NPV: Preparing the head in Blender

Summary

Created by @manavortex Published May 13 2023

This page is a part of the NPV guide. It will show you how to create your V's head in Blender.

Prerequisites

• You have downloaded the prepared Wolvenkit Project from Nexus

• You have Blender installed (confirmed working on 3.5.1 and 3.6, should work with >= 3.4)

In this section, we will be moving/deleting files. You can complete these steps in Wolvenkit or in the Windows File Explorer.

Step 1: Getting head

1. Open the head folder in your project's archive section.

   1. Optional: Be confused and/or panic about why there are over 9000 files.

2. Look into the head/morphtargets folder

   1. Optional: Be confused and/or panic about why there are over 9000 files again.

3. Delete all those files that you aren't using (read on as for how)

I have included all meshes and morphtargets from the game files. We'll now thin out the options, deleting those parts that your NPV won't be using.

Deleting unused files: the convenient option

What the actual fuck are all these files?

Meshes vs Morphtargets

The .mesh files are the 3d files making up your NPV's head. I've taken them from the game files and prepared them for you (by making them use the player animations and -expressions).

The .morphtarget files are the character creator options (a direct game export). You can safely overwrite them with the most recent version by searching Wolvenkit for the file name – you need to put it into the correct folder, though, or it won't be picked up by the scripts.

We only need the .morphtargets to generate the actual meshes by duplicating the character creator process.

Okay, and all those numbers?

The different variants in the character creator correspond to the different meshes. For example, if you select cyberware 3 in the character creator, the mesh that will get loaded is cyberware_03. Not so difficult, is it?

Here's what the prefixes mean:

Finding the right piercing

In the files, you will see four files for jewelry:

tutorial\npv\your_female_character\head\i1_000_pwa_c__basehead_earring_01.mesh
tutorial\npv\your_female_character\head\i1_000_pwa_c__basehead_earring_02.mesh
tutorial\npv\your_female_character\head\i1_000_pwa_c__basehead_earring_03.mesh
tutorial\npv\your_female_character\head\i1_000_pwa_c__basehead_earring_04.mesh

… none of which is your V's exact piercings. Instead, there are full sets of jewellery, most of which will be hidden.

You have to look at the meshes and find the file that includes your set of piercings. We'll go about hiding the excess in one of the later steps.

Deleting files

Many of the files are variants and your V will be using one or none of them. That means you have a bunch of files to delete. If you have chosen the convenient option above, you should already have a list of files that you need to keep. Otherwise, the table below should give you some oversight.

When deleting files that you aren't using, you need to remove both the .mesh file in the head folder and the .morphtarget file in the head/morphtargets folder.

The following table will show you examples on what to keep (as in, you delete everything else):

tutorial\npv\your_female_character\head\hx_000_pwa_c__basehead_cyberware_03.mesh
tutorial\npv\your_female_character\head\morphtargets\hx_000_pwa__morphs_cyberware_03.morphtarget

tutorial\npv\your_male_character\head\hx_000_pma_c__basehead_scars_01.mesh
tutorial\npv\your_male_character\head\morphtargets\hx_000_pma__morphs_scars_01.morphtarget

tutorial\npv\your_male_character\head\hx_000_pma_c__basehead_scars_01.mesh
tutorial\npv\your_male_character\head\hb_000_pma_c__basehead_big_beard.mesh

tutorial\npv\your_female_character\head\hx_000_pwa_c__basehead_tattoo_09.mesh
tutorial\npv\your_female_character\head\morphtargets\hx_000_pwa__morphs_tattoo_09.morphtarget

tutorial\npv\your_male_character\head\i1_000_pma_c__basehead_earring_0*.mesh
tutorial\npv\your_male_character\head\morphtargets\i1_000_pma__morphs_earring_0*.morphtarget

Expected result

After deletions, both head and head/morphtargets should hold only the files that your V is actually using.

For a list, see the table above.

Once you're done, you should have this many files:

Step 2: Exporting head

Now, we will export all .morphtarget files from Wolvenkit so that we can edit them in Blender. You will complete most of these steps in Blender, only the import/export happen in Wolvenkit.

1. Find the Export Tool (Tools -> Export)

   1. To filter, click into the empty row under "name" and write "morphtarget"

   2. Check the box in the header to select everything

   3. Click "Export Selected"

   

1. Switch to your project's raw folder or Wolvenkit's raw perspective. You will find the entire file structure mirrored there.

2. In head folder, find the file head_import.blend. This file is a utility file which will automatically import and export the files for you. For that reason, it needs to be in a certain relative path.

1. Open it in Blender. It will take you to the scripting perspective, where you'll see something like this:

1. Press the play button.

2. The script will now import a bunch of armatures from the morphtargets folder. You will see them showing up in the topright corner (see the next screenshot under 7. for how it should look)

3. Switch to the next script in the file, but don't run it yet:

1. Find line 26 and following in the script, and alter the values to those of your V (which you get from the character preset, see here for further explanation).

1. After you've changed the values to those of your V, click the "play" button again. This will apply the morphs to your V's face:

Step 3: Importing head

Exporting from Blender

Now that your head looks the way you want, it's time to run the final script, which will export your changed head to .glb for you:

This will overwrite already existing files, leaving you with a set of import-ready mesh files.

Now it's time to get them back into Wolvenkit.

1. Find the Import Tool (Tools -> Import Tool)

2. Click "Import All"

3. You're done!

Can I have that with textures?

Yes, you absolutely can! Once you have imported them back into Wolvenkit, you can use the With Materials option and the Wolvenkit Blender Plugin to get a fully textured and shaded set.

Step 4: Troubleshooting

Optimally, this process just runs with no hitches. However, during beta testing and troubleshooting, people ran into a few issues, so I'm listing them here.

Blender import errors

If you get an error within Blender, e.g. something like AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'name', then something is wrong with your Blender install or you are using the wrong version. Reminder: This has been tested with 3.5.1, but anything >= 3.4 should work.

The piercings are in the wrong position!

The problem went away after the person having it upgraded Blender to 3.5.

V was imported, but the textures are all wrong!

This happens when the UV maps are flipped. 8.9 doesn't implement that feature yet, so you might have to use a more recent version of Wolvenkit — the Nightly from 2023-04-29 is currently stable.

Alternatively, you can use the last script in the file, which will attempt to flip the UV maps for you. It might have an offset, though.

V was imported, but they're unsettlingly, subtly wrong

If you had the example project lying around for a very long time, please try and redownload it (Nexus link), as the first version had been using an NPC animationgraph for facial expressions.

If that's not it, then you ran into the shapekey offset issue: ssome shapekeys don't correspond 1:1 with their numbers in the character creator. If a part of your shape is shaped subtly wrong or looks weird in the game, add or subtract 1 from the corresponding shape key, and run the script again.