Ada Head Swap Mod (Updated)

_____Know what I like about these mods? They all taste different!
This one tastes like a mix between macaroni salad and strawberries.
Have you ever eaten macaroni salad after putting it in the microwave?
Have you ever eaten macaroni salad WITH the microwave? Man, that
plastic really adds to the texture! Dee-lish!
_____Ah, kiddin'! These parts-swap mods are GREAT because they
allow more options for a sort of character creation. This many
Resident Evil games, and we STILL don't have CREATE-A-SURVIVOR.
But... With individual head mods, hair mods, and body mods?
Yeah, we can change parts all around and craft our own creations
from parts of other people's creations! Thanx!

Are you using the cutscene + zombie animations mod with it? Try it without that mod. Also, you could try extracting the animations mod to use it as a folder-mod and deleting the following files from it:

\Ada Head Swap Mod - Cutscene and Zombie Anims\natives\x64\objectroot\prefab\character\player\pl1000.pfb.16
\Ada Head Swap Mod - Cutscene and Zombie Anims\natives\x64\objectroot\prefab\character\survivor\actor\pl1000.pfb.16

You probably only need to delete the first one. This is usually only an issue if your game is out-of-date.

A lot of work went into this mod. First it was just an experiment to see if I could do it, since nobody else had so far and I had tried and failed to do it once before.
If anyone wants to know how I created Ada Head Swap Mod, this is how:



Geometry:

1. I imported Claire's and Ada's heads into 3DS MAX

2. Detached Claire's neck from a bit below the chin

3. Took the detached Claire neck and did Create -> Compound Object -> Conform tool to wrap it around Ada's neck (with head still attached). Many attempts at this didn't work but eventually I found one method that wrapped pretty nicely, with a few vertices off-kilter that I had to move and correct manually.

4. Converted to editable poly and deleted the polys of Ada's neck underneath the wrapped Claire neck

5. Target-welded the vertices at the stump of Claire's neck to the base of Ada's head

6. Went in to UVW Unwrap and target-welded all the vertices together to close all the jagged holes
in the UV maps

7. Manually rearranged the UV vertices so nothing was distorted, using a checkerboard pattern projected on Ada's head (UV Ch2) for reference

8. The conformed Claire neck was not exactly the same size / shape as the real Claire neck, so again I had to detach it around the middle of the neck and weld it to a real, unchanged copy of Claire's neck. Fortunately the polys and UV vertices matched up easily since they were just two Claire necks, one slightly misshapen.

9. I had to make Ada's pupils be part of her face mesh instead of part of her inner-eyes mesh, as they were becoming all strange and distorted on export (they were shaped like little Antarcticas)

10. As I was using version 0.2 of the script for perfect rigging, I had to apply the uroboros-fix EXE to the exported head mesh. You can find it on the RE Modding Discord.


Skinning:

1. Took copies of a detached Ada head and a detached Claire neck and skin wrapped them both to Ada's head, so they would share Ada's single skeleton and could both be used as skin-wrap objects

2. Used SkinUtilities to extract the skin data from the actual Claire head, then deleted the head part from the SkinData mesh leaving it just as a neck (same size as my detached Claire neck wrap object)

3. Imported the skin weights from Claire's SkinData neck mesh back to the Ada-wrapped detached Claire neck, so it would have Claire's skin weights while on Ada's skeleton

4. Skin-wrapped the newly-created full Ada Head Swap head mesh to the detached Claire neck + detached Ada head, with the two detached meshes only overlapping eachother by a few polygons. Also the pupils mentioned earlier had to be detached from the eyeballs and made into a third wrap object.



Neck Seam:

1. I combined the pl2050_face_albm, pl2050_face_nrmr, ATOS and wetmask textures with their pl1050 counterparts (both base Claire and Arison_C) using this method in Photoshop.

2. Ada's skin was still too dark even with the blend, so I carefully feather-selected her skin and used Adjustments -> Curves to make it much lighter, keeping it in the background layer

3. Performed numerous other feather-select -> copy + paste / Curves adjustments using layers from official face_albm files for Arison_C and base Claire

4. Added a feather-selected layer of skin-pores created from detail_skin.nrm to fade in from the base of the neck on her normal map, to blend with the skin pore DetailMaps used on most mods.

5. Loaded my newly-created albm textures into the Material Editor in 3DS MAX and assigned them to a copy of my Head Swap mesh, then exported it as an OBJ file with the "export material library" option checked

6. Loaded this OBJ file up in Photoshop and used the 3D Projection painting feature to clean up any seams and funny looking areas, clean up dirt, and fix stretched looking UVs by using the Spot Healing Brush. Spot Healing Brush also helped make the blend from lighter colored Claire skin to Ada's darker skin on her head look more natural. Ada had some weird textures on her left ear that I fixed using the clone stamp tool, cloning from the other ear. I also darkened the eyebrows (which were lightened too much before from the Curves) using the Burn tool.

7. When exporting my final skinned Ada head swap mesh, I first attached the Classic Tank Top body to it and averaged normals with the body attached, then detached the body and kept the Edit Normals modifier. This preserves the normals across the neck seam and greatly reduces its appearance. I did the same for another copy of the head mesh with a body by Arison_C, for the version of the head to blend to his mods.



Mod Structure

1. I created a sectionroot folder called pl2550 for the Ada head swap mesh and all the Ada head swap files, structured exactly as the real pl2050 Ada head folder.

2. I hex-edited the real pl2000_face_costume_7.pfb.16 costume file from objectroot to have it load its MESH and MDF files from this pl2550 folder, then edited the pl2050_01.MDF file inside pl2550 to load all the Ada textures from there as well.

3. Created an alternate version of my modified PFB costume file that said to look for its MESH and MDF in a folder called pl2551, where I put the Arison_C variant of the mesh as well as any textures for blending to his bodies that were different from the ones in the base mod.

4. Hex edited a copy of my modified pl2050_01.mdf file to load these different textures from the pl2551 folder, and similarly placed it inside pl2551.

5. Now I could create mods for replacing Claire heads on different costume slots with either version of the Head Swap mod by renaming either of my PFB files to "pl1000_face_costume[x].pfb.16", with [x] being 1-9 or A-C depending on the Claire costume slot.

6. I created a batch file that would automatically create pl2000_body_costume duplicates of any pl1000_body_costume_[x].pfb.16 file you dragged and dropped onto it, to replace every one of Ada's PFB body costume files with whatever Claire PFB file you dragged, thereby loading that Claire body for real Ada. Then the batch file would ask if the mod was default or Arison_C, and create duplicates of my modded face PFB files and rename them as pl2000_face_costume to match all the body PFB files it just created. It combined all these body and face PFBs into an objectroot/.../pl2000 folder, which you could then put in your FluffyModManager folder and install it like a normal mod.

Yep that's about it, besides screenshotting, descriptions, writing readmes / modinfo.ini files and packaging it up as RARs for distribution.
That's all it took to create this mod. EZPZ 

Sure, what?

There are several mods that swap red-dress / trenchcoat Ada over Claire so you can play as Ada in Claire's campaign, but none of them have working cutscene facial animations as far as I know.
I saw on her Discord that mangakagirl was working on a version of Ada's head that could do all of Claire's facial animations:


I learned how to do this as well (by renaming the submeshes of Ada's face to match up with those of Claire's in 3DSMAX and then exporting over Claire's head instead of Ada's), but I opted not to use it for the Ada head swap mod. It made Ada always emote like Claire outside of the cutscenes as well, and I felt like it just didn't look like her; it looked like Claire wearing Ada's face. If I could figure out how to make it like that for only the cutscenes, I would (and maybe I can - I just got an idea). But instead I just decided to use the modified cutscene animations where the expressions are made all slow and lethargic, so that I could preserve the genuine Ada look during gameplay while not having the eyes pop out of the head during cutscenes.

I got it to work but her face is still static in cutscenes