Initial research on facial anim files and how to find them
Summary
Created by @Simarilius 3/10/24
Based on info from Loomy and JohnCO
John CO worked out how to export facial animations to blender while creating his like a Supreme bootleg video (check it out if you havent seen it, its impressive) with help from Loomy, and the resulting script is available in the plugin resources folder.
The original could only process scenerid files but its now able to process .anim files too.
Thats all well and good but you need to be able to find them, so again with the help of Loomy I've been digging into the file structures to work out how things are related. A pictures worth a 1000 words so here you go:
Basically you want to find the audio on https://sounddb.redmodding.org/subtitles get the locStringId, then the tricky bit is finding the scene its referenced by, from that you can find the dialogLine, which lets you find the actor id, and locate the anims file. Anim for it should be in there with the locstring as its name. Am going to try scrape all the scene files to a db to make the tricky bit easier.
Guide to change expressions for photo mode and AMM
This tutorial will teach you how to replace facial expressions for Photo Mode or AMM with those of an NPC.
Difficulty: You need to be able to read. If you run into trouble anyway, please hit us up on Discord so that we can improve this guide!
If you want to look at reference expressions, check here.
If you want to import your own facial expressions, then currently (Mar 08 2024) you're somewhat out of luck, because the toolchain doesn't fully support you yet and we don't have a guide. Reach out on Discord and help us to get this show on the road!
If you want to make custom poses for anything that is not the face, check Poses/Animations: make your own
This will be called the target file in the rest of this guide
female rig
male rig
Both body genders genders are using the same file:
base\animations\facial\male_average\interactive_scene\generic_average_male_facial_idle.anims
NPC animation files have the extension .anims and reside in the folder base\animations\facial. You can find the ones for facial expressions by searching in WolvenKit for
Find the file that you want to use and copy it over the original file.
Although the file names are gendered, you can pick any of them.
If you aren't sure which file you want to use, check the references.
👉 If you are missing reference screenshots, feel free to create and upload them and update the wiki.
You now need to make the expressions from your new file selectable by AMM/Photo mode. This happens via animation names in the target file.
Find the correct names here.
Important: AMM and photo mode use different keys. Just make sure to pick the right table, and everything will be fine.
Open the target file (which you replaced with the NPC of your choice) in WolvenKit.
Find the animation you want to use and change its name:
Rinse and repeat the process with all animation names
Save the file
Voila, you now have custom expressions.
Make sure that you have replaced the correct file, and that your mod has been correctly packed and installed.
The game will look for the animation by exact name. AMM is using a different list than photo mode — make sure that you are using the right keys.
Check your target file: you have used a key twice.
If the game is looking for the neutral expression, it will stop looking as soon as it finds an animation with the name of facial_neutral. If you have multiple of those, it won't care.
Published: ??? by Last documented update: Mar 08 2024 by
