Hawthornmon

Thank you for replying. In the mean time I found a guide to use Outfit Studio, Blender and SurfaceTool/ModelingCloth to vertex paint facegeom.nif of custom npcs. It's the guide for Citrus Head conversion to high poly, though it works for this head just as well. The only issue right now is that you can't use Blender 2.8, as the required Blender addon works only with 2.7. The dev promised to release it later this year for 2.8, so custom NPC head porting is possible for noobs like me, if somewhat tedious. I am using the high poly head for my male PC and he looks fabulously smooth with his fluffy beard. I'll switch to expressive animations .tri later on as vanilla expressions are just awkward in comparison. Your facegeom.nif is overwritten in the vanilla location, especially if you're using Mod Organizer or similar. The facegeom.nif in your mod folder is overwritten so backups are absolutely mandatory. DDS is not overwritten but mostly it doesn't work for me as intended. I had to reinstall a couple of mods to restore the nifs.

I am a big fan of high poly head meshes. Jaggy jaws nevermore! I have combined a couple hundred humanoid NPCs in merged esp files with mostly vanilla head parts for the head, brows, and eyes (the directories for nif and tri are vanilla), and custom hairs (independent KS Hairdo's, and SG Hair). Is it necessary to manually resculpt all facegeom.nif of custom followers (gathered from anywhere I could find; cleaned in SSE xEdit) in Racemenu after switching the headparts to High Poly? I did not quite understand that part. I fumbled in CK and the result was the same for Ctrl+F4 of custom followers as MrManMain's case - a vanilla potatohead with high poly count without face shapes. I am using these scripts to try again to deep copy as override starting from the vanilla esm, working my way down the load order to override with SOGS and JH Skyrim faces for females. Hopefully this will work. Edit: I used KL Filter Race.pas successfully on vanilla NPCs (overridden by JH and SOGS overhauls), but applying KL Swap Headparts.pas results in this error: Exception in unit UserScript line 750: [09000806] < Error: Could not be resolved > Error during Applying script "Skyrim - KL Swap Headparts": [09000806] < Error: Could not be resolved > This is where the keyword is applied in the script. Also, if I am generating new facegeom.nif for NPCs, do I replace their .tri files or not? TRI files should not impact the base nif, right?