[Help] The dreaded neck seam.

[dragonzero39]

I'm running into a neck seam that's driving me insane. Normally I run COSIO (Clams of Skyrim) HD, Fair Skin Texture, CBBE, and the patches for those things. It's never been a problem.

Today I started a fresh install of everything, but the neck bones on COSIO didn't align between the head/body. I removed COSIO, and again ran into issues with discoloration along the neck lines and bones.

 

In these pictures below, I only have CBBE installed. Nothing else for female body types. I don't think COSIO or fair skin baked anything into my data folder.

I've tried texblend, I've tried sculpting a mask to fix the lines, and I've tried a  fresh install of only CBBE on Vortex, and the BlankDetailMap from Fair Skin. For some reason it's not going away. 

 

Either I'm crazy, and a small discoloration like this has always existed, or possibly something actually did get baked into Vortex/Steam.

 

If anyone has experience with this, I would love some help.

 

When looking at the picture, the main issue comes along the left side neckbone, and the left side neck.
https://imgur.com/gallery/sXU7Isp

[Sgt. Marge]

Does the neck seam persist if you remove all clothing?

[dragonzero39]

It does persist regardless of clothing. I've rebuilt everything in bodyslide a few times. It almost seems like possible minor size/weight differences that might cause the discoloration. Each attempt at texblend has made it worse.

[Sgt. Marge]

I could never get texblend to work quite right either.  everything always became a mess of tans and browns.

 

My other suggestion is to search your mod folders to see if you have multiple femalehead*nif files, double check which femalebody*nif files are taking precedence within your mod manager.  Sometimes, weirdly, armor mods get female body nifs included whether by accident or purposeful, and if those are taking precedence over the body you built / armor built it could mess things up.  What I like to do is build the body again so it has a recent date and time stamp on the file and then search.  You may even be able to see in vortex if files over being overwritten easier than searching with windows, it's been a while since I used it but I think it has a conflicts feature?