Editing face textures on NPC's

[Budong]

Okay... Trying to figure some of this out as well... :)

 

According to this construction set doc...

http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index...ce_Advanced_Tab

... the face textures are in "\Textures\Faces\Oblivion.esm\" and the texture names are based on the FormIDs of the characters that they're applied to. Got that part, and extracted all 3000+ textures.

 

Now, using Martin as an example (everyone knows where he is), we quickly find a problem... ;) If you start up Oblivion, engage the console, then click on Martin with the mouse-pointer, you'll discover that his FormID is 0001e745. Go check for a 0001e745_0.dds face texture though, and there isn't any. The closest matches are 0001e70C_0.dds and 0001e750_0.dds (yet Martin's obviously getting his face texture from SOMEWHERE, so obviously he's a special case with a special texture-name/location.) Where the heck is it? :)

[Vagrant0]

Okay... Trying to figure some of this out as well... :)

 

According to this construction set doc...

http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index...ce_Advanced_Tab

... the face textures are in "\Textures\Faces\Oblivion.esm\" and the texture names are based on the FormIDs of the characters that they're applied to. Got that part, and extracted all 3000+ textures.

 

Now, using Martin as an example (everyone knows where he is), we quickly find a problem... ;) If you start up Oblivion, engage the console, then click on Martin with the mouse-pointer, you'll discover that his FormID is 0001e745. Go check for a 0001e745_0.dds face texture though, and there isn't any. The closest matches are 0001e70C_0.dds and 0001e750_0.dds (yet Martin's obviously getting his face texture from SOMEWHERE, so obviously he's a special case with a special texture-name/location.) Where the heck is it? :)

I would assume that the Martin we see in game is actually a cloned NPC which had the face linked to it. When you make a clone of a NPC in the CS (changing their Editor ID) they still retain the face textures of the original, despite having a different Form ID. If this is the case, then really you'd have compare the extracted files and find a texture without a related FormID. It is also possible that the face linked to Martin is used by someone else, but is unseen due to other reasons, like being a different race, being used in a test cell, or existing where their face is unseen, like ghosts, daedra, and others.

 

Really the only way to get around the whole face texture issue would be to replace all those textures with a smaller, blank dds.

[Budong]

Figured it out — Oblivion NPC face textures ARE replaceable, and it's really easy to do too. :)

 

The FormID for Martin that we see through the game console is NOT the one we need... (Something must load before the NPCs which offsets the ID numbers we see in the console.) BUT, if we look closely at the NPC lists in the Construction Set window, there's another column of values hidden in between "EditorID" and "Count"... If you expand the column, lo and behold, there's the form ID we need. :)

 

So, for example, if we want to replace Martin's face texture, we take his FormID (00033907), name our face texture accordingly as 00033907_0.dds, then place the texture in \Oblivion\Data\textures\faces\Oblivion.esm\ (Oblivion.esm is a folder with a ".esm" in its name, not an actual *.esm file.)

 

That's it — start up the game and Martin will have a new face texture. (External resource files with a time/date stamp newer than the corresponding resource shipped by Bethesda will automatically override the default resource - no ArchiveInvalidate entries are necessary.)

 

 

Note that all pre-rendered Oblivion face textures have alphas and are largely transparent — this is done so that the skin tone of the body shows through underneath eyebrows, beard stubble, cheek ruddiness, etc. (That's why you almost never see an NPC with a mis-matched neckline.) ;) Face textures are *just* the portions of the face that are altered.

[Abramul]

Can this be applied to the player as well?