MOR files (compiled headmorphs)
All of this mod's features will work perfectly in MOR files, as they are a "final" compiled format. No files from this mod are needed for others to use MORs made with it.

MOP files (character creator presets)
Beards on non-HM/DM heads: MOP files will internally store beards on female heads, but they will be invisible (but present) in the CC. The best way to resolve this is to export a MOR as well and have users use a face-replacing tool to apply the MOR's data to their save as soon as they gain control of their warden. EM heads will display beards in the CC.

Features requiring users to have my targets erf: Use of my workarounds for sliders snapping to 100% and beards changing face shapes, plus the "Elf ear shape DA2" slider will all require the user of the MOP to have my "Duplicate Morph Targets" in their override (see below in Option 1 for more details). Please direct them to download and install only that file from this page; they do not need any of the XML files.

MRH files (source files edited in the Toolset)
MRHs that have had unlocked features applied (eg beards on non-HM/DM/QM for Option 1, custom scalp hair tints for Option 2, etc) will lose these features if they are loaded without at least the same version of this mod installed (not permanently unless they are saved like that).

• MRHs that use Option 1 features will lose them in a vanilla toolset, but Option 2 will load them fine.
• MRHs that use Option 2 features will lose them in either Option 1 or vanilla. (Blended shapes won't entirely disappear, but only the slider that comes first in the internal order will be retained; all others will be set to 0 and locked.)
• The only feature in either option that will not have issues with backward compatibility is hair/beard/tattoo selection, since it is only an aid to selecting a file that is compatible anyway.
• MRHs made in the vanilla toolset will load fine in either option.
  

If you are distributing MRH files please let users know which version of this mod you used where necessary.

1. Finding hairs, beards and tattoos
Many modded and some unique vanilla hairs and beards can only be found by changing the file picker's filter from "Level 0 Model Files" to "All Model Files", necessitating scrolling through lots of additional irrelevant files, and a lot of clicking if you're not sure which one you want.

In the same vein, several perfectly good tattoo files can only be found by changing the filter from "Head Tint Mask Files" to "All Tint Mask Files", which involves scrolling through every single tint map in the game.

Why does this happen?

Solution
I've changed the default hair filter to "##_har_*_0" and the default beard filter to "##_brd_*_0" (ie not requiring the leading "h" or "b" in the rest of the name). It will therefore pick up all hair and beard models, without having to sift through the level 2/3 files.

For the tattoos, I have added "uh_pct_*_0t", "uh_pmt_*_0t", and "uh_hed_tat*_0t" to the default filter; this will allow easy access to all tattoo files.

• uh_pct_dc1: Dwarf commoner CC tattoos
• uh_pct_dn1: Dwarf noble CC tattoos
• uh_pct_h01/2: Human and city/mage elf CC tattos
• uh_pmt_001: Unique companion tattoos (Morrigan, Zevran, an unused dwarven-style tattoo, and the casteless tattoo on its own used in the CC).
• uh_hed_tata/b: These tattoo files are extremely unfinished. They are in the wrong format (dxt5 rather than uncompressed) and so the uh_hed_tata file has really bad compression artefacts on several of its tattoos (one of which was clearly a precursor to one of the dalish tattoos). The uh_hed_tatb file was only spared the artefacts because none of its tattoos overlap (they seem to be designed to be combined). Both files' tattoos are solid colours rather than having skin texture.
  

2. Feature Selection expanded
Head, nose and eye shape sliders under Feature Selection are mutually exclusive and can't be blended together or used on different base heads. If nose/eyes are used on a MOP at less than 100%, it will snap to 100% once in the CC.

Why does this happen?

Solution
I have largely left the original Feature Selection alone (aside from renaming detailed further down), because my solution to both issues involved creating new sliders, and I didn't want to remove existing functionality. However, Feature Selection is now called "CC Features".

Instead there are now three new tabs just after CC Features: Shared Shapes, Shared Noses and Shared Eyes. This contains all of the sliders for that feature from all the different heads, and none of them are mutually exclusive. This means that, for example, you can combine two different nose shapes from the HM head together, and add a nose shape from the HF head and the DF head. Or even all the nose shapes from all the heads (probably inadvisable xD). Some cross-head shapes work better on certain heads and worse on others; you will have to experiment. The sliders are divided into sections named for which base head they came from; thankfully these sections are collapsible, because they ended up being quite long.

CC usage
Crucially, these sliders are considered additional by the CC: it will not recognise them as positions on the feature sliders, and so will not reset them or snap them to 100%. This feature absolutely requires the "Duplicate Morph Targets" erf: they are (internally and externally) renamed duplicates of the vanilla morph target MMH files that point to the existing vanilla morph target MSH files (if you want, you can therefore apply the same morph target twice: once in CC Features and once in Shared features). Without these files, the new sliders will not work in MOP or MRH. See Section 4 for details of two more sliders that have been duplicated to thwart the CC.

Unique shapes
The "Unique Shapes" tab has also been moved closer to just after "Shared Eyes" rather than at the end of the tab list (because they're useful for variety and it's a more accessible place for them for the point in the workflow where they would be used), and has been similarly expanded to have all unique shapes from all heads. Ever wanted to put a little of Zathrian's face on a HM? Now you can! These shapes were never affected in the CC and have not needed to be duplicated.



3. Beard restrictions
You can only apply beards to male humans, dwarves and qunari.

Why does this happen?

Solution
I've added code that allows beards! Now you can apply them to anyone you like: the previously-allowed HM/DM/QM heads, plus male elf heads, female heads of any race, and children. (I know, I know, why would kids need beards? My thinking is that rather than Actual Beards for kids, this will allow the creation and application of accessories in the same vein as Earring Beards.)

This mod does not actually come with beards, but you can now apply Earring Beards and any other beards made in the future in the toolset!

Please be aware that some hair/beard mods appear as a solid blue/yellow mesh in the toolset rather than showing their texture; this will not affect their in-game appearance at all. For any hair/beard modders who are not aware, Risibisi has a de-blueing tutorial here.

CC problems
When exported to a MOP and used in the CC, beards will disappear on female heads, due to the CC's restrictions. (Yes, EM beards will stay!) The CC is aware of the invisible beard, however, and if you change any of the sliders (other than portrait/voice) you'll immediately get that sad old hollow-cheeked look. Fine Dwarven Beards' hair-beard combos are currently the only way to have a beard on (dwarf) female heads in the CC, since they add the beards to the hair models.

Beards and "beards" available for non-HM/DM/QM
(Let me know if there's more I should have on this list!)

• Elves Don't Grow Beards
• Fine Dwarven Beards - Separate Dwarf Beards file
• Earring Beards (piercings for all heads)
  

4. Beard slider locking
If the head has a beard applied, you can't alter most settings on the mouth, cheeks or jaw, or apply some head shapes. If you've already altered them and then apply a beard, they will reset to default. If head shapes from Feature Selection or two specific jaw sliders are used on a bearded MOP, they will reset to zero in the CC.

Why does this happen?

Solution
I've removed all restrictions that beards had on sliders. It's now possible to edit the mouth/cheeks/jaw and head shapes freely whether a beard is present or not. You'll have to manage clipping manually, but that's pretty easy when you can see what you're doing!

If you want to emulate vanilla behaviour you can click the "Reset" button at the bottom of the mouth/cheek/jaw slider tabs (except for the slider that moves the cheekbones up), and manually reset any head shapes to zero.

MOP/CC usage
If you want to use head shape sliders with a beard on a MOP in the CC, to avoid them being removed in the CC, you will need to use the sliders under Shared Shapes rather than Feature Selection (now CC Features) (see Section 2 above for more details). Because these sliders' morph targets have different internal names to the originals, the CC will not know to reset them.

There are two more sliders that have duplicates to circumvent the CC resetting them when a beard is present: Jaw Lower and Jaw Triangle Shape (previously Jaw Square Shape). These are in a new section at the bottom of the Jaw tab "CC Beard Workarounds", just above the Reset button.

Be aware that again, if you change any of the sliders (other than portrait/voice) on a bearded preset, even with these workarounds, you'll still immediately get hollow cheeks.



5. Permanent scalp hair
When a hair model is applied, the scalp almost always has a hair texture covering it fully. This is to conceal gaps in the hair model, but is less useful on hair models with receding hairlines or shaved areas.

Why does this happen?

Solution
There's no way to do this automatically, but I have hardcoded a few extra exceptions:

• Duncan's hair (##_har_duca_0) will now use the "receding hairline" cut.
• The female version of the male vanilla cornrows in Tucked Hair (#f_har_hdt5a_0) will not have any scalp hair.
• The "Orsino" hair in Tucked Hair (##_har_orsa_0) will not have any scalp hair.
• The "##_har_hda2a1a_0" hair in Tucked Hair will use the "receding hairline" cut.
• The "concept art Cassandra" hair in Tucked Hair (##_har_cass_0) will use the "receding hairline" cut.
  

The sliders will appear active, but they will not be able to be changed.

It would be impractical to try to cover every hair mod out there past present and future (and impossible to accommodate hairs where you might want mutliple options, such as mohawks) in this way, so if you want manual control over the scalp hair, please either check out the workarounds article or consider using Option 2 below!



6. The white scalp issue
The "white scalp issue" is when a modded hair tint is applied, but the stubble texture covering the scalp is black in the toolset and bright white in-game, often showing through gaps in the hair.

Why does this happen?

Solution
As far as I know there's no "forever" automatic fix for this one. (I only have the constructs used in the vanilla XML to go by, and there's no sign of RegEx usage.) So I've tried to find all hair tint mods that would be affected, and hardcoded their conversions in. This only works if the corresponding stubble tint actually exists, of course.

• CC Extra Tints and Tones by jaylo101, using the prefix "cc".
• Pineappletree s Vibrant Colors by Pineappletree, using the prefix "pt".
• CS - NEW tints for hairs and CS - Eyebrows Color by ChingShih, using the prefix "cs".
• Lovely Tints by Barnzi88, using the prefix "bz".
  

How tint modders can avoid this:



7. Slider restoration and expansion
Restored sliders
There are several vanilla morph targets (the meshes that control headmorph changes via sliders) that were not used in the final Toolset or the CC; I have restored some of them. All should work on both MOR and MOP, though they are of varying levels of polish. As with many vanilla sliders, most of them look pretty silly at 100% and should be used more subtly in practice. All have been excluded from the randomiser.



Expanded sliders
Two existing sliders, "Elf ear shape" and "Neck Apple" were made available on all heads, not just elves/males respectively.

The vanilla elf ear shape slider used on other heads produces exactly the same effect as can be seen in Visibly Elf Blooded, as that mod is done by duplicating and renaming the elf ear shape slider to replace one of the missing teeth sliders. If you want a different elf ear look, consider using the "Elf Boy" or "Elf Girl" sliders from the kid head (KN) section of Shared Shapes, as they also produce pointed ears (but also change other aspects of the face). Elf ear shape will change in appearance if you have Elf Update installed, since that mod changes the morph target mesh (see below for more options).

New sliders




8. Slider Renaming
Multiple sliders have been renamed. This has no effect on internal headmorph or Toolset functions and is purely cosmetic.

CC/Shared Features list

General list
Other sliders' names have been tweaked for clarity, brevity, readability, spelling or alphabetical ordering, and a few have been deliberately moved. All general slider name/location changes can be seen in the mod images, but some explanations are here:



9. Texture expansion
Many head textures are either solely defined in the base mesh's MAO, either as a default or effectively blank, even though they have the ability to be changed and stored in the headmorph. I have made several of these editable; selecting a texture will make the headmorph use that texture without affecting any other headmorph, allowing a lot more individual customisation.

In all cases, leaving a texture field blank (ie vanilla behaviour) will cause the texture to be read from the base head's MAO, whatever that may be (you can see this behaviour in the vanilla toolset where the Base Skin Texture is blank by default, being read from the base head's MAO).

Editable textures: face and scalp


Editable textures: accessories
Head or face accessories are usually made as part of a hair or beard mesh. Sometimes, as with Duncan's vanilla hair and earring combo, they are part of the same mesh chunk as the hair itself and share the same hair material and colour. But if the accessory is on a different chunk it can use its own textures and a completely different material so that it looks like an object rather than hair. The textures will be defined in the accessory's MAO file(s).

I have created texture pickers so that many accessories on their own chunk can be assigned different textures for different headmorphs (as long as they don't use the Hair material themselves). For example you could have a bandana be a different colour for every character wearing it, or change the metal and gem colours of specific characters' jewellery without affecting others. These texture pickers are all in the new "15. Accessory textures" tab at the end of the tab list.

This will only work on the node names listed in the pickers:

• accm1, accm2 and accm3 -- intended for accessories attached to beards.
• acchm1, acchm2 and acchm3 -- intended for accessories attached to hair.
• HairM3 and HairM4 -- these nodes have often been used for accessories on existing hairs (such as those by Risibisi and LotC), so I've grandfathered them in.
  

You will have to check which node name an accessory uses in order to know which texture picker to use:

• The mod author may have specified in their description.
• You can try putting a texture in different slots and see which one changes the accessory.
• To check manually, open the accessory's MMH file(s) and go to MMH_CHILDREN -> MMH_CHILDREN; the accessory will be in one of the last nodes on the list, hopefully named something obvious. The node name is the first entry inside that, called MMH_NAME. If it's not one of the supported node names you may need to edit it if you have permission.
  

For example Calpernia Circlet uses accm1.

For each node there is a Diffuse slot and a Normal Map slot. If the diffuse slot is filled it will link automatically to a specular texture by replacing the "d" on the end of the texture filename with an "s" (this is almost exactly how the face diffuse textures are automatically linked to their normal maps). The normal map slot is standalone. Either slot can be left blank to keep the accessory's default texture for that slot (for example if you only want to change the colour, put a texture in the diffuse slot (which will also change the specular), and leave the normal slot blank).

Note for mesh creators: accm# (beard) and acchm# (hair) are new node names specifically intended to free up mesh creators to use the full HairM1-3 and BeardM1-3 for their actual hair/beard and still have room for their accessories. (Unlike armour, which will only tint on M1, Hair and Beard M1-3 will all have the correct hair tint -- though HairM1 is reserved for the scalp.) They are lowercase (sadly case sensitive) to make manual editing quicker as the mesh will output by default with Hair/BeardM# as its node names.

Notes for texture creators: The texture picker's main filter is acc_*_0?, where ? is d/s/n and * is free text. The pickers also have "all" filter options where they will display all diffuse/specular/normal maps available to the game, but since that is a huge list I encourage you to adhere to the main filter's naming convention; the prefix is deliberately short to provide maximum free text (since it's also sensible to indicate what accessory mod the texture is for) while still being distinct. Remember that the toolset restricts resources to 28 character filenames (32 if you count the ".dds" at the end); it will not detect or display files with longer names.

Make sure to provide an equivalently-named specular file for any diffuse if the accessory's MAO uses the Character material; if it uses the Face material (which has the specular in the diffuse's alpha channel), the missing discrete specular file will be ignored and the alpha channel used correctly.

Toolset-chosen textures will not utilise LOD textures (since these have to be defined by a LOD mesh's MAO), so they do not need to be created for alternate textures; only direct replacements (if they existed in the original).



X. Non-headmorph related
Longer tint filenames
Tint filenames are now limited to 32 characters total rather than 10. Originally I put this up to 128 but discovered that, like many other resources, the toolset (and possible the game) will not accept tint filenames longer than 32 characters. This limit includes the extension ".tnt" and the various tint prefixes, and in practice imposes a 21 character limit on the tint name suffix. The toolset will not actually stop you when you reach the limit; it will just deduct characters from the beginning while you type, so keep an eye on the length.

Extra file filters
I have added some extra file filters (unrelated to headmorphs) to make file selection a bit easier in certain circumstances.

1. Manual Scalp hair
Replaces 5. Permanent scalp hair in Option 1.

The slider for the default scalp hair is now visible, named "Thick Crew Cut", and no longer acts automatically. It can be turned off even when a hair is applied, and a different crew cut (or none) can be applied instead. This is mostly useful for hairs with receding hairlines or undercuts.

The slider is set with an initial default value of 1, which means that a new blank headmorph will appear with the thick crew cut at first, but you may remove it if you wish -- I only did this so that people applying hairs wouldn't forget to turn it on to cover the scalp, since it no longer will turn on automatically. This default value will have no effect on existing MRHs, only new ones.

Each of the crew cuts is mutually exclusive with each other.

How to emulate automatic behaviour:
Set the "Thick Crew Cut" slider to 1 unless using the bald scalp or the #m_har_hd4a_0 hair (male cornrows).



2. Manual Scalp colour
Replaces 6. The white scalp issue in Option 1.

The remaining problems are that some hair tints don't come with an associated stubble tint, and that for the ones that do, modders are locked into having the scalp be equivalent to the hair, unless they edit the MOR manually.

I've made the scalp colour picker visible, listed as "4.1. Scalp Color", immediately below "4. Hair and Beard Color" and immediately above "5. Hair". I have disconnected it from the hair tint, so it's now possible to pick a different tint -- maybe your chosen hair tint is missing a corresponding stubble tint and you want to pick the closest one you can find, or maybe your warden's green mohawk isn't their natural hair colour!

How to emulate automatic behaviour:
Manually select the stubble tint that matches the hair tint: with the hair tint name as a base, replace "_har_" with "_stb_" and "t3" (if present) with "t1". Either use the tint picker, type directly into the box, or copy/paste the hair tint name and edit it.