EYES for Better Heads

This is a MESH REPLACER for 171 of the head meshes found in Better Heads. It replaces all the heads with new head meshes that have EYES that move. One female Bosmer and the Argonians were not done for technical reasons.

To install, unzip and place the meshes in your Meshes/BH folder, and the two textures in your Textures/BH folder. You should probably back up those folders first, just in case.

This is a modders resource: reuse anything of mine (the eyeballs) you want. Credit belongs to: the Better Heads team, Rhedd, Arathrax and Gorg; and to Mighty Joe Young for the original eyeball texture.

Technical stuff:

The eyeballs are NiBillboardNodes. They don't really look directly at the player all the time, but rather parallel to the direction the player is looking. If you look a bit to the left, they look a bit to the right. If you look right, they look left. If you check out her chest, she rolls her eyes ... but if you glance up, she'll glance down to check YOU out.

The Morrowind game engine scales bodypart meshes in the (global) X and Y direction by the race Weight multiplier, and in the Z directon by the race Height multiplier. Unfortunately, NiBillboardNodes, for some unfathomable reason, get scaled TWICE. Each eyeball has therefore been scaled in it's own local X and Z direction by the INVERSE of the race Weight multiplier, and in it's own local Y direction by the INVERSE of the race Height multiplier, in order to compensate.

This means that when you look at the heads in NifSkope, the eyes look weird. It also means that you can't cut-and-paste eyeballs from a head of one race into a head of another race, or simply retexture a head for a different race, because the multipliers are different. If you wish to do that, start with a Breton or Dunmer male or Redguard female (who have multipliers of 1, so their eyes are still spherical), and then scale the eyes according to this chart:

MALES FEMALES

Y X/Z Y X/Z <- local axes
Argonian 0.971 0.909 1.000 1.000
Breton 1.000 1.000 1.053 1.111
Dunmer 1.000 1.000 1.000 1.111
Altmer 0.909 1.000 0.909 1.000
Imperial 1.000 0.800 1.000 1.053
Khajiit 1.000 1.000 1.053 1.053
Nord 0.943 0.800 0.943 1.000
Orc 0.953 0.741 0.953 0.909
Redguard 0.980 0.909 1.000 1.000
Bosmer 1.111 1.053 1.000 1.111

Lastly, it also means that if you run a mod that changes any of the race modifiers, the eyeballs may get all funky on you.

The NiBillboardNodes have a 90 rotation on them. This is to control when the eyeballs "flip over". Without the rotation, they flip when they track across dead center, which is quite visible.

Male Orcs eyes have a 30 degree rotation to make them fit their weirdly shaped faces.

There is only one texture for every eye color: BH_eyes.dds. This texture contains 33 eyes of various colors. Just move the UV map around in NifSkope to change the eye color. (There is also BH_eyes_glow.dds - it uses the same UV map.) I tried to match the original eye color as closely as I could, but I probably made a couple of really poor choices in that regard. 171 meshes is really tedious work, and sometimes I just couldn't resist.

Enjoy!

Phaedrus
25 July 2009