Facegen File Formats

[RabidGears]

I came across this page on the Facegen site years ago that details the formats of the files used by facegen (.TRI, .EGM, .EGT, etc.):

https://facegen.com/dl/sdk/doc/manual/fileformats.html

I've always assumed that it must have been known about by the community, but I've never seen any mention of it when I've been searching for stuff related to those formats. From poking around in the source of some of the import/export plugins for these formats it looks more like they were reverse engineering the files instead of going off the spec sheet. I'm probably wrong, but anyway, it can't hurt to draw attention to it for anyone who doesn't know about it.

[SkyLover]

I think the reason nobody talks about it is because the game stores facegen in its standard mesh and texture file types, so most modders haven't directly interacted with the facegen file types. Case in point, I've only ever seen .tri files when looking at custom body replacers with custom morphs.

[Sigurð Stormhand]

Nice find, though I'm not sure what we can do with it. EGM and TRI files become relevant if you're working with custom face parts or helmets etc. that deform.

[RabidGears]

16 hours ago, Sigurð Stormhand said:

Nice find, though I'm not sure what we can do with it. EGM and TRI files become relevant if you're working with custom face parts or helmets etc. that deform.

I'm not claiming that this is super useful to most modders. I was mainly thinking of anyone writing a plugin or other tool for them. The average modder doesn't need to know about the inner workings of these files. It's really only something that would interest a programmer.

 

On 10/21/2022 at 5:23 PM, SkyLover said:

Case in point, I've only ever seen .tri files when looking at custom body replacers with custom morphs.

.TRIs are used for anything to do with character heads that need to morph like faces, ears, noses, hair, beards, helmets, facial animations, etc.

I know that it's not very common for most mods to use those files, and writing tools/plugins is very a niche area of modding.

 

[VanishingInsect]

I know this topic's old (and I apologize in advance if this counts as necro'ing), but I'd actually like to learn more about .EGM and .EGT files for a personal modding project. Unfortunately I haven't found much in the way of documentation for working with these formats for mod creation. The only resource I know of is Scanti's conformulator which I have no doubt it's a great tool, but I like being able to actually work with the files (there's a .tri import plugin for blender 2.49b, and for more recent versions of blender, there's PyNifly which even has an .hkx plugin bundled with it--it's probably still in the experimental stages however. Back to the .tri import/export plugin, it was great because now I could see what made a .tri file "tick". I learned that it contained a bunch of shapekeys and now I could create my own or easily edit existing .tri files).

 

[Sigurð Stormhand]

22 hours ago, VanishingInsect said:

I know this topic's old (and I apologize in advance if this counts as necro'ing), but I'd actually like to learn more about .EGM and .EGT files for a personal modding project. Unfortunately I haven't found much in the way of documentation for working with these formats for mod creation. The only resource I know of is Scanti's conformulator which I have no doubt it's a great tool, but I like being able to actually work with the files (there's a .tri import plugin for blender 2.49b, and for more recent versions of blender, there's PyNifly which even has an .hkx plugin bundled with it--it's probably still in the experimental stages however. Back to the .tri import/export plugin, it was great because now I could see what made a .tri file "tick". I learned that it contained a bunch of shapekeys and now I could create my own or easily edit existing .tri files).

 

Hi,

First off, don't worry about the necro'ing. We don't care about that with tool threads.

 

Essential question - which game are you modding?

[VanishingInsect]

I'm going to be working with the original oblivion.

[Sigurð Stormhand]

Apologies for the delayed response. It sounds like you've found most of the info already.

The reason I asked is because there's a fundamental difference in the way Oblivion and Fallout 3/NV do facial animations. Starting with the original version of Skyrim, Bethesda retired egm fiiles, and also changed the way face morphs work.

In addition to Oblivion having the egm file to control the face shape morph, it also uses two different types of morph for expressions in the tri file. It uses "relative" morphs for expressions and lip sync, but "absolute" morphs for eye movements like blinking or squinting. Unfortunately, PyNifly imports Oblivion Tri files as though they are Skyrim ones, ignoring the different morph types. 

As far as egm files go, currently we can't edit them in Blender. You can import them into Blender, but export always produces an unusable output that either crashes the game or causes the headpart to be invisible. I don't know why this happens, Scanti was the one who implemented egm support into the original Blender nifScripts that the plugin inherited, but afaik, they've never worked.

So, what can we do?

Basically, you can use Scanti's Conformulator to create new egm and tri files, and then check the output of the egm files and also edit the tri files in Blender 2.49b. The Blender tri import/export scripts are usually reliable, later versions seem to have scaling issues with Oblivion, I don't know what the issue is.

The difficulty is eye morphs, the Conformulator doesn't read them, and although the tri plugin can import and export them, editing them produces unpredictable results and often results in a corrupted tri file. You need to add the eye morphs separately, there are couple of ways:

This is the original way, by ThottleKitty: https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/18566

There's also Triton: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/21545?tab=description

Face mix is probably the easiest way to add eye morphs, though: https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/35037

According to the author of this mod, there's a way to edit egm files using FaceMix: https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/51090, it's described in their downloadable project file.

Personally, I've managed to edit mouth, teeth, and main head meshes so far. I've experimented with replacing eye morphs with faceMix, but I haven't completely re-done them for my projects yet.

Hope that helps!