Wearable Ears Textures Issue for Custom Race

[lovender]

Anybody know what's the cause of this kind of issue?

It happens to custom race player...

It has no problem if equipped by vanilla race.

I always include ears (using ears mesh from removable ears mod) in the helmet & in the wig mesh.

In the nifskope the ear textures looks like the pic on the left.

But when in game, the pic on the right is when equipped by custom race.

It looks like displaying the textures of footmale.dds in characters\imperial\male folder.

The path in the CS / TES4Edit is already correct I believe:

If it correspond to archive invalidation, I did it twice; once manually and once again this afternoon using OBMM,

and the body textures for my custom race has no problem.

But for the wearable ears, the issue still occurs.

Anybody can give solution?

Edited May 30, 2020 by lovender

[DrakeTheDragon]

Hmm, this whole setup only has an effect on the ears that automatically show when not hidden by helmets or wigs. It has no effect at all on ear meshes inside helmet or wig NIFs. Those are solely controlled by what's set up inside the NIF itself.

 

You say the ears look alright when worn by non-custom, Vanilla races? What body/body mod are you using, if any?

 

I'm trying to get a hold of the Vanilla ears NIFs to take a look inside, but this'll anyways be useless, if your ear meshes come from somewhere else and the setup inside your helmets or wigs with ears is different than what I will find. That's what we'll need here to get down to this, the properties and settings of the NiTriShape or -Strips block inside your NIFs.

 

edit: No, as I expected the Vanilla ears I found make no sense. They can't have been the ones used with their settings as is, else you won't have changing texture with different race.

[lovender]

You say the ears look alright when worn by non-custom, Vanilla races? What body/body mod are you using, if any?

For the male I use Robert's, the female I use DMRA.

But only when I become the custom race then the wearable ears textures has an issue like that...

 

edit: No, as I expected the Vanilla ears I found make no sense. They can't have been the ones used with their settings as is, else you won't have changing texture with different race.

Yes, vanilla ears have morph feature or something like that to follow the character's head size. So I don't use that.

But I cannot upload nif file here...I think it's forbidden in Nexus.

Anyway, the ears meshes I used is the same from Fall Hair Wig Shop mod.

I tried to wear wearable ears from Apachii Goddess Store and the textures issue is the same.

 

 

[lovender]

Found solution from my best friend...

 

The ears now looks the same like in NifSkope:

I think setting the NiMaterialProperty skin in the Nifskope (as in Fall Hair Wig Shop, Apachii Goddess Store, etc) is the cause.

Vanila ears textures path is facegen\ears\human\EarsHuman.dds

Maybe custom races need ear textures in the facegen folder, so if the game does not find a texture in that folder, it uses the footmale.dds textures for wearable ears.

I tested in game, that changing the NiMaterialProperty to default is enough to fix the issue.

So maybe we can make conclusion: NiMaterialProperty skin is just for lowerbody, upperbody, hand, foot meshes?

And hopefully all the modders that include wearable ears in their mod know this important information.

Problem SOLVED then.

Edited June 2, 2020 by lovender

[DrakeTheDragon]

Sorry for the late reply. I wasn't able to visit any non-work-related website since the weekend.

 

Yes, of course, the material property is what I suspected as well. There's a, on the one hand nice and on the other sometimes bothering, ruleset in play with how body parts work and what makes a mesh in a NIF an actual skin-ed body part.

 

When the material says "skin", no matter what properties, and the "name" of the NiTriShape/Strips node is one of "upperbody"/"arms", "lowerbody"/"legs", "hand", "foot" or "tail", then the game considers it an actual body part, even if it's inside a clothing item, will use the texture slot from the current race settings according to the name (thus I grouped the multiples) and override any and all material properties with the shade settings done in CharGen/FaceGen. It will also ignore any texture settings in the NIF, but still the textures referred to there "must" exist or missing texture errors will ensue regardless of the override.

 

It's no surprise the ears didn't work on a custom race, when for example they were set up to use a specific slot texture of the current race like explained above and the texture in the slot was surprisingly fitting, while the custom race had no fitting texture assigned to that slot but the "footmale"/"footfemale" one.

Though for all specifics I'll have yet to take a look at the NIFs concerned as coming from the mentioned mod. Though I know of no way to set a mesh up so it uses a different "ear" texture for different races. Now that your's are no longer material "skin", they also won't adapt to race, skin tint or color anymore.