I couldn't help but notice a lot of non-clone-elf race mods (humanoid wolves and other such critters) look like, uh.. poopie. They're lumpy and have crummy proportions and such.
Now I've never played around with meshes in the CS so I don't know what goes into adding a new custom race, but it looks like all those types of races are just facegen modifications rather than a new mesh.

Now, if I were to go into, say, Blender, and make a model of some type of wolf head, would I be able to import that into the CS as the head of a new race without it turning out lumpy and deformed like some
other race mods out there?

Basically, what I'm asking here, is; Is the engine simply incapable of rendering decent looking non-humanoid faces, or are the people who make non-humanoid race mods just.. not very good at it?


Not to criticize the work of those who make those mods - I just might have high standards. The default khajit and argonians are ugly to me as well.

Not the engine as much as the limitations of what access we're given to it, and how various things are used internally. The root of the problem lies with every race sharing the same body mesh and having limited room for variety in skeleton stuff without screwing up ALL animations. Although we can apply a different head mesh for each race, the face uses rigging elements which are not particularly accessible, and a format which is not particularly supported by exporters.

If it was all a matter of just a few meshes, we would have many new race and creature looks.

so you're saying only bethesda can create new creatures etc? :S shouldn't there be a tool released somewhere for this? doesn't that famous monster mod have different creatures than normal? :S

Creatures don't have the same restrictions as NPCs

Thanks for the reply. I'm not sure I understand though..

What exactly is stopping modders from importing new meshes and having them look like they did before the import?


Edit: I'm specifically referring to faces in this regard - does the ingame facegen engine really distort the imported meshes that badly?

Talkie Toaster has messed around with the actual skeleton that all races share to give different proportions and such. (ex. http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=29853 and a playable goblin mod somewhere i can't find)

I'm pretty sure it is really complicated to do, but technically it is proven that it can be done.

Regarding actual working head meshes with full deformation-by-CharGen and facial-animation support there's still a lot to do to get these right.
Each such NIF file has an EGM (deformation morphs) and TRI (facial-animation morphs) file going along with it and their vertex orders have to match "exactly" or your head will literally "explode" into hundreds of disconnected polygones.

Now I'm guessing the number of morphs from memory, so it's definitely not 100% correct, but I should be quite close and you should at least get an idea of what I'm aiming towards.
For CharGen deformations to work right you will need about 50 morphs. For all facial animations there are 30 or 40 morphs.
Currently each morph means importing the head mesh as an OBJ file into Blender, deforming it into the target shape of the morph, exporting this one back to OBJ and using some tools or scripts from Scanti to add the target shapes into the EGM or TRI file as actual morphs.

So with a little math this currently makes roughly 100 meshes you need to create either from scratch or via deformation of one base mesh. You may "never" do anything that could alter the vertex order in the process or your resulting files won't match anymore (exploding head, remember?).

To make things worse a complete head consists of many different "parts". You have 2 eyes, upper and lower teeth, tongue and an inner mouth mesh. I think apart from the eyes, which are somewhat special anyways, you need to do the things I mentioned above for every of these meshes yet again. And they have to fit perfectly in every target shape, all together and to each other.

I hope this gives you an idea why there are so few really new head meshes out there.
Most people prefer deforming or reshaping of existing ones, because when you don't mess up the vertex order you can keep the EGM and TRI files from Vanilla Oblivion and wouldn't have to mess with morphs much at all.

Oh, uh, jeeze. Yeah, that does make sense.

What about that imported mogmod? If you, say, wanted a pretty PC for screenshots but didn't much care about turning them into npcs - could you just have a static head mesh, in that case?

Sure, but it'll look more like some crappy mascot costume than an actual head. Now granted, we're talking about furries here, and in that regard they aren't usually that picky... But still, at that point, it's more of a helmet you wear instead of being part of a race, and therefore has many of the same limitations.


No, there are some new creature meshes and skeletons floating around. However, many of these either make use of ripped assets from other games, or are distributed specifically with certain mods, so it isn't always easy to find them.

The problem with new creatures however is the skeleton and rigging stuff. Only some of the information about this is available to the public (since some people like keeping their secrets), and making these things requires high familiarity with Blender and 3dsmax, as well as dozens of hours to spend setting up animations. It can be done, just the logistics of making it happen aren't within normal reach. As is, there aren't overly many people who know enough to make new static meshes, let alone properly rigged/weighted equipment.

Aw, come on now. For the purposes of screenshots I'm sure it'll be as convincing as someone makes it, right? Sure, it'd look lame when it came to conversation, but I'd think given that (i assume) most players play in first person and occasionally give themselves a lookover with the third person vanity camera, it wouldn't make much of a difference. I know I've never been in a position to see my PC's face when it actually would be doing anything besides staring blankly.

Granted, that's if you don't use it for npcs or companions, but c'est la vie.