TES CS crashing whenever i edit face...

[Surilindur]

Of course you do. Have you actually tried any of the advice given in these various old threads you keep necroing, and not just posting on each of them, telling you have the same issue? It would be handy if you linked all the threads you have found in in your new thread and telling people you have tried everything suggested in those, to no avail - instead of going around posting in every single old thread with the same problem described. You can also add your operating system, whether you use the CSE, if you use the CSE then do you have all the prerequisites, where you have the game installed (Program Files?), if you are running it in compatibility mode and such. And of course mention whether you have tried all the advice given in these threads.

 

Patience is they key. If no one responds to your new thread within the first couple of hours, that is just normal. Going around posting pointless one-line statements in every old thread you can find will not help you fix your issues. Just an idea.

Edited June 20, 2016 by Contrathetix

[Darklocq]

>> I still have this problem....

> Of course you do. Have you actually tried any of the advice given in these various old threads you keep necroing [...]

 

Don't be tetchy. Just because someone's solutions worked for you doesn't mean they work for everyone in the world. I'm also having this problem, and ZERO of the proposed solutions and workarounds mentioned in this or any other thread I've been able to find on any site about it work for me. None. It crashes EVERY single time I try to do anything in the Face or Advanced Face panes, other than once in a while I can adjust one or two of the hair color values and save really quick before it bombs. The "Preview: Full" thing never does anything (other than crash). Same with "Preview: Head". Same with "Copy" in the Advanced Face tab. Same with all of the Face tools. Crash, crash, crash, 20 times or more back to back on my last attempt.

 

I'm going to have to find some other way to inject face data into NPCs. Weirdly, TES4Edit doesn't seem to have this feature, though you can edit hair and other stuff. The FaceGen block is just a read-only bunch of hex. There must be some other way to do this. I'll look into that Oblivion Face Exchange thing next. All I want to do is take a face from one of the unused vanilla test characters and put it on a new NPC in my mod, and THREE DAYS later, after reading every thread in the world on it, I still can't do it with the CS. It's buggy software to start with, and verges on unusable in Win7.

 

PS: It's not "necroposting" to continue a years-running thread about software people still use every day, trying to deal with the same problem that's still not entirely resolved. It's just a thread that's continuing longer than you're used to.

[Striker879]

Something I recall from Emma's site ... try plugging a microphone into your sound card/on board sound.

[TheMastersSon]

Darklocq, when you double-click on an NPC's name, the CK first displays the Stats tab for that NPC. Are you sure you're clicking on the Full and/or Head preview buttons in that Stats window (lower right-hand corner) BEFORE you move on to the Face or Face Advanced tabs? Oblivion's CK will definitely crash if you don't.

 

[Darklocq]

> try plugging a microphone into your sound card/on board sound

 

Not applicable in my case. It's all USB, no such port. And I do have a mic (via headphones + mic headset) connected.

 

My VM solution, on the same hardware, below demonstrates that in my case at least it has nothing to do with audio hardware.

 

> when you double-click on an NPC's name, the CK first displays the Stats tab for that NPC. Are you sure you're

> clicking on the Full and/or Head preview buttons in that Stats window (lower right-hand corner) BEFORE you

> move on to the Face or Face Advanced tabs?

 

Yep. And after three days, there is no permutation I have not have tried, other than going back to the pre-SI CS, which I had considered, until I realized that my mod has SI stuff in it.

 

I did find that you can copy the read-only hex FaceGen data from a vanilla NPC and paste it into a new one, via TES4Edit. However, this does not actually work. As soon as you enter a cell with that NPC in it, Oblivion will CTD. The CS will, too, if you try to edit the NPC's face, or turn on Full or Head rendering at all.

 

I next tried using a hex editor to locate the NPC's FG data in Oblivion.esm and then copy it to my NPC in my .ESP. This doesn't work, because the hex string cannot be found. The combination of these two things means that there's some kind of encoding/encryption going on (presumably at the behest of the makers of FaceGen), and that the data in the file, what TES4Edit or a hex editor can read, is not the real FG data, but the CS and the game do some decoding/decryption to get at that data in realtime.

 

I would suppose that the makers of Face Exchange figured out the format, and I guess Wrye Bash has, too, since you can move face data around without using the CS. But it's an extremely tedious and geeky process, especially if you are trying to do NPC-to-NPC. All of these things want to do PC-to-PC, NPC-to-PC, or PC-to-NPC, and even the last two are a pain. So, the only way I can find to do NPC-to-NPC is a hour-long, error-prone process of NPC-to-PC-to-NPC, involving multiple conversions of ESP and ESM to ESS and back again, using multiple tools. I guess that no one's made an NPC-to-NPC copy tool because the CS provides one and the ways around the CS crashing bug USUALLY work.

 

In the end, it was more expedient to simply install Windows 10 in a virtual machine, install Oblivion and the patches and ESMs and ESPs and textures and meshes my mod requires, copy my mod over, and edit it in the VM. The installing took an hour or so, and the editing took only a minute, the way it's supposed to, without any problems (other than, yes, you do need to pick "Preview: Full" first). Mod works fine in Win7 in my real game.

 

So, it's a crappy answer for anyone who can't get this to work at all in Win7: Use Win10, at least temporarily. I'm sorry I couldn't find an actual fix. :-(

Edited May 9, 2018 by Darklocq

[Surilindur]

Don't be tetchy. Just because someone's solutions worked for you doesn't mean they work for everyone in the world.

 

Maybe my wording was a bit bad, now that I read the post again, it does sound extremely rude. Sorry. :unsure: However, I never claimed any of the solutions would work, I have never even tried any of them. I just pointed out (in an unnecessarily rude fashion, my bad) that the person never mentioned having tried any of the solutions. They also created their own thread and posted on two other threads: another thread, this thread about still having the issue. It would have been a lot more convenient to use one existing thread, or use their new thread by linking all existing threads to it, and then describing the workaround they have tried thus far. Yes, my wording is bad, and I have no idea why I have written it that way, I must have been very annoyed at that time.

 

The FaceGen data for an NPC can be transferred from one NPC to another by copy-pasting in TES4Edit (like you found out). It seems to work, but it may not look pretty, depending on the copy source and target (from female to male and vice versa). :laugh: I tested it with a new NPC in a new .esp file, by copying data from two different NPCs from Oblivion.esm to that NPC and the face did change. I copied all the three items under the face data. It did not crash in-game, either, when I went to look at the NPC to see if the changes had any effect. Which is interesting. Maybe there is something more to the face data issue? Something too obvious or too inconspicuous to notice? Have you tried the Construction Set Extender, would it make any difference? Before I changed to Windows 10 (that I use now, so I cannot even test Windows 7 easily, sorry), I used the CSE in Windows 7 and edited NPC face data without issues. I cannot remember if I ever tried editing faces without the CSE, my memory has more holes in it than emmental. :sweat:

Edited May 9, 2018 by Contrathetix

[TheMastersSon]

I had similar thoughts as Contrathetix. The few times I've needed to do NPC-NPC face copies I've just opened two CK windows instead of one, brought up the source NPC in one window and the new NPC in the other, and used the CK's copy/paste buttons. For Oblivion you need to do three copy operations (geometry symmetry, asymmetry, texture) to get a precise match, but it's still a lot faster and cleaner/more reliable than third-party utilities and file conversion routines. If I remember correctly the copies should be done in the order specified or else the new face may substantially differ from the old. Edited May 9, 2018 by TheMastersSon

[Surilindur]

Sorry about the massive delay again. :tongue: What I meant was that, when I tested, copying face data in TES4Edit worked and did not crash the game when I loaded it to check the results. So maybe there is more to the NPC face issue than just the CS crashing when trying to edit the face? The CS (with the CSE) does not crash for me, and neither does copying data in TES4Edit cause crashes. When I still used Windows 7 and CS (with CSE), editing NPC faces also worked without crashes. So there is some issue somewhere that causes the crashes, or something that causes the crashes to not happen. :huh:

 

For testing the face copy in TES4Edit, I copied the three items under FaceGen Data of an NPC to another NPC. Here is a picture (spoiler below) to illustrate the three items I copied (I did not copy from the player, though, I copied from Count Indarys and some other character to a newly-created test NPC). Of course it could be that I failed to copy something that would have been necessary, but at least the NPC faces changed and the game did not crash. Would not be the first time I forget to copy something.... :unsure:

 

 

 

Edited November 26, 2019 by Contrathetix