Generating facegeometries in CK, are the DDS and TGA files junk?

[AWHA]

I've searched all corners of the internet, yet no one seems to have a definitive answer. When you use Ctrl+F4 in CK to generate face geometries for custom NPCs, it creates a bunch of DDS and TGA files along with the meshes. I've heard people say that the TGA files are not necessary, but what about the DDS files? Will deleting them cause performance issues?

 

I know that generating face geometries is needed to prevent performance issues, so I want to know if the DDS and TGA files are also somehow needed to prevent slowdowns and stuttering. Any ideas?

 

The only discussion I've found on this topic seems to be this very short thread:

 

[Alter Native]

You need the dds it's an additional texture layer above the skin, it holds stuff like freckles or warpaint. 

You can throw the .tga away.

[AWHA]

22 hours ago, Alter Native said:

You need the dds it's an additional texture layer above the skin, it holds stuff like freckles or warpaint. 

You can throw the .tga away.

Thanks. Does the CK create these face textures based on your texture resolution? If I have 2k faces installed, will these textures cause the dark face bug?

[Alter Native]

It's independent from your texture resolution as far as I know, but I don't know which settings to change for the .dds resolution, sorry.

[Carreau]

The CK is going to create a diffuse, a normal, and a spec map.  I've found that the diffuse and spec maps look empty, but that's due to the alpha channel layering.  If you open the _d and _s files in an image editor, you can hide the alpha channel, and the face textures are there.  They house all of the facial features that Alter Native mention.  I use Valkyr face textures and have not had issues with dark face bugs.  Another thing to note, the CK generated files also lack mip mapping that is typically present in DDS files.

 

After I posted that original thread oh so many eons ago, I did a few builds of my mod where I removed the CK generated texture and NIF files, and my end users never reported problems, but none of them ever reported if the faces lacked details either.  I eventually went back to including them due to the way it disrupted my workflow when packing archives to remove all of the files.

[AWHA]

2 hours ago, Carreau said:

After I posted that original thread oh so many eons ago, I did a few builds of my mod where I removed the CK generated texture and NIF files, and my end users never reported problems, but none of them ever reported if the faces lacked details either.  I eventually went back to including them due to the way it disrupted my workflow when packing archives to remove all of the files.

 ? so after all these years, the best answer seems to be "definitely maybe include them, but no one will complain if you don't" ?

 

I recently switched to using 2k face textures, and still get the occasional brown face bug due to mismatched texture resolutions (not to be confused with the dark face bug, which occurs when facemorphs inside the esp don't match with the face mesh). Hence I'm trying to track down any texture issues I may have.

 

And yeah, there are plenty of mods on the Nexus that don't provide exported face textures, yet no one has reported any issues. This whole thing is clear as mud ?