Tutorials on sculpting a new face mesh?

[SailorTaurus]

Could anyone point me towards a tutorial for creating new head meshes (based on the original mesh of course)? I'd like to have a go at altering, say, the Khajiit face mesh in something like Mudbox or Zbrush and then importing it back into the game as a replacer. I've tried looking for one myself, but i'm not sure what search terms I should be using (I tried "Oblivion create new face", but instead I got "How to create a new race").

[DrakeTheDragon]

This is the only material towards the matter I could find so far, and I've done this with the Argonian head mesh to create my dragon heads:

http://tes.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=18566

 

Despite the name it covers far more than just eye morphs. ThrottleKitty is the only modder I'm aware of who succeeded in creating a "completely" new head mesh so far. All others are only reshapes, as far as I know.

 

Unfortunately, besides using the professional licensed Singular Inversion Face Gen Modeller things will get very tedious and convoluted.

You either preserve vertex count and order by all costs, then you can re-use the existing EGM and TRI files,

or you have to create a couple hundred meshes from scratch, one for each morph, that has then to be merged into completely new EGM and TRI files.

And I'm not saying "a couple hundred" only to make it sound big. There's the head mesh itself, the inner mouth mesh, the upper teeth, the lower teeth, the tongue, and the eyes, and all of these have around some 80 or so morphs each to be created and must be fitting together in all of them. Without the modeller those morphs are created from full meshes modelled as when the morph is applied to its fullest, and the game will then interpolate between this and the original shape.

 

I for one was really relieved when I finally succeeded with the "easy way" of just reshaping an existing mesh without breaking the morph files' applicability. That solution is rather easy in comparison and you just have to watch not to touch vertex count and order, as in import from/export to OBJ format only (option "preserve vertex order" checked), as NIF import/export already inevitably re-sorts the vertices and kills the correlation between mesh and morph files in the process.

 

I hope it helps and doesn't discourage you. There's a cause for why there are only very few custom head meshes. It's among the most tedious tasks of Oblivion modding still. :ermm:

 

But maybe my information is already outdated even and someone else will come along and tell you more. It's been quite a while since I last did it.