Help with black lines on mouth during facial expressions after LE>SE conversion

[Apahguinsimo]

Using a custom race mod that I converted from LE to SE, every time I use a facial expression the mouth mesh goes crazy, vertical and horizontal black lines take turns shooting out of the mouth. It doesn't seem to happen with most facial expressions from the base game, but it happens with any expression added by a mod, such as Facial Expressions project. How can I fix the mouth? I've exhausted many options: numerous tutorials on converting meshes from LE > SE, running the meshes through nif optimizer, Cathedral assets optimizer, and other optimizers.

 

Here is what it looks like, and here is the mod file if anyone is interested further, greatly thankful for any help I will be.

 

 

Black bars emanating from the mouth when using facial expressions:

 

Spoiler

 

 

Zoomed out:

 

Spoiler

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

mrracese.rar

[Aylis]

Pictures don't show...

[Apahguinsimo]

8 hours ago, Aylis said:

Pictures don't show...

Oh yes I forgot imgur and LL have a blood feud, fixed the links

[Apahguinsimo]

Has anyone encountered this before? I've spent so much time looking up solutions and tutorials that at this point, short of learning 3dsmax, I don't know where to go next. The lines appear when using facial expressions which leads me to believe it's the mouth mesh, and this race does have a mouth mesh. But it also has .tri files, and I don't know if the .tri files are part of it, or even the cause of it, or how they interact with nifs, or if tri's need to be converted to SSE as well. Any suggestions at all, especially from anyone who has converted assets like this from LE > SE before, would make me greatly grateful.

[anjenthedog]

crop your image to the area of concern, then save it as a compressed jpg. (Paint dot Net, a "free" - optional donation not "required" - photo editor, will do that very easily) that should keep you within the file size limit for a direct post. Beyond that I can't offer any advise (and I suspect few can)  since you're not showing what you're talking about.

You can compress down to ~86% before it compromises the quality of online imagery

[Apahguinsimo]

Hmm I thought the second picture showed the problem clearly, but I see what you mean with the first and third. Are you saying the images don't show at all due to file size? I can see them myself in my post so I'm a bit confused, they are saved as .png's which are only barely larger than a jpg and jpg's are so small you'd have to post dozens of them to hit any file size limit that I know of. I will add another spoiler with cropped images to show the problem very clearly, here and in the op.

 

 

These black bars coming out of the mouth when using facial expressions:

Spoiler

 

 

[anjenthedog]

I saw no such images when I wrote my post. There were no spoilers, just a comment from you about imigur and that "you couldn't upload images" or something to that affect. Sorry if I missed them first time.

 

No certainty, but it reminds me of the days when I fooled with  meshing (long before Skyrim and unrelated to gaming) when a non closed surface could result in that sort of behavior during rendering of the texture *although it was a cad thing and they didn't call them textures..., can't even recall the term used at the time, its been so long) . I downloaded your file but couldn't see any such deviance when viewed from NifSkope so idk. 

[Apahguinsimo]

Thank you for looking at the file, unfortunately I don't know enough about mesh editing to contextualize mesh editing outside Skyrim. I haven't much considered that it could be a texture problem, I've been so focused on it being a mesh issue. Back to the drawing board for now.

 

I'm hoping someone who has converted races, characters, or any meshes at all from LE > SE might happen by and give some suggestions or just observations on what they think is happening in those screenshots. Even any suggestions on a discord to visit that might have answers could be helpful, I've visited several including the Nexus discord but with no solution.

[anjenthedog]

Hmm... idk if it's a texture problem or a mesh problem (or even something else). Last time I screwed with meshes (wireframes) directly was in the 1990s.

 

Have you tried asking over at Nexus? If not, it's worth a shot. 

[mouton18]

I had a similar issue when playing with bones and weight slider in the past, corrupting shadows that looked like your screenshot. 

[Apahguinsimo]

On 2/25/2021 at 8:33 AM, anjenthedog said:

Hmm... idk if it's a texture problem or a mesh problem (or even something else). Last time I screwed with meshes (wireframes) directly was in the 1990s.

 

Have you tried asking over at Nexus? If not, it's worth a shot. 

 

I haven't tried the Nexus, the modding support forum is a ghost town where threads routinely go for months, years, or eternity with no reply. 

 

15 hours ago, mouton18 said:

I had a similar issue when playing with bones and weight slider in the past, corrupting shadows that looked like your screenshot. 

 

Tried everything I can think of, new textures, messing with weight and bone sliders, everything short of switching out meshes which of course cannot be done. Not only is there no fix, there seems to be no change at all when changing these things. The problem continues as shown above

[anjenthedog]

8 hours ago, Apahguinsimo said:

I haven't tried the Nexus, the modding support forum is a ghost town where threads routinely go for months, years, or eternity with no reply. 

 

A certain number of posts both there and here go unanswered.  

 

I have posted many many times here and received no reply whatsoever. I have posted many many times on nexus and received no reply. In fact, when it comes to queries, my hit vs miss ratio is about 10:1 for either site.  "Bump" can sometimes trigger a response after a post slides down to near obscurity.  But in the end it's up to you, both to form a cogent question and to provide sufficient detail for others to assist you. 

 

My last advise,  go ask in the CBBE conversions thread here on LL. Maybe those with a targeted interest in conversions can help you. 

 

[Apahguinsimo]

On 2/27/2021 at 8:35 AM, anjenthedog said:

 

A certain number of posts both there and here go unanswered.  

 

Of course, speaking from my experience of asking incessant questions, my rate of 0 responses is vastly higher on nexus than LL. Heck one time I had an issue with a mesh and a respondee here on LL downloaded the mesh, fixed what I was trying to do, and sent it back just like that. The thing is that modding has changed over the years, the Nexus is no longer the, umm, "nexus" of modding like it used to be. Its forums don't get visits from actual modders like they once did, as modders have spread out to other places - Discord, Patreon, and other sites like LL or GUN. Thus the Nexus support forums are mostly people who need support while almost anyone able to provide support has moved elsewhere.

 

I will check out the CBBE conversions thread now, I like this idea.

[Apahguinsimo]

in the rare case that someone has this problem in the future, I figured out a solution. It's not 100% perfect but it works. Extract Skyrim's Mesh .bsa files with a bsa extractor and find the mouthhumanf.nif file under \character\. Take that file and use it to replace the mouthhumanf nif that came with the custom race. Then I ran FNIS again and the mouth works with facial expressions without the black lines everywhere. You can use mouthhumanf.nif files from other mesh replacer mods but most of them froze the game when using expressions, and some don't fit the mouth perfectly and may have blank spots inside the mouth.