Why bLoadFaceGenHeadEGTFiles=0 is dumb [image heavy]

[FiftyTifty]

Wee update. Older ImageMagick versions properly save the header, but egtpacker still refuses to compile the .egt file. So I've created a thread on LoversLab asking for help, as that community has the most experience with this sorta stuff. I'll continue to post any developments.

[FiftyTifty]

Great news, I found what the problem was. I somehow suffixed the .tga files with "_01". After removing that, they now pack properly. Now time for some info.

The game does not allow you to override .egt files from other archives, even with the JIP plugin installed and an accompanying .override file. However, the game does load .egt files from the first archive that has them. I replaced Fallout - Meshes.bsa with a custom one, where I copied over that Oblivion .egt file to overwrite New Vegas' vanilla .egt file. And it works.

What does that mean? .EGT files are not hardcoded into the game engine. We can actually modify them. To do this, make sure to use an older ImageMagick version when converting to and from .tga. I found that version 7.0.7-25 Q8 works properly.

Now we actually know how to tackle the fucked up face textures. Better yet, we know which ones to modify thanks to that OFF mod for Oblivion. I'll report back once I've fucked around some more.

Edit: Turns out that no tinkering was required. The EGT file from OFF works perfectly. I took the beard off of Lucas Simms, exported his facegen texture, and take a look at him now.



There's no horrible green/blue tinting all over his face.

I think we just fixed Facegen.

[RoyBatty]

So did you find any caveats with editing stuff? I won't do it until I know there is no issues at all.

The egt doesn't need to be overwritten, just need to generate the bodymod/facegen textures again with the new .egt

[FiftyTifty]

So did you find any caveats with editing stuff? I won't do it until I know there is no issues at all.

The egt doesn't need to be overwritten, just need to generate the bodymod/facegen textures again with the new .egt

The EGT will need to be overwritten for the player, and Dad, to also not have the horrific facegen blending. The sliders in the racemenu work just fine, and actually work on the parts of the face that should be affected. Better still, there's no buggy-looking tints since the colours were normalized. The next step would be to change the other body EGT layers to have the same tints, though that might be unnecessary. Only way to properly check is to have fixed neck normals but I don't know where to look for that.

Just finished exporting all the face textures, so I'm going to check NPCs out in-game. See if they look odd or not.

Edit: The EGT will also need to be supplied so all NPC mods can use the fixed tint layers, otherwise we'll see mods being made with the buggy vanilla tint layers.

Edit2: Did a quick run through for NPCs. They look much better, like actual people rather than burned toys: https://imgur.com/a/xDZ8yY6

Edit3: Noticed that Cindy in Rivet City still has some of that green tint: https://i.imgur.com/l2LdTiN.png

So female NPCs get the artifacting. Maybe there's another EGT file that I'm missing.

Edit4: Yup, they have their own egt file. Going to compare, maybe we can just copy over the male one as well.

Edit5: Copying the male one over and regenerating the facegen just works. https://i.imgur.com/zYbSuWs.jpg

[RoyBatty]

Can you take pics without ENB please.

[FiftyTifty]

Yup, here we go: https://imgur.com/a/EUVKS7B

[RoyBatty]

Awesome, now just need the face/body to match, great work!

[FiftyTifty]

Awesome, now just need the face/body to match, great work!

Yeah I've just taken a look at the body .egt files, and they have the same tinting as the head layers, though of course, they have a different UV layout. The thing is, they're literally 32x32 pixels. There's really no point to having anything other than a single colour for the entire layer. Like, here's the first layer at 100% resolution:



There's no detail. I'll experiment with replacing the layers, see what happens.

Edit: Well, the result was a mess. I made sure that only tint layers 0, 1, 11, and 26 had colour, with the rest of the body EGT layers being gray. The NPCs had rainbow-textured bodies since the blending was ruined by the missing colours.

Do you have head meshes with fixed parallel normals? I'd like to see how the modified face layers look with vanilla body layers., with the normals fixed for the neck vertices.

[RoyBatty]

I think you can test with junacc's stuff, but it's done with blender so they are going to be heavier on the game. There's someone else on the discord who's working on their own and fixing the armors.

I'll unban you, but you better not act like a twat again.

[Bottletopman]

This is looking wonderful...I don't suppose you can release the files as they currently stand? No idea if this is just a simple drag and drop to override vanilla files because I'd love to use this in my current game. If not I can wait for 3.3.