[Wipz] Better Headhuman Resources

[Sigurð Stormhand]

I'm announcing a new project, which for the moment I am calling "Better Headhuman Resources". The purpose of this project is to improve on the vanilla headhuman.nif, the associated tri and egm files, and the other mouth parts (mouth, tongue and teeth). I plan to eventually cover the vanilla head as well as popular mods like OCO and Ren's head.

The plan is currently as follows:

Part 1

A. Fix the UV error under the nose on headhuman.nif and improve the headhuman.tri to make mouth and eye movements ore natural and less rubbery - progress on this is pretty advanced. The main issue is disassembling tri file to edit the eye movements, then reassembling it. I have resisted doing this, but I finally cracked when I realised what was happening with the tear ducts. This will benefit custo races and vanilla races to varying degrees. What's more, because the tri files is shared with OCO and most other custom heads they will benefit as well.

B. New symmetrical merged tongue and mouth nif with new tri and egm files - subject to testing to make sure there's no clipping this is done!

C. New merged teeth with some of the lower teeth modelled individually, new vampire morphs for better differentiated (and multiple types of) fangs, probably also different teeth models for people who want fangs but don't want to be vampires. Mesh is in progress, need to do some ore work on it before generating and cleaning up the tri file.

D. Attempt some fixes to the EGT files for the head, mostly around preventing the beard from turning the whole body purple. I've looked and it seems like this *should* be possible. This will be different from other "improved" egt files that get around the issues with character creation by just removing layers. I'd like to try upscaling the egt files for the head, but because it contains so many layers this would only be useful for making new tint aps which would then need to be packed in a BSA. Generating tints from an upscaled egt at runtime would probably kill the game (packed it would be about 140MB).

Part 2

This is where things get a bit more interesting, as I'm going to attack OCO and some other mods, Many of the OCO meshes have errors that need correcting. They all have slightly miss-aligned necks, which is what causes the gapping with the mod installed. If that can be fixed it might allow for true seamless necks. A lot of the meshes have other issues, such as changes to the skull shape that cause gaps with the ears, or protruding vertices, general asymmetry etc. Oddly, from what I can tell there doesn't sea to be asymmetry in the normal maps, which suggests it was introduced after they were baked. Another thing OCO needs is narrower mouth and teeth for elves and female humans as the default one actually clips through the cheeks in some circumstances. This is why you occasionally see odd red lines around the mouth. Similar deal for Ren's head, which has major asymmetry.

Current plan is to get Part 1 A and B done and released in the next few months, then work on part 1 C before porting those improvements over to OCO and other heads. Then I plan to go back and work on Part 1 D separately as I expect it to take the longest.

So, watch this space - literally - I will be posting updates here.