Need help with new head

[Dlesang]

I've been wanting to make my own head for some time now, and after gaining some understanding of how Blender 2.49b works, I made one.

 

I've loaded it into Oblivion, and it functions well as a wearable object. However, when I tried to load it into Oblivion as the actual head for my catfolk race, the game crashed on loading. When I tried loading Oblivion's own EGM, EGT, and TRI files [renaming them "cathead" to fit my mesh], the game loaded successfully, but my face was invisible. Teeth, eyes, ears, hair, tongue, and mouth were all present, but my head was gone.

 

That was a creepy sight. XD

 

Can somebody help me get this working, please?

 

Here's a look at what I made: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/22554025/misc/oblivon/cathead.jpg

[DrakeTheDragon]

Unfortunately creating your own custom head mesh from scratch is among the most complex tasks in Oblivion modding.

 

There are those additional files EGM (containing the shape morphs), TRI (containing the facial animation morphs) and EGT (containing the coloration and skin tint texture overlays) which have to be matching by all means or the game will crash.

 

The EGT isn't really troublesome, just containing textures, but for the EGM and TRI those contain "offsets" for every vertex of your head mesh to morph it into the target shape for every morph there is (round about 80 different morphs in total I think) and for this to work the count "and" order of your head mesh's vertices and their's have to be an exact match! One cannot simply "reuse" the Vanilla EGM and TRI files, when in your head mesh anything got changed about vertex count or order, which happens automatically for example by importing from or exporting to NIF files with Blender or using any of the "scripted" tools or even altering the UV-unwrapping for a new texture mapping layout.

 

Once this happened, those EGM and TRI files have to be created from scratch as well. This currently means you'll have to create about 80 or more new head meshes from cratch, each with the respective morph applied to its fullest, exported to OBJ and then Scanti's tools used to create new EGM and TRI files from these. Again the vertex count and order has to absolutely match count and order from your head mesh or morphs will simply never work right! Importing from and exporting to OBJ files instead of NIF for both original state and all 80+ morphed states is highly in order for this to result in a working combination of files in the end.

 

Depending on how much your geometry has changed, you might also have to recreate the other features of your head, namely inner mouth, tongue, upper and lower teeth meshes, again once in original unmorphed state and then for each of the 80+ morphs (whichever apply for the individual face parts here, not every part needs all morphs, eyelids' blinking on tongue or teeth for example won't be needed, that's a bunch of morphs less to cover) seperately, to again create working EGM and TRI files for those parts as well with Scanti's famous tools.

 

That's a bit overwhelming a task, so if it can be helped by "reshaping" an existing head mesh, and its parts, the EGM and TRI files of this can be reused unaltered, provided the vertex count and order of any of those never gets touched in the process!

 

As for your head not crashing the game but being invisible, there's a number of things which could be responsible for this. You could be missing a normalmap texture ("..._n.dds") for your face texture, but that's not even proven to be required. It could be positioned wrong in the NIF file, as the original Vanilla heads have an "unapplied" translation of certain amounts along certain axes so their vertices' stored position is still relative to 0 and morphs can be applied, but the head is positioned on top of your neck nevertheless ingame and not lying on the ground between your feet. (Have you searched there already if your head is by chance lying around between your feet, as would be the case when you missed this special unapplied translation in the NIF?) Possibly your new NIF itself could be damaged, as it's pretty easy to mess up their NIF structures, either on export, or on import already, or by combining things in Blender without knowing this will screw up the NIF (duplicate armatures coming into mind here, for example, a "Scene Root" inside a "Scene Root", etc.). And last but not least, actual head meshes used by the game use certain "keyworded" properties, for example their material or the name of their NiTriShape/Strips, and there is only allowed to be a single one of those meshes as well or morphs will not apply, cause issues, etc., and if you used your own names or made up some or let Blender define them, it's likely not going to work as an actual head mesh.

 

I know only 1 person attempting to create a new head mesh completely from scratch and succeeding so far, so this is the only person I know able to tell all the details and secrets not even I am aware of, yet, and this is ThrottleKitty, creator of the famous Head06 resource. But then I certainly don't know everything about it, so there could as well be others I'm not aware of. But I'm convinced their number is pretty small.

 

Don't let me disencourage you to go on with this though. Try to get more help from other sources who know better than me, I'm just a novice in this. Your head mesh isn't crashing the game instantly after all, so you must have done several things perfectly right already, and maybe there's only a few little details missing or done wrong, maybe as simple as missing normalmaps or some NIF structure anomalies even, like I told.

 

Good luck in getting it fixed! I'm looking forward to more custom head meshes for the game.

[lovender]

Hi, Drake.

 

I fixed the neck's vertex in Ren's head, because it didn't connect with the body perfectly.

But after export it from Blender, when in-game the eyelid's blinking has an issue where the eyelids became messy... (hopefully I don't have to show picture of it)

I believe because it didn't match with the previous .egm, .egt, .tri files.

 

Is it hard to fix?

 

(It it's hard, then maybe I'll just fix the body's neck to match the head's neck then...)

Edited May 2, 2020 by lovender

[DrakeTheDragon]

Hmm, I'm afraid from what I know so far, if you imported the head mesh directly from a NIF into Blender and then exported it again directly into a NIF after you were done with your changes, then it's very likely the vertex order already got changed, and as such the connection between the NIF and the EGM or TRI files is broken beyond repair.

 

I know of no way of intentional and aimed changing of vertex order in order to get it back in sync with the EGM and TRI's, as much as I don't know in which way exactly im- and export into or out of Blender actually changes it. I only know from having read writings on the topic and my own observations it definitely does.

 

If there is a way to re-do your changes to the neck after importing an original unaltered head mesh from scratch but first converting it into an OBJ (import into Blender from OBJ gives the critical option to "keep vertex order intact"), exporting it back into OBJ as well and only from there into a NIF, then you should be able to fix it. But if re-doing your changes is too much work, I'm afraid things don't look good.

 

But like I said, I'm not an expert in this. It could very well be there's new knowledge, tools or means to work on this available by now and it can be done much easier. I just don't know of them, yet.

[lovender]

And so this tutorials is not valid I think?

https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/37209

 

Because there will be eyelid issue after that...

[DrakeTheDragon]

Well, this tutorial was made by one of the "other sources who know better than me" I mentioned in my 1st post above, so I'm pretty sure their tutorial is still valid. But they already said it won't work with the Vanilla head mesh and only with Head06. Now, I don't know whether Ren's head was made from scratch or reshaping the Vanilla head, but chances are it's the same reason the tutorial won't work for the Vanilla head, if it runs into issues with Ren's head now.

 

Coming to think of it, it could even be their one deviation from ThrottleKitty's path they mentioned responsible for the issue with eyelids. The heads in this game have specific "unapplied" location and rotation properties, exactly for the reason that they appear far away up from the origo in game while their internal location is close to the zero point still, so morphs will work. All this talk about eyelids dropping down to feet in their comments makes me think their head's internal location is no longer around the zero point for some reason, so the eyelid morphs will move them down to the feet, where the zero point actually is. But that's just speculation on my part based on the context of what I read.

 

I'll have to give the tutorial itself another close look first, before I can possibly see where exactly the eyelid issue might be coming from or how it could potentially be prevented.

But from what I recall (from when I looked into it closer the last time) and read on the page and in the comments, it sounds like it contains lots of exactly what I was telling above:

Not to directly import and/or export from or to NIF but to use OBJ instead to keep the vertex count and order intact, not to use any scripts to prevent changes to vertex count or order from happening, and not to do any major changes or new unwraps even to the UV map either for exactly the same reason.

Unless they leave out one particular important point or do something else important differently in a way that would mess things up, I'm not seeing why their tutorial for reshaping Head06 meshes all of a sudden would no longer be valid, only that it also might not apply to Ren's head either.