Export NPC Face Textures
Export NPC Face Textures appears in the Character dropdown menu.
Purpose
Newly added NPCs in Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas will normally have mismatches between their body textures and their facial textures.
By default, GECK solves this by generating NPC face textures for all NPCs in the game using Export NPC Face Textures, and then saving this data into the BSA.
This method, however, will generate all NPCs from all loaded master files — including FalloutNV.esm. This process can take upwards of several hours and is very redundant as most of this data has already been generated.
Note: GECK Extender has an option to only export textures from the active plugin.
Generating Mod-Specific Face Textures (Vanilla)
To generate textures only for the NPCs added by a specific mod, you can use following method to generate the textures for specific NPCs. This is very quick — usually taking no more than a few seconds.
- If the mod is not already an ESM, it must be converted to an ESM due to a limitation in the GECK. You will need to enable the mod's ESM flag by using xEdit, or another similar utility.
- In xEdit, load the plugin, select the File Header, and right-click on the "Record Flags" near the top. Tick "ESM". Then save the plugin.
- Create the following folders if they do not already exist, you must do this or the textures will not be exported.
Data\textures\characters\BodyMods\youresmname.esm\ Data\textures\characters\FaceMods\youresmname.esm\
- Load the GECK and load your plugin.
- Select all NPCs added by the mod.
- This is much easier when sorting by FormID (see How to Keep Track of Your Records).
- Press Ctrl+F4 on the keyboard. A message box should pop up in short order saying "Done!"
- You may close the GECK without saving — you do not need to save the plugin in the GECK unless you made any other changes.
- If you had flagged the ESP as an ESM and want to distribute your mod as an ESP, you should reverse the ESM process.
- In xEdit, repeat the same steps as in 1, above.
After following these steps, the mod's body textures and facial textures will have been exported to the folders created.
Be sure to distribute these files along your mod so that your NPCs will always have perfect textures regardless of whether the end user has made any edits to their INI files.
It is inadvisable to distribute your mod as an ESP as it will treat every Reference as persistent and waste memory.
Notes
- If you are using Mod Organizer, the output files from the GECK CTRL+F4 will be placed in your Overwrite folder, unless you previously had extracted the corresponding DDS files and put them in a different MO2 folder (in which case MO2 will overwrite the files wherever you put them).
- The DDS files do not need to be stored in a BSA, but if you have multiple ESMs that contain the corresponding NPC record, the filename of the last loading of those ESMs is where the game will look for the associated DDS files.
