Adding a head (in this case mine)

[iramod]

Hello, i have been working as a professional 3d artist for years and lately i wanted to go back playing oblivion, i thought to myself that i could add my own head\face without too many issues but hell was i wrong...

As you can see the model is ready to go and it has the same amount of tris as the OG mesh for humans, the fact is that there's a barely any documentation and it's mostly insanely old, the software used changed (especially exporters etc.) i would be fine to have even a static mesh over the original head(covering it or even hiding it with a mod i don't care really), the oblivion character is seen almost only in the inventory so i don't care about eyes blinking, if anybody wants to try i can give you the obj plus the albedo and normal texture.

[iramod]

By editing an existing mod that adds custom hair i was able to add my mesh instead, it works but it requires mainly these edits:

1. Adding Eyes or at least moving the default ones to the desired position

2. creating an egm file that morph the position of the head to the one of the neck when the pose changes

3. Hiding the OG head entirely

If anyone has any idea on how to deal with these points, feel free to tell me.

test

[iramod]

https://streamable.com/4qhwp4

 

Done, the neck penetration is not that much of an issue, realistically this mod is mostly for the inventory and some screen in third person.

I would like to improve the eye shader, maybe the neck and possibly add a mod that will swap the normal texture when vampirism is contracted, i don't even know why i'm still updating this thread but the mod came out decent.

[AndalayBay]

Well I've been reading it. I just couldn't help you with your issues.

We could have used your help on a large modding project if you like to do creatures. I think at this point, I've given up on the project though.

[iramod]

Oh nice! i thought nobody cared at all, the more i search for ways to improve the head the more i discover that in theory BUT just in theory the whole facegen system could be scrapped, by using complex morph targets animations for the faces could be triggered for all kind of actions, it would require advanced scripting but it's possible in theory.

In my case i got it to a point where it's good for the most part, i would still like to fix the neck and add a vampire texture triggered by vampirism, for the mod i guess it could be fun but i work a ton on my business and when free i mess around with this stuff but hardly anything bigger lately.

[AndalayBay]

I'm not sure what you're after, but you might want to check out Blockhead.

[iramod]

5 hours ago, AndalayBay said:

I'm not sure what you're after, but you might want to check out Blockhead.

That might be interesting for something more advanced down the line but for now i want:

1: To eliminate the the neck penetration with clothes and armor, i would like the the neck i modeled to move and deform like the neck of vanilla oblivion

2: I would like to make it so that if i become a vampire in-game the texture on my custom head will change with another one

 

That's pretty much it for now.

[dreamCloud]

To get a proper custom head mesh into Oblivion you need to do one of four things:

1) Edit the vanilla head mesh in a way that does not interrupt the vertex order (CRITICAL). This can be done fairly easily in Blender 2.49b or 3DS Max 8/9 by pinning the vertices at the very bottom (the ones that line up with the neck) and then applying a shrinkwrap modifier to it so that it matches the geo of your custom head mesh and then cleaning things up by hand so everything sits right before exporting. 

2) Edit the head06 head mesh the same way as 1. It's here on the Nexus and is also what was used by other people who did big race modifiers. It's basically a vanilla-ish head mesh but with way more geometry applied so you can sculpt it a bit.

3) Create a new head mesh using the Facegen tools that lines up very closely to a basic Facegen mesh. This takes forever, it's prone to errors, the software is extremely old, and it's expensive. Ironically though it's still being used in some current games. But it will give you the correct morphs for the game engine. For some reason I only have a 50/50 success rate using this software though. And then you'll have to probably edit it like option 1 anyways to get it to look right in the engine (especially around the eyes, man this tool has trouble with eyelid animations on anything not super exact to its base mesh lol).

4) Create a brand new head mesh (like you've already done) and then hand-make a tri file for it that includes ALL of the morphs that Oblivion engine expects. This may be the most reliable way for you with your experience, but it takes forever and you can easily mess things up (ask me how I knoooow lol).

[iramod]

It sounds like a complete mess for something that behaves almost entirely like the head i just added (minus the eyes blinking)

Really at this point i just care for the vampirism bit and a fix for the neck and that's it.

EDIT: Also if there's one thing i learned to hate over the years as a 3d artist is dealing with multiple file conversions, man i would do anything not to deal with that.

Edited November 7 by iramod

[dreamCloud]

Yeah it's all about the morph animations. You can still use your same mesh if you are committed to that, you'll just need to use option 4 and make the tri files for that. 

As for the neck moving like the vanilla neck, you need to parent it to the skeleton and then weight paint the neck part of the mesh to the neck bone, spine2, clavicle l, and clavicle r the same as the Vanilla head is done.

One big downside of using the hair slot for your mesh is also that the hair slot defaults to only being weighted to the head bone (it's something a lot of hair modders complained about early on and their workarounds was to make helmets).

 

I have a bunch of old tutorials I can dig up too if you really want to dive in.