[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 more 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 custom 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.

[Sigurð Stormhand]

So, I've done some initial work and run into a couple of issues. The first issue is that Blender 2.29b no longer works with my GPU and updated AMD drivers, so I'm going to need to do some experimentation to come up with a workflow that uses just modern Blender to edit the full head morphs, including the eye modifiers (like blinking).

As far as the body/head junction goes, I have that down to ALMOST eliminating the physical seam in the mesh. There's a very, very, slight hairline gap. Less than with OCO, but it's still there. I'm going to continue to work on this and see if it can be fully eliminated. I think it SHOULD be possible, but we'll see. It depends on an exact match between egm, tri, and both nif files. As things stand, I can inspect the nif and tri files, but I can't do anything with the egm files as they won't export from Blender properly.

[Sigurð Stormhand]

OK, so I was able to hide the hairline crack by putting a "collar" around the body, but the miss-match is proving difficult to resolve. Even when I get a perfect match in Blender, tring to get that to repeat in game just seems to not work somehow. The original Seamless mod has the neck and the body overlap at the junction, and I think that fact of not actually being able to see the edge of either mesh is what makes it work. This is incredibly frustrating.

Stranger still, when I look at the head and body textures together in Blender there's a colour miss-match. This seems to be related to the way the game handles egt files, and it's very frustrating as it makes it very difficult to get a match with custom textures if you want to have a different skin tone.

In better news, I'm working through correcting OCO's various minor mesh defects (lack of symmetry, triangles poking out of faces), and I can do that without breaking the neck-seam, at least.

[Sigurð Stormhand]

So yeah, these are the "seamless" textures for Oblivion in Blender. I've dialled up the glossiness so you can see the normals are basically smooth. This head/neck combo works in-game, despite that miss-match in colour at the junction of the neck. It's apparently deliberate to compensate for facegen weirdness. That obviously makes it difficult to get a colour match with other custom textures, even if you can get the normal maps right.

 

[Sigurð Stormhand]

So, revised plan.

Push forward with A, B and Part 2 (fixing OCO head meshes). Once the vanilla and custom head meshes and mouth/tongue are done I will reassess and see what to do next. I have new teeth in progress, but honestly I could just do new normal maps for the existing teeth and fix the vampire morph is be less, absurd.

I can also fix the OCO textures under the nose, I think.

I guess EGT will have to come last.

I'm wondering if the answer here is to have one texture map for head and body. That could be done by merging together the EGT and making it rectangular. Kinda terrible for compatibility, though. I think I'll put a pin in that.