Hmm.. very interesting! Thanks for looking into that DP. Even if we were unable to change the vertex count on base heads, we would still be able to sculpt a new custom head in zbrush or whatever and then use a max plugin like Wrapit to fit the base head to the sculpt without having to change the vertex count. It would require some cleaning up but it should be pretty straightforward and I'd certainly be up for it. And for half orcs, we could definitely use a cheat like combining the tusks to a scalp model/hair models. I like it!

Remember it's not just the raw number of vertices, but the actual IDs for each as well. Can that plugin properly assign vertex order as well? That would be pretty awesome if so, but I can't say I've ever heard of something like that. But then I've never had much to do with Max.

Leaving that aside, I still think getting them into the morph system may be problematic. We could attempt to replace the Qunari with the Half-Orc and the kid/child with either the Halfling or Gnome, but that would leave us one shy. Not to mention that neither the Qunari or kid are options in the vanilla in-game char creator - is it even possible to modify it to include them?

Hmm, no, the plug-in would just be like manually moving all of the verts into the correct position along the surface of the custom head. I don't know how it would affect vertex ordering (as I know nothing about vertex order). But it wouldn't change the number of total vertices. And it's easy to do.

Cuv's looking into the 2da entries to see what he can find.. is there anyone else on BSN or somewhere who may have some inkling as to how we could add new options to the char creator?

I can't see it working without the proper vertex order. If in the original mesh vertices 1-10 are around the mouth but in your mesh those are around one of the ears, well you'll end up with some weird and wonderful distortions.

Unless you mean that the plugin essentially morphs a copy of the vanilla head to fit the shape of a custom mesh, without actually physically altering it. That should actually work, as long as the shape isn't too extreme.

Hmm... I can do my best to manually move the vertices on the new mesh where they were on the base head. I would have tried to do that anyways to prevent myself from having to do extra weighting work on the Skin modifier. Should turn out pretty well, I think.

Interesting. It seems there is a plugin for C4D that will change the vertex order of one mesh to match that of a second mesh. So in theory there may be similar plugins for Max. And if not, we could always try a bit of file swapping between apps and see if the vertex order holds up. Only one way to find out I guess. Make a head with the same number of verts and a similar topology and we'll see what happens.