Making Companion with a preset face.

[GoldenDragyn]

Hello,

Would the process be similar like in SSE? Load preset in character creation then export. Find Face gen files ie: dds and nif putting those in the appropriate folders? Seems like FO4 is more taxing than SSE, I can do it there but been struggling here. I know about face ripper and have used it in the past for Curie, but this time I am trying to make an companion from scratch and so far the face is not working. There doesn't seem to be any facegen files from other companion mods like Heather Casdin and I am guessing it's because how mods are packed for FO4? I check the head nif for the preset I'm using in nifscope and the textures look fine, but in CK they end up looking like they are stretched in preview window. Anyone have experience making a companion using a non vanilla face?

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Edited November 14 by GoldenDragyn
Adding Screenshots

[subaverage]

I don't know whether this helps, but you find the presets and values in the CK under "Character Gen Morphs".

[South8028]

As far as I know, no one has ever inserted a non-vanilla head into the game. Because it's difficult. There are several dozen heads, where each of them is a face gene expression with morphs and it is not clear how the facial bones work. There are no manuals on the head. Simply replacing the vanilla mesh with your own won't do anything.

[GoldenDragyn]

That tab has been totally blank when I have looked at it wierd enough. As for bones, I did notice a 2B follower mod I am trying to fix/ improve has what seems to be facial bones included. Now that follower does have a different head and body compared to FO4 vanilla, different proportions. In fact she does not have a full body unless you give her a FO4 one. Any skin you see is part of the outfit for all intents and purposes. I believe this preset changes the player into a custom race. It also comes with a json file that I assume dictates the head appearance. I just have not figured out how to make use of that. Maybe I need to include that so the game knows how the face is supposed to look?

[South8028]

2 hours ago, GoldenDragyn said:

That tab has been totally blank when I have looked at it wierd enough. As for bones, I did notice a 2B follower mod I am trying to fix/ improve has what seems to be facial bones included. Now that follower does have a different head and body compared to FO4 vanilla, different proportions. In fact she does not have a full body unless you give her a FO4 one. Any skin you see is part of the outfit for all intents and purposes. I believe this preset changes the player into a custom race. It also comes with a json file that I assume dictates the head appearance. I just have not figured out how to make use of that. Maybe I need to include that so the game knows how the face is supposed to look?

I only did the body. I'm using a custom body that I built in 3ds. I wanted to redo the head, change the seam, add polygons. But this turned out to be beyond my capabilities. I realized that I need to redo all the heads with facegen from the Morph folder, otherwise facegen will not work. Then you need to redo all parts of the face. All sorts of eyebrows, cheeks, etc. It's a huge mess. And there are even no guarantees that it will work, because there are no manuals.

[GoldenDragyn]

That's why I think FO4 is more of a pita, SSE is more friendly. Atm I'm dabbling Blender (older version before they got bought?). At least in SSE I could go to character creation make my face export it and get the nif and face tint. Here I don't seem to be able to.

I looked at the preset mod in CK but could not see how it applied the preset other than preset was a npc of a different race. Face was still messed up in preview but is normal in game. I got as far as the companions face looks black with weird texture which could be an error on the texture paths, idk. Otherwise her face seems like it may be correctly rendered.

I pretty much just for experiment created a new npc in the preset mod trying to apply or figure out how to make the preset apply to it, I ended up adding face geom and tint folders where they should be. At least my brain is getting a work out. I might have to pick apart the 2B mod though since I know it has a face tint and an imported head. As it stands, spf gives me a nif with all the head parts and 3 dds files with the same name as the nif. In SSE I get a nif and 1 file that is actually the face tint, no new texture files.

[GoldenDragyn]

Update, I somehow finally got her face to work. Not sure how or if it was CK being stupid.  

Apparently I had to make sure in Race > General Data I had FaceGenHead and Playable clicked. I also had to make sure all of her headparts had Playable clicked too.

 

Hope that info helps anyone else.

Edited Wednesday at 10:51 PM by GoldenDragyn
Added info