I have no experience with meshes and the like, so I've come here to see if one of you with some experience can do something for me (or at least point me in the right direction). I want all of the humans, AKA Breton, Imperial, Nord, and Redguard races to sport pointed, elven ears. I'm aware this wouldn't be lore friendly, but I want to give the characters of those races a more outlandish look, because as it is, those races are all rather ordinary in comparison to the wonderful fantasy setting around them. And perhaps I'm also a fan of pointed ears. Meh.

Again, if someone could point me in the right direction (or outright do it for me) I'd really appreciate it.

Play an elf ;P

If Skyrim's ears are the same as Oblivion's (and I have not checked to see, so this may not be relevant), then ears are their own meshes apart from the heads. It could be as simple as copying the elf ears and giving them the human filenames, though it might look odd if they're not properly aligned or what-have-you.

I didn't mean for my character only. I meant all of the human NPCs are boring looking when compared to the elven races. Elves have interesting ears, eyes, strange faces and more varied heights, but the human races are fare more common, and far too plain. For me it's an eyesore to fight a dragon one moment, then look at an average human.

I only found a few meshes under the characters folders in the data files, but none that sounded like ears. Most of the vanilla meshes are hidden from me as well.

After dissecting the meshes a bit, the ears are part of the head mesh.

However... I found no sign of an elf head mesh. I think the elf race heads are morphed from the basic human heads, including the ears.

...Unless I'm missing the elf heads somewhere?

EDIT: Examining one of the baked NPC head meshes for an elf character, the distorting on the ears holds out to my hypothesis that the elf head models are morphed from the basic human head meshes.

So basically... you'll have to wait until the CK comes out. And you'd have to re-bake every single NPC's head since those are baked into their own meshes for faster loading and processing now.

So if the original head mesh was edited to give human elven ears, would the elf races distort then and have longer ears than normal as well?

Yes it would. I wouldn't recommend it anyway; head meshes have a lot of things going on in them: facegen morphs, expression/lip morphs, skin tinting... don't fiddle with them unless you really really know what you're doing (and I can count the number of people I know could do that in Oblivion on one hand).

EDIT: Actually... no it wouldn't. As stated earlier, all NPC heads are baked. You'd have to re-bake each and every head that was affected.

There's a whole folder of them you can look at if you've extracted the mesh and texture BSAs. They're in the meshes\actors\character\facegendata\facegeom\skyrim.esm folder.

I'm guessing they did it that way because it would take less time to load and run a pre-generated head NIF mesh than it would to procedurally morph every NPC head on a case-by-case basis from the mesh.

I suppose this thread is dead then, thank you for your help though.

Does that mean all the NPC faces are effectively "closed source" and mods like Project Beauty are no longer possible, unless the modder creates each head from scratch (assuming they provide with facegen capabilities)?