Editing face textures on NPC's

[Le_Hussard]

I am trying to do a very simple thing here, and yet I have spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to figure this out.

 

I want to make minor changes to the appearances of certain NPC's, but the Construction Set seems to only allow me to adjust the face shape along with the hair and the eyes, but not the skin tone and make-up(texture). I am aware that all the options are still there. It's just that changing any of the sliders does not do anything to the appearance of the NPC not only in the preview window in CS, but in the game itself.

 

I have also tried exporting a face from a saved game using Wrye Bash. In this case I open both faces (the NPC and the exported face) in CS and try to copy the exported face to the NPC, but once again only the shape changes.

 

I have looked through these forums, but have not found anything that would help me. Perhaps I am the only one having this problem, and there is something really obvious that I'm not doing?

 

I would appreciate any help.

[Vagrant0]

I am trying to do a very simple thing here, and yet I have spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to figure this out.

 

I want to make minor changes to the appearances of certain NPC's, but the Construction Set seems to only allow me to adjust the face shape along with the hair and the eyes, but not the skin tone and make-up(texture). I am aware that all the options are still there. It's just that changing any of the sliders does not do anything to the appearance of the NPC not only in the preview window in CS, but in the game itself.

 

I have also tried exporting a face from a saved game using Wrye Bash. In this case I open both faces (the NPC and the exported face) in CS and try to copy the exported face to the NPC, but once again only the shape changes.

 

I have looked through these forums, but have not found anything that would help me. Perhaps I am the only one having this problem, and there is something really obvious that I'm not doing?

 

I would appreciate any help.

 

I believe all the faces for NPCs are individual textures. Meaning that you have to extract them from Oblivion.esm. There are 3,854 files, and as I am not sure how they're associated with individual NPCs, you may need to extract them all to figure out which one is associated with what. Off hand, I would assume that the file names are related to the ID of the NPC, but don't have the time to verify this.

[Povuholo]

You should be able to edit them right from the Construction Set. I remember changing the npc's race once and going to the face editor (without saving it first by pressing OK) and I couldn't change the textures. When I had saved the npc with it's new ID and race and the other things I changed, I could edit the face without any problems.

[SickleYield]

Depends on what you mean by editing the texture. You can edit things like tone of lips and eyes and shading in the CS, but if you want to add tattoos, scars, etc., you have to create a new race and create new textures (generally by editing the game's textures in textures/characters/imperial/m or /f using a program like the GIMP).

 

This is how I've created new race textures for my upcoming mod, such as the ones on these two characters:

 

http://img153.imageshack.us/img153/6790/taranvo3.th.jpg

[Vagrant0]

I believe he is talking about how the default NPCs react when changing their skintone or complexion. Even when changing from one extreme to another, the actual skin tone of the NPC's face doesn't seem to change. Meanwhile their body does, leading to some nasty looking necklines. And yeah, I believe I had it right, the filename of the .dds is related to the ID number of the NPC. They probably did it this way if the facegen stuff wasn't done before the NPCs were made, hinting more toward a Morrowind system where you would pick your head/face. Or maybe it's there just to keep people from screwing around too much with the NPCs. Either way, you would need to extract them, and come up with some way of changing them in a meaningful way.

[Povuholo]

I believe he is talking about how the default NPCs react when changing their skintone or complexion. Even when changing from one extreme to another, the actual skin tone of the NPC's face doesn't seem to change. Meanwhile their body does, leading to some nasty looking necklines. And yeah, I believe I had it right, the filename of the .dds is related to the ID number of the NPC. They probably did it this way if the facegen stuff wasn't done before the NPCs were made, hinting more toward a Morrowind system where you would pick your head/face. Or maybe it's there just to keep people from screwing around too much with the NPCs. Either way, you would need to extract them, and come up with some way of changing them in a meaningful way.

:huh:

I can mess up any npc's face in any way I want to without doing anything else than moving around some sliders in the CS. The bodies changes as well, but sometimes a little more than the head (especially when making beards) which causes these 'necklines'. I'm pretty sure this can be done with existing npc's as well as new npc's.

 

If what you're saying is true, wouldn't that mean that when you upload a mod editing the face of an existing npc, you would also have to upload the .dds file? Which you don't.

[Le_Hussard]

Thank you for the replies, everyone.

 

So right now I'm seeing two potential ways of changing these textures: the first is to overwrite the extracted .dds file with the one I want, and the second would be to copy the NPC I want in CS to edit and change everything there (as mentioned above, you can change all the skin tones, lip colour and such in the new copy of the NPC).

 

But I'm running into problems when trying both of these ways.

 

With the .dds files, the CS only extracts the textures of the original characters in Oblivion.esm. My plan for copying the looks I want (an NPC made from my character in a saved game) onto an existing NPC doesn't work because I don't get the .dds file for my new NPC.

 

For the second potential solution, if I make another copy of the NPC I want to change in CS (save it to a new ID), everything associated with this NPC (quests, locations, etc.) stays with the original NPC, and I don't know how to change that. Perhaps someone could explain to me how it's supposed to be done? I'm sure there is a way.

[Vagrant0]

I believe the .dds file for the NPC is just an overlay. Meaning that if you replace it with a blank .dds (flat grey, or maybe one with a black alpha channel.) it may allow the sliders to behave naturally. For whatever reason, this system was used, probably because the sliders weren't in existance as a part of the CS when they were creating the NPCs. The standard NPCs still use the sliders, but the .dds file seems to have a strong influence on their facial coloring. It only makes sense that the .dds face textures came before the sliders we see now were implimented.

 

Doing it this way may have even allowed the possibility of extra details like scars/tatoos on individual NPCs, without changing their race. This is all speculation though, I'd really need to spend a few hours testing stuff to have any real idea.

 

Hmm, I remember some mod that supposedly changed the emporer to look more like Patrick Stewart (the voice actor, and god's second hand to some trekkies). I don't know how well they did it, but you may want to take a look at it for some ideas.

[Le_Hussard]

Replacing the .dds file for the NPC with a blank one in the Textures/Faces/Oblivion.esm folder worked, so I was finally able to edit the face tone after that.

 

Thank you for the help! :)

[Vagrant0]

Glad I could help.

 

On a related note, it seems that only some of the NPCs have .dds files associated with them, further supporting my theory that they were a component for making NPCs durring development before the facegen stuff was worked out. However, I havn't had much luck linking a new .dds to an NPC that didn't have one, or a new NPC, so this association may be hard coded. Honestly, I havn't had much time to play around with them.