Why bLoadFaceGenHeadEGTFiles=0 is dumb [image heavy]

[Lyndi]

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.

He already has.

viewtopic.php?f=55&t=8670

[Bottletopman]

ooooh thanks! Guess I was searching for the wrong text

[FiftyTifty]

Wee update. I tried changing the face tint layers to have the same RGB colour as the centre of the body tint layers. There were only four to change, but it didn't, err, come out too well. So the layer colours and indices, for the body and head, aren't indexed and/or used 1:1. Ended getting blue faced African American NPCs.

Which mesh has the fucky normals around the neck? The body meshes, or the head mesh? Knowing Bethesda, it'll be both.

Edit: Loaded up an outfit that exposes the neckline, and headhuman.nif. The normals are all over the place, the head mesh having the more wonky normals of the two: https://i.imgur.com/RJgkOcS.png

The green lines are the normals for the outfit's neck, and the blue lines are the normals for the head mesh. The blue lines look much more random and inconsistent. What we need, is for the green and blue normals to be the same.

There is also another issue. The vertices for the neck don't line up together, and instead clip through: https://i.imgur.com/lrzwOMs.png

The red are the polygons that are part of the outfit. You can see them clip into the polygons of the head mesh. There are two options to fix this. Either edit each and every outfit for both genders, or edit the head .nif and each .tri mesh variant.

Either way, it's going to be a shit ton of work.

[RoyBatty]

You'll have to edit the head normals in nifskope, you can't change the vertex order or all EGMs will break and crash the game. There's not the many vertices so I suppose you could fix it, then copy/paste them manually one at a time to avoid re-ordering.

Yeah the outfits are going to literally take forever and no one who wants to do them has 3ds max or uses it. So the exports affect frame rate even more than vanilla ones which is completely undesirable.

[FiftyTifty]

Did a wee bit of digging. The way that the modder for Oblivion found the right colour to use for the flood-filled tint layers, was to take the centre colour for the same layers in body.egt. So I think the head and torso colours are going to match up as good as they can get at the moment.

Editing the .egt files is a bit too much though, as I can't find any proper workflow for editing them.

[FiftyTifty]

I tested out Junkacc's Type4 body replacer by replacing it's .egt files, as it has fixed normals. While Caucasian characters have no neck-seam and fixed face colours, African American characters still have a stark contrast between the head and body's colours.

SpoilerShow

So the .egt file needs a couple layers tweaked. Trick is, which ones?

[RoyBatty]

they still look a bit off, too light.

[Kurt91]

I actually have 3DS Max, under the free student license. I've never used NifSkope, though, so I don't have the first idea what I would be doing to fix the normals. I did a quick look online and didn't see anything to explain how to do that. That's probably the only thing I would use NifSkope for, to be honest.

Is the process something difficult, or just a bunch of mindless instructions that nothing but time-consuming? I'm not saying that I'm volunteering for the job, but I do plan on doing one last TTW run once the new version comes out. I figure if I fix the things I come across in-game as I encounter them, then I could always post the fixed collection of files I've put together by the time I finish. I mean, a slow and steady pace rather than try to do all of them at once doesn't seem to bad, but like I said, I haven't the foggiest idea where to start right now.

[FiftyTifty]

I actually have 3DS Max, under the free student license. I've never used NifSkope, though, so I don't have the first idea what I would be doing to fix the normals. I did a quick look online and didn't see anything to explain how to do that. That's probably the only thing I would use NifSkope for, to be honest.

Is the process something difficult, or just a bunch of mindless instructions that nothing but time-consuming? I'm not saying that I'm volunteering for the job, but I do plan on doing one last TTW run once the new version comes out. I figure if I fix the things I come across in-game as I encounter them, then I could always post the fixed collection of files I've put together by the time I finish. I mean, a slow and steady pace rather than try to do all of them at once doesn't seem to bad, but like I said, I haven't the foggiest idea where to start right now.

It's very tedious. You'd need to copy the normals from the edge of the head's mesh, to the neck-area of every outfit that shows that part of the body. It's doable, just absolutely boring and would take a while.

[RoyBatty]

And most of the outfits have a multitude of issues that need fixing, so that's why no one has taken it on. Just having better face textures is good enough I think.