Is there anyway to use an NPC’s appearance as a usable preset?

[Weweber]

I’ve been looking into different ways to do this for 2 days and just can’t figure it out, even with the vast archive of people looking for a similar thing. I’ve tried Proteus, Alternate Actors, Copy Character Appearance, and some more I probably can’t remember.

The closest I’ve gotten is copying the NPC’s (in this case from one of the BIJIN mods) DDS and NIV files into CharGen, but even after hours customizing I can’t get them to look even remotely the same.

This all makes me wonder why people don’t just release their follower/NPC mods with a preset for the player aswell :( Does anyone know of any method that works?

[scorrp10]

Well, if you like a particular dish at a restaurant, you can try asking for a recipe...   chances are they'll  refuse.    Same here.    Folks generally like to keep their 'secret sauce'... secret.

Regardless, getting that exact look may reqiure some work.   One option is to see if you can track the mods from which those head parts came.   (head, brows, hair etc).    Texture names are often telling.   Once you in RaceMenu selected the parts, you can just import the NPC head mesh to apply the sculpting.

Another option is to 'disassemble' the head mesh into individual BSDynamicTriShapes, and create your own head parts records using those meshes.    Important part - those headparts should be 'playable', specify the main .tri - either vanilla or included in the mod - and NOT specify the race and chargen .tris.    Then in RaceMenu, you can 'assemble' your looks with those parts.

A much much much bigger issue, however, is the tintmask.    Splitting out the .nif mesh is easy, but the tintmask texture is baked together from all the textures used by  the  'colors' and 'makeup' tabs in RaceMenu.   And each baked in texture came with its own color and alpha, and those may have blended together - especially the shading and contours masks.

[Savela]

This might be a total dead end, but i have used Face Ripper for Fallout 4 to make NPC's out of player characters a long while ago.

Maybe you can use it in Skyrim to do the inverse.

[anjenthedog]

you can rewrap your player easily using Copy Character Appearance, but when rewrapped, it can be a bit buggy a times.  Anyway, once executed on the player, (a simple console command while the NPC you want to clone onto yourself is targetted), you can (and should/must) use Racemenu to save a preset, but it's only good for that player instance, due to the way the mod works. (Not shareable)

It clones the NPC in its entirety (nos clothing), face and body. there may be slight scale issues depending on if your player has any customization to that value 

*must: because you'll probably need to use it occasionally if your face accidentally gets reset by a Boss hit or other glitch trigger

Also, I think Proteus provides some mechanism for something similar

[scorrp10]

Ok, here is the thing.   There is a 'recipe' for how your head mesh looks, expressed in "get such and such head part provided by core game or this or that  mod, then set this slider to this, and that slider to that, etc etc".  Same goes for tint mask texture: Take one tintmask with this color/transparency, add another at that color/transparency , etc.   So a recipe is this collection of head FormIDs and their source plugins, slider positions, sculpt brush strokes, tintmask textures and their RGBA values.    This recipe is remembered by the game, and it is written into the save game.    I.e. if you go into racemenu, move some sliders, exit racemenu, save, exit game, restart, and load that save, in racemenu your sliders will be as you set them.  When you save a preset in racemenu, it writes this recipe into the .jslot file.   Hold that thought.

Now, what you actually see on screen while in racemenu, and what gets exported when you 'export' in sculpt tab, and when the game uses for general playing, is mesh+mask 'baked' to that recipe.   And it is also written as part of your save file.  So when you load and play the game, it will just load the baked mesh+mask directly, without having to regenerate it from recipe.

Now, if you look at an NPC Actor record in SSEEdit, there is the head parts list, there is a 'Face morph' list of about 20 sliders that were in the vanilla racemenu, and a bunch of tint layers with mask names and RGBA.   So yeah, every NPC also packs a 'recipe'.    If someone is making a visual replacer for an NPC, and they do it entirely via CK, using sliders on 'Character Gen Morphs' tab, and pick tint layers on Character Gen Parts tab, and then export the head using Ctrl+F4... then yeah, their mod includes both the recipe and the baked mesh+mask.   But the game will just load the baked NPC head mesh from  facegendata/facegeom subdirectories.

Thing is, nobody these days makes NPC replacers using CK.   They are made in RaceMenu, head mesh+mask gets exported, and the NPC record in the .esp (the recipe) remains pretty much vanilla.   Except for head parts - those need to match the head mesh.   
 

Spoiler

Say, here is my replacer record for Mirabelle Ervine in CK:

And her actual head mesh used by the game:

So, if a mod can take the baked NPC head mesh and mask, and load it in place of player's baked mesh, then yeah, you will have player looking exactly same as NPC.   But if the mod 'bakes' player head mesh from the NPC recipe in the .esp (which was likely left on vanilla)...  the result will be not so good.

[Karna5]

I tried hard to read the thread to see if this answer was given, but please note I'm legally blind and can't actually see letters, so if this answer was given, I apologize.

With Racemenu installed, I type the following to transfer face presets. It works fine.

1. Target in console whom you wish to be the source.

2. In console type:  skee preset-save [a descriptive word]

3. In console target whom you wish to be the recipient.

4. In console type: skee preset-load [the copied word]

For instance:

• skee preset-save PrettyNord01
• skee preset-load PrettyNord01

 

 

[scorrp10]

Those skee preset-save and preset-load commands are pretty much useless for RaceMenu-designed heads.  

skee preset-save  saves the 'recipe'  (tintmasks/morph sliders/head parts) as they are set in the NPC's Actor record.   Which basically has nothing to do with the NPC's actual head mesh look.   Except maybe for the head parts.   And even there is a caveat.   If this is a vanilla NPC visual replacer, chances are Actor record is still listing their vanilla parts, and the shapes in head mesh are renamed to match.   If it is an add-on NPC, most likely their parts are 'stripped down' flagged non-playable and are not really usable.

For example, here is result of using those commands to save an NPC(left) as a preset, and then loading that preset onto a player(right)

[Karna5]

1 hour ago, scorrp10 said:

Those skee preset-save and preset-load commands are pretty much useless for RaceMenu-designed heads.

That's very interesting. I use it all the time and get exact matches in my (HPH) game. Here are a couple of recent examples where I used it on NPCs to clone my character for films.

(You can click the pictures below to see the films.)

Still, I'm all in favor of trying to learn new ways to do this. I've been using the skee preset-save and load for months but don't mind learning something new.

 

[scorrp10]

To clone YOUR character.  That is the key part.  Your character carries around the complete RaceMenu recipe that produced it.   And you have all the mods that contributed head parfs and tint textures.  

The thread is about cloning a non-vanilla NPC designed by someone else.

[Karna5]

28 minutes ago, scorrp10 said:

To clone YOUR character.  That is the key part.  Your character carries around the complete RaceMenu recipe that produced it.   And you have all the mods that contributed head parfs and tint textures.  

The thread is about cloning a non-vanilla NPC designed by someone else.

Are you saying that most NPC mods (which I don't ever use so don't have experience with) don't use .tri morphs for the face shape but have prebuilt meshes?

That's kinda terrible.