Does the last sentence mean that he's changing vanilla NPCs too? I thought he added those beards only to his own druids. Now that would be pretty cool!
(Wouldn't stop me from trying stuff myself, of course.)

Additionally to the styles Hel Borne posted, I found http://wondermark.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/endpapers.jpg
Apart from the long beards and the oriental styles, I would love to see such beards as resources...

Yes, WAC TCOS.esp also changes large number of vanilla NPCs. That NPC includes Real swords, mage equipment, Real swords blacksmiths, and bunch of stuff.

I'll pass that along.

If the resources from WAC can be used I'd say you have tons of meshes to play with.

Just want to hop in and say that beards add lots of character, which Oblivion's (non-)player characters definitely need. Support the idea!

Hail the beards.

WAC resources can't be used. :/
Anybody thought of an equipable item that fits into one of the freed face slots? NPCs would wear it if they have it, so it would be a LL issue, and all we'd have to control is they get the apropiate colour, leaving the shape in random

I made the beards as low poly as possible so they would not rob frame rate. I'm not a huge fan of mesh smooth because it adds unneeded polygons. The proper way to do it would be to simply use max's cut tool and cut polygons to match the original face meshes... but come to think of it, if I remember right, I cloned the beth face in max to start with, then extruded it into a beard shape, so the topology of the beard mesh SHOULD match the face deformations pretty closely as is. But without conforming them and testing it, its hard to say what it would look like.

I'm too deep in my Unholy Darkness vampire overhaul to actually work on beards again at this point, but I'd like to see someone do something further with it. As for tail slot and additem, I was referring to NPCs only. I don't think that many mods use tail slots for NPCs and that would be a way to add beards to them with zero conflicts. Of course the drawback with that is, the beards would not match their hair color but I provided the basics in my beard SDK to cover most common beard colors anyway. Can teeth slot items be made to match the hair color of the NPC? Do you just use the hair texture and it will automatically match the NPC's hair I wonder?

Just needs to have enough polys to not crimp into sharp corners when the mouth morphs. You may have enough now. As far as polycount goes I don't think you could hurt the game even if you cranked it up to 2500+ (not that its needed).

Yeah. Tail slot would work for NPCs. As far as I know only hair can use the color sliders for hair. Beards are ussually a different color/texture than other hair anyway. I don't see that as an issue personally.

Whatever you do, do not give any hostile NPCs a Chuck Norris beard. There are enough fists flying at me as it is!

Well http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXjKpcIiQlM worked OK.



If I remember correctly the tail slot doesn't work on conformulated stuff. Conformulated meshes only work on face parts, hair and helmets and it will only animate while talking with the face parts. That's why I created the merged teeth/mouth meshes.

But it's all in one huge .esm so you can make your mod dependent on WAC.

Aye, I've made it a master of my beautyfication mod, works perfectly.

Not terribly on topic, but when I read the title and subtitle for this thread, I end up thinking of http://scientologytalk1.ytmnd.com/.

I once tried to do something via a script that would apply a change to all female NPCs and failed. Any clues as to how I would go about scripting on the game load block as you mentioned above?

Thanks for any tips.

You can check out script in my mod Nine Divines Robes and modify it for your needs. Requires OBSE.

Many thanks for responding - will take a look

Edit:
Took a look and if I understood it correctly, it will only take action as the PC goes from cell to cell rather than doing a blanket change at the beginning of the game. Have I understood this correctly?

It was never a question if your beards moved with the mouth, was it? :huh: They do that just fine, as scanti's video shows.
My problem with the beard meshes is this: http://img404.imageshack.us/img404/8163/beards.jpg
First, the "mustache" part of each beard stands out too much, which makes it look very bushy. It also looks like this isn't actually intended, because the beard also gets transparent at the lower side of the mustache, which makes it seem like this part should actually be hidden behind the skin.
Second, the "circle beard" looks like it was made for a much bigger head. It clearly does not fit the Oblivion head very well. I've made a comparison in GIMP: http://img251.imageshack.us/img251/4249/beards2.jpg - all I did for the second picture was to cut the beard from the original picture and paste it on a slightly bigger picture. I think you can see that it fits the second head much better.
(These are all conformulated meshes, by the way.)


I'd like to point out that the tradeoff has always been "zero conflicts" versus "beards that move with the mouth". This is not a new discovery, and if I'm not mistaken, nothing has changed about that.
And this thread is mainly about concepts that have the beard move with the mouth, because I think that especially finer beards (like small mustaches etc.) will look very bad if they don't move correctly - with your big bushy beards, that isn't such a problem, but I'm still hoping for beards that maybe Dunmer/Bosmer/Altmer can use, and these wouldn't be as big and bushy, probably.

One thing about "zero conflicts": I think the Dwemer Spectacles Equip mod uses the tail slot for its spectacles. So we'd trade spectacles against beards, instead of having both. I'm not sure I'd like that idea.

I'm currently working on a small mod that uses the various beards of Hel Borne and madmole. By making new races for each (sensible) race, beard and color combination. I guess when I've got something to show, I'll upload it. That way, everyone can try out a mod that was made with that approach, and we have a better base for this discussion.
Also, it might encourage modelers to start working on some additional beards... :angel:

Yes, that's correct. But how else could you do it?

Unless you want to set up bunch of manual work.

Whatever you do remember that Lord Sheogorath has a problem with anyone else wearing a beard in his realm. http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Shivering%3a%44eath_Decree#Death_Decree

Don't get the player executed in SI!

Alright, I've made a proof-of-concept mod to demonstrate what is possible. If you're interested, please try it out and post your feedback.
I'll continue work on this if time permits and if I can get some more beards to work with, but other people should feel encouraged (word of the thread, eh?) to try their own versions too.

http://tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=30140

Nice

I had to use alpha to end the beard & mustache realistically. Hair doesn't roll back down and into your lip mesh, it grows out so the proper way is how I did it, which is how any artist paints hair. I made the beards to fit a default head mesh with zero changes to the mesh. I'm not sure what textures your using in those screenshots but they don't look anything like what I made. Under the usage guidelines I provided, they should look nice, as in these screens:

http://i113.photobucket.com/albums/n206/madmole_2006/goatee01.jpg
http://i113.photobucket.com/albums/n206/madmole_2006/beard08.jpg
http://i113.photobucket.com/albums/n206/madmole_2006/vikingbeard01.jpg

Notice the nose in this one:
http://i113.photobucket.com/albums/n206/madmole_2006/beard09.jpg

If the beard polygons on the edges were completely flush with the face, you would get clipping like the nose of that all over. I haven't seen scanti's video... do you have a link?

I was going to use a mustache as a resource, but to my dismay, it was connected to a goatee!
If somone could take the moustache from the French Beard and make it seperate for me, I would be very happy and thankful.

The link is in Scanti's post on page 2.

Yeah that looks great! Good to see my beards deformed good. I figured they would since I based them on the face topology.


I'd use getnextref to scan the area, filter out the NPC's you want to modify, and then stick a token into them if they do not have a token already. Then token will have a script that adds an item (beard, etc) to the NPC, and equips it.

Another way to do it would be to just run a quest script that adds the item (or the token) to the NPC's inventory and then shuts itself down. that would probably be the best solution so your not running getnextref all the time.

madmole - Sorry if I sounded rude on that comment above. I honestly thought these things I listed were related to the fact that there was no Conformulator around back when you made the meshes.
There are different ways to look at a low-poly mesh; where you might see a beard rolling back into the skin, I'd see a low-poly mesh of a very bushy, yet trimmed mustache, where the upper and lower stubbles are shorter than the ones in the middle. In that sense, the "proper" way to do a beard mesh might differ depending on the artist's interpretation of what he is seeing. (Basically, if two artists have the same high-poly model in front of them and are supposed to make a low-poly model of it, their results may look very different because they focused on different things.)

I've used the textures from your Beards SDK for my mod. Some of the ugly transitions you see in that screenshot are caused by the Construction Set's way of showing alpha channels, so they don't appear in the game like that - it actually looks very similar to your screenshots. Some transitions don't look as nice, but that is probably because the beard is conformulated and therefore very close to the head mesh, so that some minor clipping might happen.