Problems with Material Swaps for custom head meshes.

[RatB0Y68]

I've been having a problem recently. I just discovered that my material swaps for my custom companion's head aren't working. I can't get my companion to use her custom face textures.

This is what I've tried:

 

- I've created a texture set entry pointing to the custom textures, then edited the companion's head part so it is set to use that texture set.

 

- I've created a material file also pointing to the custom textures, then set the companion's head mesh to use that material file.

 

- I've created a material swap entry that switches the vanilla head material file for my own custom one, then set the companion's head mesh to use that swap.

 

All of these approaches, either on their own or in combination, have failed to work: my companion inevitably uses whatever's in the default vanilla directory. I only noticed this problem recently as I use the same face textures for my companions as my player character, which concealed the issue. I've also found that I have this same problem with hair parts.

 

As far as I can tell, the only head part that I have working is the 'headrear' part, which uses a material swap for the vanilla head rear mesh. My custom companion uses a high poly head mesh in it's own directory.

If this were Skyrim SE, I would not be having this problem. All my Skyrim companions properly use their standalone head textures and many even have standalone meshes.

 

Any advice would be appreciated.

 

 

[Thirdstorm]

Face Textures and Nif headparts can be a huge pain for Fallout 4, so don't get too frustrated!

 

Question(s):

-Custom Race or Vanilla?

 

-Did you add the face textures and headparts to the race record?

If you didn't you might need to, and I suggest creating a new race if you need to add them to avoid conflicts, you can make a new race that references humans for all armor records with little trouble.

 

-Did you export the FaceGeometry data for your NPC?

If you did, the exported FaceGeometry data does not include Material files, just the hard texture paths and lighting data.

Check out your unpacked files (Data\Meshes\Actors\Character\FaceGenData\FaceGeom\Fallout4.esm)

[RatB0Y68]

Vanilla race, yes to all. Still didn't work.

 

However, I've already discovered the real problem. It's the face morphs. The various nose, eye, ear and mouth shapes use the vanilla face texture sets (that's why each face part has multiple variants, one for each face texture), so regardless of which custom textures the base head uses, the vanilla face morphs override respective areas with the vanilla face texture.

 

The solution is to create custom face morphs for each category that point to the specific textures you wish to use. However, unless you also create a custom race, you would need to edit the base human race to add these records.