I edited a lot of hairs for Project ja-Kha’jay (namely some lovely KS Hairdos) for Khajiit use, and I’ll try to show ya how. This is not the easiest way, and probably isn’t the best way, but it’s the way I do it.
Outfit Studio
BSA Extractor/Cathedral Assets Optimizer
Creation Kit
One thing to note: I use Mod Organizer 2 and run things through it, so this tutorial is based on my experience with it. I don’t know how it works for Vortex.
Another thing to note: this will NOT work for HDT hairs. That would require an extra step of weighting the hair to work for HDT and idk how to do that.
Prep Work
1a. Extract the Khajiit headmesh(es) from Skyrim - Meshes 0.bsa using BSA Extractor or CAO into a convenient folder (for BSA Extractor, this is just drag, drop, search. You want ‘femaleheadkhajiit.nif’ and/or ‘maleheadkhajiit.nif’. Whichever gender you want to fit your hair to.
1c. If you want to specifically work with a character you made with RaceMenu, you can export their head (under the ‘Sculpt’ tab), find their headmesh under wherever you SKSE files export to, and use that instead.
2. Open Outfit Studio. Drag and drop your kitty head. (You might have to set up Outfit Studio to use your textures.)
3. Open up your hair mod and find the hair mesh, the hair .tri, and the matching hairline mesh (and any other accessories that go with it. I recommend checking to see what parts belong to it use SSE Edit or Creation Kit, if you’re not sure.) Drag and drop both meshes into OS. Copy the .tri file to somewhere you can easily find it.
Now comes the real work.
The Real Work
Important to note! Keep both the hair and hairline meshes highlighted in the right pane window while you’re doing big adjustments. You want to edit both at the same time for the most part, just to make things easier. Like so:
For small edits, you can also use the Mask, Move, Inflate, and Deflate tools. I recommend using them for stuff like small gaps or editing . At this point, you can probably just edit the hair mesh alone. The Pencil tool is handy, it will show you where the vertices are.
Just play around until you get a look you’re happy with (be sure to save before any radical changes, just in case.)
Making a plugin
Make a new folder, name it whatever you want. Put it wherever is easily accessible (I usually just use the desktop).
In that folder, make 2 new folders: ‘textures’ and ‘meshes’.
Meshes folder:
Make a new folder. Name it something easy for you to find and remember (starting with 000 or an underscore will keep it near the top.) Put your hair and hairline mesh in it. Also put your .tri file in here.
Textures folder:
This is optional if you plan on keeping the hair mod you took the meshes from in your load order, as your hair will keep using the textures provided by it.
If you really want it separate, you need to open up the original hair mod and find the folder path that your hair’s textures are in.
In *your* textures folder, you need to recreate the exact folder path and copy and paste the textures into it.
(Some alternatives are opening the mesh with NifSkope and changing the paths to match yours, or creating a Texture Set and applying it to your meshes in the CK. I won’t be going over how to do either of those, but they’re options.)
Now you have to make a mod manually- personally I just use MO2′s method where I right-click the left pane and hit ‘All Mods -> Create Empty Mod Above’ then name it, open it with Explorer, and copy paste my textures and meshes folder into it. Then activate it.
Now it’s time to open Creation Kit (if you haven’t got it yet, I cannot recommend installing Nukem’s Creation Kit Fixes enough.)
This part of the tutorial assumes some light familiarity with the Creation Kit.
1. Load Skyrim.esm and Update.esm.
2. Find a Khajiit hair for the gender you are a making a hair for.
Best way to find them is:
- a. In the Object Window, leftmost pane, expand Character and click HeadPart.
- b. with HeadPart selected, search ‘khajiit’. Hairs/hairlines are a little ways down.
4. Time to change a few things:
- ID: rename the hairline to something you’ll remember
- Model: hit Edit->Edit and direct it to your hairline mesh (in the folder you set up in the last step.)
- TRI: if you have one, sometimes it’s automatically detected. If not, once again go to Edit and direct it to the .tri file you copied earlier.
5. Hit OK and ‘Yes’ to creating a new form.
6. For the hair: open a hair part (ex. HairKhajiitFemale01) that matches the gender you’re working on.
7. Repeat step 4.
8. Time to set up the Extra Parts. Highlight and delete the hairline in the Extra Parts box. Right-click and hit ‘New’. Search for the hairline you just created. Should look something like this:
(I forgot to add a .tri file here, but it’s usually not too essential- mostly just allows you to edit the hair scuplt in RaceMenu.)
At this stage, if you want some of the Khajiit earrings you can also add them in Extra Parts box.
Once again, hit OK and ‘Yes’ to creating a new form. Save and name your mod, load it up and try it out.
1. Weird shadows on hairs. I don’t know what causes this, you can typically see it as soon as you open the mesh in OS. I don’t know how to fix this, unfortunately. Sometimes they’ll show in-game, sometimes they won’t.
3. Hair has accessories: In the CK, typically these are treated like Hairlines, You can use a hairline part to start with and can be added to the hair in CK in the Extra Parts box.
4. Hair causes CTD (sometimes on loading)- Open in CK and delete the .tri files from both the hair and the hairline, see if that fixes it.
10 comments
When ever I tried to edit the model directory with my edited mesh it throws invalid directory. I tried locking into the directories that where considered valid it would not let me open an explorer of it claiming the file location didn't exist.
I have no idea what I was doing wrong.
Edit: nvm I figured it out.
Edit: Creation Kit gives me a "model not found" error and wont show my model. when im in game it shows nothing. but it opens just fine in outfit studio. im not this nerdy at computers and i have no idea what im doing wrong.
Thank you so much for this guide! Was able to finally have beautiful KS hair on my little Serval mage.
I used it to fit KS Hairdos/HG Hairdos on humanoid heads (since they don't fit perfectly out of the box). Of course, all the same tips apply when fixing meshes for humanoid heads!