NPV - V as custom NPC

How to create your V as an NPC

Created by @manavortex Published May 13 2023

This guide will show you how to do the following things:

• Setting up a Wolvenkit project with the prepared example files

• Creating your V's head in Blender (has its own sub-page)

• Adding them as an NPC to spawn them with AppearanceMenuMod (has its own sub-page)

Difficulty:

Easy, but not trivial: you don't need any prior knowledge, but the whole structure is complex, and if you make mistakes, you will end up missing files.

If you run into issues with this guide, the right place to ask for help is the redmodding Discord server.

It uses the following versions:

• Cyberpunk 2077 game version >= 1.6

• WolvenKit >= 8.9.1 — the Nightly version from 2023-04-29 is stable.

You can not use the current release 8.9.0 for this! But the Nightly is perfectly OK :)

• Blender 3.5.1 (the version this has been tested with, but anything >= 3.4 should work)

• AppearanceMenuMod >= 2.1

This tutorial should cover your basic needs, but there are many more guides and resources about NPV creation outside of this wiki. You can find them here.

None of this would have been possible without NoraLee, who pioneered the process and taught me everything that I needed to know to set up these tools. This guide doesn't use any of their resources, but a lot of their knowledge. For the full guide with all edge-cases, bells, whistles and context, see their Google Drive.

This is the speedrun version. If you want extra details and context, please check Nora's Google Doc.

Preparation

At the time of writing this guide, the most recent Wolvenkit release is 8.9.0, which doesn't yet support the .morphtarget export! You will have to install a Nightly version, for example the one from 2023-04-29 (which is perfectly stable, the next release is just not quite ready yet).

I have prepared an example project (Nexus | mana's mega) for you again, but due to the complexity of V's head mesh, you have to do a little bit of prep work here.

Don't worry, I'll walk you through it step by step.

The character preset

To create a face, we need to know the following numeric values from the character creator:

• Eyes

• Eyebrows

• Nose

• Mouth

• Jaw

• Ears

Find the mirror in V's apartment and note them down, or load a savegame in Cybercat.

Setting up the files

Body gender:

As a rule of thumb, I'll document the process for an NPV with a female body gender, because as we all know, the other doesn't exist I have one of those. In doubt, double-check paths.

1. Download the example project of files from mana's mega or Nexus and load up your Wolvenkits

2. In Windows Explorer, find the prepared folders per body gender:

body gender	file path
female	tutorial\npv\your_female_character
male	tutorial\npv\your_male_character

1. Delete the one you're not using (do one project per NPC. No, really, I mean it.)

Now it's time to do the actual work.

• If you want to create your V's head for Cyberpunk, read on here

• If you already have a head mesh and just want to set up the file structure, read on here

Please remember that before sharing your NPV, you have to change the paths! At the very least, rename the tutorial folders inside of archive and resources to your user name and then do a fulltext search and replace in json.

However, you might want to do that after preparing the head in Blender, as you would otherwise have to move the utility script around.

At any time during the guide, you can install the Wolvenkit project (Wolvenkit has a button in the toolbar) and spawn Tutorial Man and Tutorial Woman via AMM to check out your progress.

You'll be editing these two