Resource:Using facebones on armors that cover the face for Fallout 4

Using facebones on armors that cover the face for Fallout 4 is a resource guide written by Blaze69 and BlahBlahDEEBlahBlah and transcribed by Wanaming0.

Info
You can use "FaceBones" nifs to adjust facewear to fit non-default faces. Usually, mod armors will clip with faces that have proportions bigger than the default Nate/Nora face, because the bones that modify the face in character creation are not the same bones as the regular skinning.

You can make your own faceBones NIF by copying the weights from a vanilla one, like the Surgical mask faceBones NIF (\Meshes\Armor\Raider02\Raider02MaskM_faceBones.nif and Raider02MaskF_faceBones.nif) or whichever faceBones NIF that fits best for the kind of mask/helmet you are making.

The thing is the ArmorAddon needs to include a specific bit of data to let the game know a "_facebones" version of the nif exists. There are two methods to do this, you can do it with the Creation Kit or with xEdit. The first method I recommend the most as it is quicker, does it in bulk, and has less chances for mistakes. The second method can be used for checking if everything went well.

Creation Kit method
To do it in the Creation Kit, go to "Character" and select "Update FaceBones model Availability". It will update every **linked** ArmorAddon (as in, an ArmorAddon that is being used in an ARMO entry). This method will **NOT** give you any confirmation message to know if it worked or not.
 * IMPORTANT: This method only works if the NIFs have been packed into a BA2 archive, not loose!**



xEdit method
In the model field in xEdit right below where the standard nif path is there should be an "Unknown" field (MO2F and MO3F); you'll want to type "01" in it, that's what enables _facebones nif support. You can check the vanilla AA for the surgical mask for reference.

In this example below, the "Mask_Hood.nif" and "Mask_Hood_F.nif" have a "Mask_Hood_faceBones.nif" and "Mask_Hood_F_faceBones.nif" respectively in the same folder.

License
This tutorial is under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Credits

 * Blaze69 for the original response from which this transcript comes from for the xEdit method.
 * BlahBlahDEEBlahBlah for the Creation Kit method.