Export NPC Face Textures

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Link to TES4 Construction Set Wiki: Export NPC Face Textures

Export NPC Face Textures appears in the Character dropdown menu.

Purpose[edit | edit source]

Newly added NPCs in Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas will normally have mismatches between their body textures and their facial textures. Although this can usually be corrected by setting

bLoadFaceGenHeadEGTFiles=1

in Fallout.ini under the [General] section on the end user's PC, it can still occur that NPC textures will fail to generate — especially with ESPs rather than ESMs. This results in severely uncanny mismatches between faces and bodies; the faces will take on the colour specified by the mod author, but the rest of the body will use a default colour (usually Caucasian), which can result in very odd mismatches between face and body, especially when the actor is of a race with a significantly different base skin tone.

The base game solves this by generating NPC face textures for all NPCs in the game using Export NPC Face Textures, and then saving this data into the BSA.

This feature, however, is nearly useless for mod authors, because it will quite literally generate all NPCs from all loaded master files — including FalloutNV.esm. This process can take upwards of several hours, and is very redundant as most of this data has already been generated.

Generating Mod-Specific Face Textures[edit | edit source]

To generate textures only for the NPCs added by a specific mod, you may employ an undocumented method to generate the textures for specific NPCs. This is very quick — usually taking no more than a few seconds.

  1. If the mod is not already an ESM, it must be converted to an ESM due to a limitation in the GECK. You will need to enable the mod's ESM flag by using Wrye Bash or FNVEdit, or another similar utility.
    • In FNVEdit, load the plugin, select the File Header, and right-click on the "Record Flags" near the top. Tick "ESM". Then save the plugin.
    • In Wrye Bash, right-click on the plugin and choose "ESMify".
  2. Load the GECK and load your plugin.
  3. Select all NPCs added by the mod.
  4. Press Ctrl+F4 on the keyboard. A message box should pop up in short order saying "Done!"
  5. You may close the GECK without saving — you do not need to save the plugin in the GECK unless you made any other changes.
  6. If you had flagged the ESP as an ESM and want to distribute your mod as an ESP, you should reverse the ESMify process.
    • In FNVEdit, repeat the same steps as in 1, above.
    • In Wrye Bash, right-click on the plugin and choose "ESPify".

After following these steps, the mod's body textures and facial textures will have been exported to the following folders:

Data\textures\characters\BodyMods\yourespname.esp\ (or .esm)
Data\textures\characters\FaceMods\yourespname.esp\ (or .esm)

If you had renamed the file (e.g., if using Wrye Bash) to .esm but will distribute the plugin as an ESP, be sure to rename the folders to be .esp rather than .esm. Be sure to distribute these files along your mod so that your NPCs will always have perfect textures regardless of whether the end user has made any edits to their INI files.