Hair/Race Screw up. Need help

[davidnowlin]

I was trying to understand how to make changes to races (because I was trying to design my own) and somehow I inadvertently made it so that every caucasian female in the game has the same hairstyle. I don't know how to undo what I've done. Does anybody know of a good beginner's tutorial on how to work with NPC appearance in the geck? I have Ling's coiffure loaded, but for some reason the hairstyles that come with it aren't available in game anymore. I don't know what I did to make them go away and I don't know how to bring them back. When I load my mod, they disappear. When I load an earlier version of it, they're fine. So, clearly, something I did is blocking them out, and I don't know what. All I really did was open up the Caucasian race and look at the settings to compare them with other races so I could get a feel for what settings do what. When I saved my mod, it screwed up everything up.

 

Any suggestions?

[GrindedStone]

When it comes to races you are just better off using FO3 edit to create them. The GECK is just too touchy & quirky.

 

1. Find a race in FO3 edit, right click it, copy as new record into This is the same thing as duplicate in the GECK, you can pick new file an hey you just created a new mod with this duplicate race in it. Also if you duplicate the race based off the race inside a Merge Patch "Blamo" you just saved yourself the trouble of having to add other mods as masters then creating a list of eyes, hairs, eyelashes, ect You can also RCM (resource) content this way, find the eyes you like then Copy as new record into an save it in the same file as the race, then you just need to go back to the race an add the parts in the right spot. Add zzz as a prefix an hey now in the list it's always at the bottom... Easy to find.

 

2. Don't forget you need a facegen preset. Copy as new record into on a NPC, doesn't matter which one. Save it in that file, then flag it to be a face gen preset which is in the flags area, then also change that NPC's race to your new one.

 

3. Change the In-game name of the race, so it won't look like a vanilla one while in-game

 

4. No doubt you saw in the races form that there are many different parts that make up the male an female part. The model is the 3D shape, but the tricky part is that the texture for that is listed as a icon texture, it's directly below the model. If you say copied the folder that contained all the textures for the female then pasted it in a new folder named "MNR" or whatever created inside that same folder that had the female textures, now all you would have to do is go back to the mod an add that "MNR" to the folder path for all the textures, an you can now do whatever you want to those textures. Same thing for meshes. NOTE there are many support files for content for example meshes need .EGM an other stuff, or textures have more than just defuse an normal, when in doubt use FOMM to unpack those folders to view as a guide to what is being used.

 

Data/Textures/Characters/Female <----copy everything in here

 

Data/Textures/Characters/Female/MNR <------create a new folder there (MNR my new race, something short)

 

Add MNR to the texture paths inside the .esp or .esm Bam! do the same for the meshes an you now have a custom race