Patching High Poly NPC Overhaul (SSE) to remove dirt

[Antiope_Apollonia]

So, I'm pretty novice when it comes to modding.  I have a basic knowledge of SSEEdit and have made a few small patches for things, but my skills are quite limited.  I'm always keen to learn, though.  

 

I'd like to figure out a way to patch High Poly NPC Overhaul to remove all the dirt.  I really like the mod overall as a baseline NPC overhaul.  It covers everything, both male and female, and mostly they look really good.  They're a lot less anime-esque and more realistic looking than a lot of the other popular NPC overhauls.  But the bandits are dirty—way too dirty.  A sizeable fraction of the hostile NPCs have a lot of facial dirt, and no matter how many times you bathe your slaves, it won't wash off!

 

So, for starters, how ambitious of a project would this be?  Is this the kind of thing that'd be obviously simple to an experienced modder, and I'm just ignorant of the technique to do it, or is this a challenging project regardless?  Is there a way that I can batch edit that value for all NPCs with some kind of script?  And can you even edit dirt in xEdit, or would that require using the Creation Kit—which intimidates the shit out of me, to be honest?

 

Thanks in advance for any guidance!  

[bnub345]

Skyrim stores all of the data for NPC heads in facegen files, both a mesh and texture file. The name of the files is the base id of the NPC they are used for. For instance, the level 1 Nord female bandit has a base id of 39cf5. So the facegen texture has the file path textures\actors\character\FaceGenData\FaceTint\Skyrim.esm\39cf5.dds. The dirt face textures are baked into these facegen files. So to get rid of the dirt you would need to know the base id of every NPC you wanted to change and then generate a new facegen texture.

 

You could do this in the CK, but it only supports native resolution textures, 512x512 or something awful like that. If you try to export a facegen with high res textures, it bugs out and prints a red rectangle across the NPC's face. The best way to do it would be by using racemenu and using its export options. Of course this process would take a lot of time and effort.