I'd like to alter the shape of a mesh that is controlled by a GeomMorphController. Like a goblin's head for example. I can export the altered head, but if I add the Beth controller afterwards in Nifskope the animations reset the shape of the head in game (vertices are moved to their vanilla goblin head position by the animations so it looks like the default head in game). How can I export/adjust the head correctly so it will keep my altered shape while the animations still work? I know it's possible without altering all the anims since Waalx did it in his creature mod for lots of creatures. I'd also like to know whether it's possible to add vertices to a mesh and make it still work with the controller. It's not that important, but I wonder whether that possible easily.

I know nothing of 3ds max, but in Blender you can access those morphs via Shape Keys (editing panel [F9] and the Shapes tab there). There's also possible to add new vertices. But if you have a new mesh, I'm afraid that all shape keys need to be recreated from scratch then with the same names as original ones. I never did that for creatures but it works with bows well. While shape keys are not that hard to do in Blender, that's rather quite laborious process for such a small thing.

the only thing I can think of, is try pasting the nitrishapedata block over the originals. IF you managed to get it into and out of max without reoredering vertices, they you will be in business. so not resetingxform, or collapsing modifiers, or anything of the sort. just importing/exporting it can reorder verts, it's best to try and see if you can find a method of simply importing and exporting and pasting over the trishapedata block with yours to see if its workable.. Iplay with the weld verts on import, and all that.

can you add/remove vertices? almost certainly not.

waalx probably used blender. which people report can keep vertex number list intact.

alternatively, just make your own morphs. It's not the hardest thing in the world. and you just have to press export, and niftools exporter handles it, the morphs are called from the kf anim, so you don't need to do any animating your self. it should just call and run your morphs if you have it set up right, named correctly etc. < if you do this you can just add or remove verts all you like as well.

Getting in and out of Max without altering Vert Numbering can be done through the .obj format -> your problem is going to be that at NifSkope does not allow updating the Base Frame Morph without clearing all of The Morphs Data essentially making them worthless.

Max has the ability to just import the Head complete with all of the Morphs as Meshes -> allowing you to do pretty much anything you want.

Personally When I have to do facial Morphs I set up a Stretchy Bones Rig and Animate the Morphed Head with the Rigged Head -> the most important difference of a Stretchy Bone Rig over trying to hand edit morph targets is with the rig you can update morphs faster you can also be 100% sure that Symmetrical facial expression is symmetrical -> there are Plugins for Max that can do this with symmetrical geometries but any asymmetrical geometries (basically an imported version of ANY already stripified Mesh will fall into this category) those plugins are worthless for, so the stretchy bones rig is a good skill to learn.


If an SBR is to advanced of an animation technique there are other Modifiers and Plugins that can help with doing this the old way but honestly if you do not already have them and know how to use them properly it will take you less time to just alter the Head Mesh clone it and alter the MT Clones then to track down what Plugins you might want and learn how to use them.