Lips not moving!

[Gawdzila]

So here's the deal...

 

I created some custom races and assigned a vanilla NPCs to them, so I could change their body model / textures. This worked just fine! ...except that it made their face darken several shades. So I found a fix -- I went into the CK and used ctrl-f4 to export the facegen data, then loaded up my last save. Now their heads are back to normal... but their lips don't move when they talk! WTH is going on here?? Does anyone know how to fix this?

[angelmeats]

Try going into Actor > Presets and making sure they have a head part selected. I had this same issue the other day and found that i had to manually reassign the head.

[Gawdzila]

Hmm... I went into the Actor > Preset tree, but the only things there are the presets for all the vanilla races.

 

I didn't actually create new presets for each race because, for one, it would have been a lot of extra work, and two, I was using the "Copied Data: Morph Race" pulldown to select whatever race the NPC originally was. I figured it would just inherit the preset data and such from the stock races. I did check the vanilla presets (I assume you meant to look for the head parts in the "Character Gen Parts" tab of the XXXXPreset01 entry?), and the head parts list does seem to be populated. The Head Parts list on the "Face Data" tab of the Race entry also seems to be populated, including the "MaleMouthHumanoid" part.

 

So I can't see anything amiss here, but maybe I messed up and looked in the wrong place? I'm pretty newb-ish when it comes to playing with the CK, and knowing the ins and outs of the TES animation / modeling / texturing system.

[angelmeats]

I'll try to double check my head part and presets listings and see if i forgot anything.

The trouble might actually be the Morph.

 

Are you using any other mods that affect npcs/heads/bodies? If so, load the custom race esp after everything.

[Gawdzila]

I was using the UFO follower mod, and also apachiihair, unique bodies, and some animations, all of which I disabled.

I also put my mod at the end of the load order. Didn't change anything.

 

After that didn't work, I got curious about what the difference between my races and other races were. So I downloaded "Enhanced Character Edit" and tried changing Lydia to "ygNord", a custom race from a working mod. Oddly, the exact same thing happened. As with my mod, her face morph did not change AT ALL (which is weird because ygNord has different face geometry). I mean.. it did when I first edited her race and her face turned gray; her features changed because of the ygNord race I presume, and her lips worked, as they did with my custom race. But after I saved and re-loaded the game, her face went back to stock normal (even though I have no .dds or .nif files in the Data\....\facegendata\Skyrim.esm\ folders) and her lips stopped working.

 

So then I decided to unload Unique Bodies, Enhanced Character Edit, and my own mod as well, and simply change Lydia's race to another vanilla race (Imperial). With no other race or NPC mods running at all, the exact same thing happened. Face changed and turned gray with working lips when I changed her race, then turned back to normal with non-working lips upon re-load.

 

So, on one hand, my custom races are behaving exactly the same as every other race that is working. That's good.

On the other hand, it appears that I cannot change an NPCs race at all without their face ceasing to work. That's bad.

Haven't other people changed NPC races before? I don't see why this shouldn't be working :-/

 

BTW, thanks for the help and direction :)

[angelmeats]

I also use Unique Bodies and Enhanced Character Edit and had this exact issue.

In my version, it's fixed completely. I'm just having a little trouble backtracking and figuring out exactly what i altered in either of those mods (because i have modified both of them quite a lot). I know that when i load Enhanced last, after Unique, everything is golden. The only reason this might be of interest to you is that i also smooshed the Yaksha (another custom race mod) into my Unique Bodies...which means i have more than one custom race running, if you include the Ygnord. AND, all issues i had with grey faces seems to have been completely resolved by using Enhanced at the end of my load order.

 

Thinking about it now, i think i unchecked the facegen box from the races in Unique Bodies and kept it checked in Enhanced, letting that do the presets.

 

I know for certain that Enhanced Character Edit does something with the face morphs and, most likely, with the Phoneme mapping (the bit that animates the mouth movement).

You might try combining your mod with Enhanced, using TESVSnip?

 

Apologies. This probably isn't helping much. I should have documented the steps I took.

[Gawdzila]

No sweat, you're at least giving me good ideas on where to look!

 

I've tried loading up Enhanced Character Edit at the end of the load order, but that didn't change anything. I also did try unchecking the "FaceGen Head" in one of my custom races while I had it loaded, but that just made the character's head disappear. I think that's because its main function is just to add the "ygNord" race. Apparently ygNord has modified TRI files; I don't know where those are located or how they work, but that seems to be how ECE affects face morphs. But unless you "smoosh" ECE into another mod with TESVSnip, as you suggested, I would imagine that those TRI files are only used for the ygNord race, and the other races just function normally.

 

The thing is, though... wouldn't merging my mod with ECE that just make my races use ECE's facegen data? Is that how your mod works, does it change a lot of NPC faces? ECE makes some rather Anime-looking characters and, other than not really being my style, my main goal is actually to leave a bunch of NPCs looking exactly vanilla but just with extra customize-ability.

 

Of course if I'm mistaken and it is possible to use ECE to keep characters faces looking "stock" while still getting rid of the dark faces, then I suppose I'd better learn how to use TESVSnip :)

If you can remember how you merged it with your mod that would be very helpful, but if not I can just try messing around with ECE.

[angelmeats]

ECE definitely references other races. If you start a new game, you'll see some very different (more anime style, like you said) presets for all the "human" races.

 

Using Morph Race in the Body Data tab will almost certainly conflict with ECE. There's got to be a workaround for that...

 

I was doing some more tinkering of my own and managed to reintroduce the lip sync issue. So i need to fix that again. I'll try to take notes this time. :)

[Gawdzila]

Thanks, I'd appreciate it!

 

By the way... The author of this mod claims that the proxy function in the CK -- the function responsible for adding custom races to the appropriate FormLists when you select the Copied Data : Morph Race option -- does not work properly. His mod is supposed to fix this, and apparently the HeadParts use FormLists to decide which races get to use them. I noticed that ECE includes his RaceCompatibility.esm; I'm not sure if this is partly responsible for fixing the issue, but I just thought I'd mention it.

 

I did notice that my races were NOT in the FormLists alongside the races I'd tried to proxy, so I included his .esm / script in my mod and re-saved it. This didn't help, although I'm not sure if I should have taken other steps as well. I then manually created my own FormList with all my custom races on it, which did show up in the "Valid Races" section of the various HeadParts. That didn't fix it either, although once again I'm not sure if I missed a step or three, but I figured I'd report my findings :)

[Gawdzila]

SUCCESS!!

 

I'm afraid my method of conquering the problem won't help deepen our understanding of how HeadParts or TRI files work, and it is a bit roundabout and tedious. However, it appears that I have fixed both the dark face and the no-lip-movement problem in one fell swoop, and in a way that is quite clean once the work is done.

 

Essentially what I did is used the "Is CharGen Preset" option in the Actor record of some given NPC. This generates a Preset which I then add to the Preset list of a stock race.

Then I use the "showracemenu" command in-game to change my race and choose the new preset, which makes me look exactly like the NPC.

Then I use the "spf XXXX" command to create a file in the Skyrim directory called "XXXX.npc"

I then use a text editor to delete the "Race:" line from XXXX.npc.

Then I open the CK, go to the Actor I want to customize and set its race to my custom race.

Lastly, I go to the "Character Gen Parts" tab and click "Import", then choose XXXX.npc. Ta da! Save and exit.

 

The NPC in the game appears with whatever custom body I'm using for their new race and there are no face bugs, I imagine because there is no mod that is changing their face separately from their Actor record. Their appearance is defined in exactly the same way it was in the Vanilla game.

 

Anyway, I guess I'm off to create a whole bunch of presets and *.npc files and change a lot of Actor records.

I really wish there was an easier way of copying facegen data within the CK. *Sigh* :(

 

 

EDIT: A slightly earlier version of my mod seems to still be suffering from dark faces, even using the head-copying technique. Perhaps if I can figure out exactly what is making the working version, you know... work... it would help narrow down what is causing the dark head problem.

Edited April 21, 2012 by Gawdzila