Hello everyone. I spend many hours in the last days to work on the character design, namely: The sets of hair, clothing, beards and hats you can choose from. I think I have a profound knowledge of the file now and I want to share my findings with you.
When I have the time I will share more interesting things regarding character creation. But for now lets get started.
CharModels.dbt contains the following values:
"id" INT -1| -- internal ID. Afaik nothing important, but has to be unique as always.
"name" STRING 0| -- name is referred to in the Objects folder. That is important if you want to add multiple clothing (namely: armor) for that character.
"male" INT 0 | -- 1 = male 0 = female (or animal)
"class" INT 0 | -- referred to Classes.dbt
"cloth" LIST 0 | -- probably the texture of the character model?
"skins" LIST 0 | -- The faces. To see all possibilites check out the Textures - folder and search for *face. You can add new faces but not more than 8. If you have less than 8, it will cycle. If you enter nothing, apparently the child-faces will be set as default faces.
"beards" LIST 0| -- to see all, get Nifscope and open Objects/characters/beardlibrary.nif
"hairs" LIST 0 | -- to see all, get Nifscope and open Objects/Characters/hairlibrabry.nif
"type" INT 0 | -- 1 is used for childs and 2 for adults. Probably for scaling the hair and faces
"hats" LIST 0| -- to see all, get Nifscope and open Objects/Characters/hatlibrabry.nif
"profession" INT 0 | -- referred to Professions.dbt
"armortype" INT 0 | -- 0 means it will always use the default model, 1 means you need different models for each armor, in reference to the 'name' you chose earlier. So to make a scholar use visible armor you need to change this to 1 and then create (or copy) models and name them dyn_scholar_cloth, dyn_scholar_plate etc. If the game misses a file it will crash.
So far so clear but it gets more complicated. The order of the 'skins' will determine which position in charactercreation the face will be. NPCs will choose random. Same goes for beards. Hairs have 'position IDs'. They double up each time. The maximum you can use in the character creation is again 8. So you need: 1,2,4,8,16,32,64,128 allways in pairs with the string of the hair-name.
Keep in mind that some hairstyles are not completed unless you add a hat. Other hairs will clip through the hats, so there is a limited number of combination.
To make hats for a hairstyle available you have to assign the hat a number. You have to choices: Choose the exact same position ID (for example 4, to combine it with hair in position 4) OR you use a value below the next position to include all positions below.
Example:
If you have "HAT_XYZ" 7 the hat will appear at positions 1,2,4 but NOT 8+.
To have the options of no hat (or masks) you simply add a "none" POSITION-NUMBER.
You can add multiple hats for the same position but you should try to use groups instead of writing every hat for every position (it will get a rather long table otherwise)
Thats all for now, happy testing!
