A Brief Guide on Porting Hair That Is Compatible with Hats

[DaelonVance]

Notice:

 

This is a short guide about how to port hair from existing meshes, and making the hair compatible with hats in the game. Basic understanding of Creation kit, Bethesda Archive Extractor, Outfit Studio, Nifskope and Blender are needed for this guide. There are far more comprehensive tutorials about these tools on the internet, please find them yourself.

 

Note that all of the findings was solely based on my own experience, and English is not my native language. If you need further instruction or you have more insight than I do, please feel free to ask or pointing us to a more constructive tutorial.

 

Concept:

 

Hairs in fallout 4 has 3 parts: Hair Top, Hair Long and Hairlines, the former two of which occupy Biped Slot 30 and Slot 31, respectively, while the latter seems to show when Slot 31 is not occupied by Hats. Hair Top and Hair Long are "in the same meshes", defined by "Segment" and "Segment Data". "Segment" can be defined by using Outfit Studio, while "Segment Data" need to be altered in Nifskope.

 

On the other hand, hats also occupy Biped Slot. These data can be altered by creation kit. This part should have plenty of information on the internet, but I will briefly explain this, nonetheless.

 

Instruction:

 

Needed tools: BAE, Outfit Studio, Nifskope and Blender. (The newest edition should do the trick.)

 

1. Use BAE and extract Fallout4 - Meshes.ba2.

Find and extract Meshes -> Actors -> Character -> CharacterAssets -> Hair -> Female (Male if you want Male hair).

 

2. Extract hats you want to use ingame. If you want the hair show in almost every vanilla hat, I suggest using Military cap and Dirty Fedora as reference.

 

3. Port the hair mesh you want to show without hats into Outfit Studio (.Nif or .obj). Right click the layer under the "Meshes" category on the right, and select "Move". Change Z position to a fixed number (I usually choose 25)

 

4. Port the hair mesh you want to show with hats, then port the hat you just extracted from Step 2. Tune the hair mesh until it fits perfectly with the hat.

 

5. Remove the hat layer, and export the whole project in format .Nif.

 

6. Open Nifskope. Port the Nif file you just created, and export the mesh in .Obj (Outfit Studio would lose a small portion of vertices point sometimes.).

 

7. Port the .Obj file into Blender. LSHift + LMB every mesh and Ctrl + J to join all the meshes into single mesh. Export the file in .Obj.

 

8. Import the file into Outfit Studio. De-scale it into 0.1, and apply the material by choosing "properties" when right-clicking the mesh in Meshes category.

 

9. Click on "Segment" category. By default there should be Segment #0 to Segment # 3. Delete the latter two segments, right-click on Segment #1 and select add Sub-segment. Make two Sub-segment. Mask the Hair Top with Sub-segment #0, and Mask Hair Long with Sub-segment #1. Click Apply.

 

10. Return to Meshes Category. Select "Mask tool" and mask Hair Long completely. Move the Hair Top back to the original location.

 

11. Port vanilla hair mesh that resemble the new hairstyle the most. Set the vanilla mesh reference, right clicking custom mesh and select "Copy Bone Weight". Export the file without Reference in .Nif format.

 

11. Open the .Nif file in Nifskope. Choose category BSSubIndexTriShape, scrolling down Block Details and open "Segment Data" -> "Per Segment". There should be four "Per Segment" data category, and the latter two "Per Segment" should be what you are looking for. Open them, change "User Index" into "30" and "31" corresponding to their assigned sub-segment. If you are not sure which is which, see "Segment" section. The order should be exactly like what shown in "Segment" section.

 

12. Find every bits of data that is different from an Vanilla Mesh and change it correspondingly. Saves the file and place it into custom data files you recognize. (Example: Meshes -> Actors -> Character -> CharacterAssets -> Hair -> Female -> CustomHair)

 

Congrats! The mesh is ready for uses.

 

13. Open Creation Kit. Find a vanilla hair. Double-click the hair and change the FormID and Name into what you desired. Saves the changes into different object. Choose the meshes you just created and remove any object in window "Extra Parts".

 

14. Find the hat you wish to show your hair. De-select Biped Slot 31.

 

15. Saves and create a new plugin. Find that plugin in your game files and copy it into the custom data files "Data".

 

Optional: "Extra Parts" is the hairlines that hides gap between hair and head. It is not needed if those gap does not bother you.

 

16. Pack the whole files into Zip, 7zip or RAR. Profit!

 

 

 

I am not planning to make a tutorial with picture. That is just too time-consuming. If anyone is interested, please feel free to make a tutorial with information provided above.

 

 

I hope this guide is useful to you. Thank you for your patience!

 

 

Edited April 14, 2019 by DaelonVance