EYES for BETTER HEADS

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 also 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.  This is Morrowind behavior and there's nothing to be done about it.  (On PlanetElderScrolls the most common comment was "They don't look at me!  Can you fix this?"  The answer is No.)  Personally, I think this is realistic, as people tend not to look you straight in the eye all the time anyway - if they did, it'd be creepy.  (Don't believe me?  Try it on the subway.)

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