#mod guides

Say you want to mash up a hair that's viera only with a hair that every other race has, like my longer styled for hire mod.

Find the hairs in Textools, and then EXPORT them as .fbx:

Next, open blender and import the hairs in from the dropdown file menu. It'll look like this. (NOTE THE FILES ON THE RIGHT SIDE! THESE ARE ALL VERY IMPORTANT!)

Now expand the files on the right side so they look like this. You'll be immediately joining the pieces together.

Select from the N_root of the hair you're stealing parts from, and drag up to the N_root you're making the base hair. HOLD SHIFT! Otherwise it'll be a bad boy.

and be sure to have ALL the things under that root node selected like I have it.

It'll drop the hair down to the ground like this. Click the orange box on the right hand menus and then, one piece at a time (don't select them all and try to do it, just won't work) rotate them to 90 degrees.

Next, join the bones together. They're those triangles.

SAVE! BEFORE! YOU DO THIS! Blender likes to crash randomly, but especially with "join" functions.

Select them either on the sandbox, or by holding CTRL and selecting the N_roots in the files.

Now you have one bone for all the hair pieces to work off of. You will have to reassign bones- i will show you later in the guide.

But now, we get to some very very important parts! Discussing node pieces.

First of all, before you do anything- look at their names. Au Ra Male is "1301", Viera male is "1701." I'll be renaming the Viera's pieces to match the Au ra's pieces in a minute, but don't start with that.

Instead, look to the numbers on the right. Those are the NODES. The numbers after the "." are just different parts, but the numbers BEFORE that are the actual different pieces!

0.X nodes will have different TEXTURES AND ATTRIBUTES than 1.X, 2.0 nodes. THIS IS IMPORTANT FOR TEXTOOLS! Pay attention to what pieces of hair are in "0.X" and so on.

But for the X.1, X.2, X.3? As long as they're all on the same node, you are free to join them.

IN A LOT OF OLD HAIRS THEY WILL HAVE A LOT OF PARTS! Feel free to join them if they're under the same main node!

Now, the Viera hair honestly can be one piece. It's got main hair and some fragments. So, I joined them together like how I would bones.

THEN!

I renamed them to match the naming structure (including this green thing in the dropdown) but put them on a whole new main node! (NOTE: see, it's 2.0 now instead of 0.0)

That's MOST of the technical bits out of the way.

Now we focus on modeling the hair. There's two tabs to model under. "Modeling" and "Sculpting."

Modeling is for deleting/moving individual pieces of polygons/deleting entire polygons.

This is the tool I mainly use: Poly Build. It allows me to click and drag polygons by their verticies and make new ones.

If you make new polygons, you have to triangulate your build when you're exporting your save to a new .fbx!

When you have "poly build" on, you can hold "Shift" and delete polygons or verticies.

(If you need to join verticies together, use the select tool and hold CTRL and click on the verticies you want to join one at a time, right click, and go to "merge at center" or "merge at first/last" depending on what you need)

Sculpting is for the entire shape of the hair you have highlighted.

Here are the tools I use in Sculpting:

The top one is "Grab", it grabs onto a vertex and pulls on it SHARPLY, so use it for very accurate things.

However, the other one that I have selected in that picture is "elastic deform." It grabs a VERY LARGE AREA and pulls on it gently, I use it for shifting things around by a large margin.

NOW! Let's say you did everything you want. You deleted, you moved things, you joined things.

Now, assign a bone. The part of the hair we moved from Viera doesn't have a bone anymore! So sad. So go back to "layout" and click the part of the hair the viera hair is on, and go to "Modifier properties"

Ignore the part at the top, just click on "object"'s box and select "n_root" and it'll have bones now.

You did it! Wow, look at that hair!

(results my vary)

Now you save it as a .blend once more, just to make sure it's there in case you fucked up somewhere.

Once you've done that, you're going to save it as an .FBX again.

Name it what you want, untick "add leaf bones" and "apply modifiers", while also selecting "Triangulate faces" if you NEED to- if not, don't bother.

You now have the hair modeled out. This... was only half the journey. Now you need to harvest the Normal and Multi layers of the hair you joined in with your base model and make a new texture.

To navigate to the different texture maps, it's on the upper right.

Remember, Normal files are _n, and Multis are _s

NOTE: TEXTOOLS ONLY ALLOWS FOUR TEXTURES /APPLIED/ ON HAIR. You don't have to delete unused textures, but you can only use four of them max.

Since my hair uses Viera hair 14, I go to Viera hair 14 on textools (note, for midlander based hairs you'll probably have to go to the midlander hair menus for the textures. You will see why in a moment.)

Export these as .dds, extract them from the folder they go to (lower right again) and now go alllll the way up to hair 157 on MIDLANDER.

Even though this hair is being made for au ra, it's ALL based on midlanders! IT'S A CONSPIRACY--

Next you click "more options" on the lower left, and this will pull up. Click the dropdown for "backfaces" and click "show backfaces"

then click the button "use unique textures". After you do that, it should look like this in the menu, and click "save"

You now have a blank texture.

Press "import" and put the _n texture of the hair on the normal, then use the dropdown on the upper right and go to multi and import the _s there.

REMEMBER THE TEXTURE NAME, it'll probably be something like Acc_C or Hir_C!

Once you've done that, it's a matter of uploading the .fbx.

Go back to au ra hair 157, press "import" on the "models" tab, and click your .fbx. Then, don't have any of the boxes checked (unless you are a miqote, then it's UV1 to [1,-1]) and press "open editor."

This is the part where I told you to remember which Root Nodes applied to which pieces of hair.

The base hair is on 0.X and 1.0, so all we care about is editing rootnode 2.0 in this guide.

Go to Rootnode 2, click the dropdown, click custom, then type in the Hir_B or acc_c address you need, then hit import!

BEHOLD, ART

Now you load into game, check if it works. If it does, go to "mods>create mods>basic modpacks" and select the pieces you changed.

Ask or DM me if you need anything else :)