How might I go about permanently changing player head scale?

[Asterra]

I'll be tackling this one until I have a solution. Reason being I've decided my character is a bit shorter than the game's NPCs, being that she's female with Small Frame. It's already a little odd that females and males are exactly the same height throughout the whole game. Anyway, I know you can get this partially achieved with SetScale, and I long since set up a mod to ensure that, along with an appropriate change to character speed so they don't travel slowly.

 

Of course the problem with SetScale is that it scales everything, and human heads don't work that way. Shorter people still need a human-sized brain. Frankly speaking, my character ends up looking bizarre, like she has microcephaly. She's not shorter; she's miniaturized. It's going to be fixed.

 

An in-game solution would have been nice. SetNifBlockScale works perfectly, until you un-pause the game and their head reverts to 1.0 scale instantly. Even using this function every frame produces no result—evidently the mere act of being animated is enough to revert what this function sets.

 

I've plugged away a little bit with NifSkope but I certainly don't know what the game wants from me. It always feels like no matter how crazy I get with my edits to nodes and whatnot, the game ignores it.

 

I think this could probably be done with a change to the skeleton. I also think you can see the problem with that idea. You don't get to define the skeleton file in the race data. Every humanoid in the game uses the same skeleton, including the player character.

 

I'll leave it at that. Somebody knows how this can get done, I'm sure. Help would be appreciated.

Edited March 12, 2020 by Asterra

[madmongo]

Human heads actually do scale with your height. Google florida volleyball alabama cheerleader and you'll find a picture of a volleyball player who is 6'8" standing next to a cheerleader who is 4'8". The proportions scale, including the head. It's also kind of a funny pic.

 

Children have proportionally large heads for their size, and someone afflicted with dwarfism will also have a proportionally larger head, and will also have proportionally shorter arms and legs. Making shorter arms and legs gets problematic since you'd need a different skeleton, which the game doesn't really support.

 

For larger heads, the way the game does it for the child races is they use a different head mesh. This isn't something that you can scale up in nifskope. You need a 3d modeling program like blender or 3dsmax so that you can scale most of the mesh up while leaving the neck seam where it is so that your head attaches to your body mesh correctly. You can then create a custom race in the GECK that uses your custom head mesh. Note that you will also need to scale up the eye, teeth, mouth, tongue, and any hair meshes you want to use, otherwise those parts won't line up with your new head.

 

For a non-modeling approach, you might try making the character's face wide and giving them a larger forehead, then play around with other face proportions. You'll be a lot more limited with this than what you can do creating a new head model, but if you don't need the head too big you might be able to get close to what you want.

Edited March 12, 2020 by madmongo

[Asterra]

For larger heads, the way the game does it for the child races is they use a different head mesh. This isn't something that you can scale up in nifskope. You need a 3d modeling program like blender or 3dsmax so that you can scale most of the mesh up while leaving the neck seam where it is so that your head attaches to your body mesh correctly. You can then create a custom race in the GECK that uses your custom head mesh. Note that you will also need to scale up the eye, teeth, mouth, tongue, and any hair meshes you want to use, otherwise those parts won't line up with your new head.

 

I figured it would be something like this. Also far outside my scope of know-how. It's almost high irony that I could easily get this done in Skyrim's RaceMenu as its (very intuitive) processes are aimed directly at this sort of manipulation, and yet achieving the same thing in a more robust modeling app would require either an exacting tutorial or a high level of understanding of the app.