the author's snaps, or the nifskope view.

 

Hence my blather about ini settings and "morphing with elven or vampire models" (or something similar) , since logically, it should just work, yet it's producing something else narrower than intended.

 

That's why I asked about ini settings. The presets are fine, and their head meshes look correct in nifSkope. They just look wrong once applied to the player.

 

idk maybe one of the support files I installed a long time ago to augment the old head model are screwing with things. I just don't know. All I know is that loading racemenu presets produced by others (HP or otherwise frankly) usually doesn't result in the expected facial shapes, and the products of loading presets looks more like a morph of the preset with something else, something far more "long headed".

[scorrp10]

Well, you would need to post a few screenshots to see what is going on - like what you get in-game with Mikasa?

 

And sure you got the proper versions of things?

 

HPH 1.4 (SE) I recall I provided a download link for you if you still can't get signed into Vector Plexis.

Expressive Facegen Morphs

Expreccive facial animation: Female and Male

[anjenthedog]

yep yep and yep yep for the dependencies. I'll post one or two a bit later on when I have time to open the game. (shoulda thought of doing that from the gitgo but I was being dumb)

 

EDIT: with one exception. The hair. I have KS hair, among others, but I couldn't find that specific hairdo, although maybe I just didn't look hard enough or possibly don't have the latest KS hairs to work from. It applies something completely different by default when the preset is loaded, some longer haired side hanging version.