I have been looking at the helmet and hair meshes, and in order to work with gamebryo's wonderful morphing head technology they need morphs of their own.

I know that the Oblivion Conformulator create these morphs automatically by (apparently) using linear interpolation of an existing head, but I've had no luck finding these morphs in the head nif files.

Is there anyone knowledgeable about this topic who feels like explaining it? It seems as though the morph information isn't stored in the nif files for the heads.

Rather oddly, there is one place where there ARE things that look vaguely like morph targets, and that is the default skeleton (located : Data\meshes\characters\_male\skeleton.nif).

There are a number of objects in the skeleton child of Bip01 Head (the head bone). Their hierarchy is :

'Bip01 Head'
> HeadAnims
> HeadAnims:0

The list 'morphs', if that is what they are, appear as a small triangular mesh in Max, and in the engine they appear as a NiTriShape object with a NiTransformController>NiGeomMorpherController node structure underneith it. The morphs are named as follows :


"Morph: BlinkLeft"
"Morph: BlinkRight"
"Morph: LookDown"
"Morph: LookUp"
"Morph: SquintLeft"
"Morph: SquintRight"
"Morph: Aah"
"Morph: Anger"
"Morph: BigAah"
"Morph: BMP"
"Morph: BrowDownLeft"
"Morph: BrowDownRight"
"Morph: BrowInLeft"
"Morph: BrowInRight"
"Morph: BrowUpLeft"
"Morph: BrowUpRight"
"Morph: Eh"
"Morph: EyeSquintLeft"
"Morph: EyeSquintRight"
"Morph: Fear"
"Morph: FV"
"Morph: LookDown"
"Morph: LookLeft"
"Morph: LookRight"
"Morph: LookUp"
"Morph: Oh"
"Morph: OohQ"
"Morph: Sad"
"Morph: W"
"Morph: Happy"


That seems to be a basic viseme map with some other relatively standard emotional and facial expression morphs (though why this data would be included in the skeleton and -not- in the facial nifs confuses me immensely).

It does not in any way match up with the morphs used to define the face. This leads me to believe that they were used specifically for facial animation, and not as part of the FaceGen system.

Does anyone feel like being kind and pointing me in the direction of more information on this topic? Google has failed me.

I'm interested in anything related to the FaceGen system, and the location of the morph target data in particular.

the conforumlator reads the morphs from tri files. it doesn't write any data into nif. No point looking in nifs for the facgegen morphs, as you found out they aren't stored in them.

the facial morphs themselves are in stored in the .tri files. the skeleton is not really storing morphs at all, it just has the contoller and I guess what you could called a proxy mesh, the headanims:0. just look at the vectors- they are just for that single tri face and not for the head at all.. these morphs can be called from controlled blocks (in kfs) that target the headanims:0 in the skeleton, these activate the morph controller and that plays the morphs that are stored in the tri... onto the face.

just looking at a anim, Variable 2 in the controlled block is where you set up the morph name thats to be called.

What he said I think a few expressions are missing from the skeleton's dummy holder, I know that was the case for F3. I can provide you with a complete list if you want. Also, shape morphs are stored in the .egm files, but those don't have names, just numeric ID's

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=18566
It's outdated and windy, but does have a fair bit of info as well as some tools for working with egm/tri files.

Thanks guys!

I'll look into this some more today.

At a preliminary glance, this seems to be something that a more robust tool could be built to handle in a more friendly way.

Hex editing is not my friend.