How to add phoneme mapping to a custom mesh actor

[muppetpuppet]

Anybody have any clue how to add phoneme morphs to a race, is it a lst of separate meshes . Is it even possible to mod, has it been done for oblivion?

 

Anybody. ,

[Thandal]

Moved to the appropriate game subforum. :armscrossed:

[DrakeTheDragon]

Well, let's say it's a little... complex to create a custom head mesh from scratch with working FaceGen shape morphs (EGM files) and facial animations (TRI files).

You could license the use of the commercial Singular Immersion FaceGen Modeller tool, but that's rather expensive and likely not the way to go just for a hobby.

 

Due to insufficient im- and export support for modeling apps (Blender NIF Scripts can only im- and export EGM files, from and to Blender morph keys, if I'm not mistaken, but sadly no TRI files, yet), the only method left involves working with a bunch of OBJ files, one for each morph the game requires, each being a complete head mesh of its own just with the respective morph applied to its fullest, and making absolutely sure the vertex count and order does never change from OBJ to OBJ, as the morphs inside the EGM and TRI files are stored as 3D offsets "per vertex", referenced by its vertex index. Alter count and or order of vertices in one OBJ by accident and the resulting morph offsets will affect the wrong vertices... in the best case just making your head mesh literally "explode" into a huge cloud of polygones when opening the mouth, for example... I've had that happen to me once, and while it was 'looking' funny, it wasn't funny at all anymore having to deal with it in the aftermath. In the worst case the game will just crash, because the number of vertices addressed in the EGM or TRI files doesn't match the number of vertices in the head's NIF file. So, maintaining vertex count and order is paramount, and importing or exporting from or to NIF directly will always "sort" the vertices and screw up your precious order into randomness. Thus we're using OBJ, with the import/export option to "preserve vertex order".

 

The complex and "tedious" part is coming from the fact there are about 80 or so morphs you need to create to end up with fully working EGM and TRI files, and there are the head mesh itself, the inner mouth mesh, the upper teeth, lower teeth, tongue, the eyes, two of them, and some heads also have ears, and these can be animated, too... and most important of it all, everyone of these has to morph in unison with the rest or you will end up with for example your teeth going down further than your chin and clipping horribly through your head when talking or something. You won't have to do every morph for every of those meshes though, as rolling your eyes has no effect on say your tongue, and as such you can leave away some of the morphs in some of the meshes TRI files. But still, how many complete-yet-quite-differently-shaped meshes you have to create does this make now? Quite a lot. Thus I call it "tedious".

 

The best reference and tutorial to the task you can likely get is this one from ThrottleKitty:

Adding Eye Morphs to FaceGen Files

Don't let the name confuse you. It covers the basics of the whole task in general, like all the background info I wrote above, goes far beyond just Eye Morphs, and comes with a complete set of very handy Scanti's tools, likely the only source of tools to the task by a 3rd party and available for free.

 

ThrottleKitty and Scanti are the only ones I know who know all about this task, and ThrottleKitty is the only one I know of who has succeeded in creating a completely new head mesh from scratch, the famous Head06 resource. Haven't seen many others which weren't just simple "reshapes" of existing working head meshes while keeping the existing morphs intact so there is no need to create new EGM and TRI files from scratch.

For the records, my custom dragon head mesh only is such a reshape from the Argonian head mesh, too. I never had to do new morph files and saved a lot of work... taking the easy route you could say.

 

I hope this helps.

[muppetpuppet]

excellent.. that is a great help, its for the sload npc mesh i made for the moonpath,, now its just standing there during the dialogue. so i'm thinking of adding 4 or 5 meshes and using them for all the phonemes,, it doesn't need to be realistic seeing as the sload are just bug old slugs.. so any movement is an upgrade.. sad thing is i'll have to fix it to a facegen wich sux.. was hoping just to morph the entire thing..