FO4 Extended Facial Sculpting - status and rambling

Nose and mouth are about done. I still need to get the dimple sculpts done, then run everything through testing again to make sure all the new sculpts work as expected and as much as expected. Then, I'll reorder the sculpt list and add a bunch of spacers to make it less of a "oh god there's so many options and they all blend together" mess. After that it's a matter of packing everything up and uploading'em. ...this evening, since it's now 5:30am and I have work later today : \

More or less done with nose sculpts. I'll probably do a bit more fine adjustment on them before release, but they're about ready. Now...mouth sculpts. I both am and aren't looking forward to this; there's nearly as many as the nose, so it's going to be time-consuming, but after I'm done...that's a considerable addition of customization. The vanilla mouth shapes are pretty awful, but they can be made tolerable and even good by screwing with the lip bones. 'course, the ones I'll release in this round will have temporary IDs, so they won't be suitable for creation with. But once I do make them, I'll have them ready for when I know which ID they'll receive down the line.

While looking at the facial skeleton and deciding on the order of this next batch of sculpts, I noticed something interesting; there's actually a bone on each side of the face, situated underneath the outer brow and "outside" the outer corners of the eyes. These bones are called "skin_bone_(R/L)_Eyefat". Running a search on the rest of the sculpt file, these bones aren't included in other sculpts, which really got my curiosity going. I immediately created a sculpt for them to see what they did. Alas, nothing happened when the bones were moved. This meant one of two things: the bones were effectively immutable like the head as a whole is (extremely unlikely), or nothing was skinned to them. Checking BaseFemaleHead_faceBones.nif - the face model - finds that the latter is the case: the bones aren't even included with the face (they would need to be if any of it were skinned to them). So why are they there, in the face skeleton? It's possible t...

If it's not obvious: working on nose sculpts now. The nose region is comprised of like...5 different bones, a couple of them left/right. So there's a fair amount of customization to be had. At least one pair of those bones is actually underneath the eyes, if I recall right, and is slightly modified by both the Upper Jowls and whichever nose sculpt. Should prove as interesting to play around with. Afterwards, or maybe during if I get particularly bored while doing the above, I'll throw together some mouth sculpts and assign them temporary IDs. There's 8 bones there - two each of corners, top outer, bottom outer, and center, each of which will have its own sculpt for making expressions with :)

No, really. Changes: - New ID index. It should now be "safe" to create faces with this mod, future versions shouldn't ruin faces made with 0.3+. - Semi-permanent index section for single-sided sculpts

I've been asked what we can do with this mod. Things that are currently possible as far as I'm aware: - Moving/scaling/rotating facial bones - Scaling body bones (haven't specifically tried, but I'm 95% sure this can be done because of some other testing I did) - Moving/scaling/rotating additional bones (i.e. the FO4 skeleton, like Skyrim's, isn't a static thing: we can add more bones/nodes to it and "skin" (attach) things to them. This enables things like adding additional bones specifically for headgear, glasses, etc, which we can then place whereever we please on the head/face. Theoretically, this isn't even limited to there: we can move things around the body, too, enabling things like moving accessories to avoid clipping into clothing.) Things that are not currently possible from the looks menu with my level of knowledge: - Moving/scaling/rotating the head - Moving/scaling/rotating the face as a whole - Moving/scaling/rotating t...

As per the previous post, I have to fix my indexing. This is mostly just a time-consuming nuisance, since I have to do things like basic math and data entry. Ugh, maaaan.