What's causing the dark face bug?

[Frozium]

So I'm facing the infamous dark face bug (dark skin without eyebrows) and I'm going mad trying to find the culprit. Apparently I'm using 1K textures in my 2K face textures, but I don't know which mod I have is adding said 1Ks. Have a look, these are all the mods I currently have in my "Beauty" section in MO2 (it's in reverse btw, starts at the bottom):

Spoiler

+Commonwealth Cuts - KS Hairdos - ApachiiSkyHair
+FOV Slider and Player Height
+Console Util
+KS Hairdos - Addon(s) with Physics
+Ponytail Hairstyles by Azar v2.5a
+Rusty Face Fix Redux 2022
+Advanced Animation Framework
+HiPoly Faces REDUX - 2K Face texture compatibility
+HiPoly Faces REDUX (Seamless Kit - CBBE - TWB - FG - AB)
+CBBE Muscle Map Conversion
+Cridowskin V3 - Seamless 4K texture set for CBBE
+Natural 2K Face Textures
+Fallout 4 High Heels System
+Skeletal Adjustments for CBBE
+Discrete Female Skeleton (DFS)
+Cait and Piper Replacers TWB 3BBB
+TWB VANILLA 3BBB-UNI.1
+TWB NUKA WORLD 3BBB-UNI.2
+TWB FAR HARBOR 3BBB-UNI.2
+TWB AUTOMATRON 3BBB-UNI
+TWB AIO Fallout 4 Armor except raider chest armor
+True Wasteland Body
+Caliente's Beautiful Bodies Enhancer -CBBE-
+PIP-Pad
+Looks Menu Compendium 2k Textures FIXED
+2K LooksMenu Customization Compendium ba2
+RealHD Face 2K - ba2 and guide
+LooksMenu
+BodySlide and Outfit Studio

And in case you want the full modlist and load order, here you go:

loadorder.txtmodlist.txt

Thanks

Edited December 6, 2023 by Frozium

[izzyknows]

1 hour ago, mircislav said:

Google:

Not your friend... anymore, but can be useful on rare occasions.

 

[oblivioner]

2 hours ago, mircislav said:

Google:

https://www.google.com/search?q=Fallout+4+What's+causing+the+dark+face+bug

FYI, only this is needed, rest is tracking stuff for Google.  Also I'd recommend switching to another search engine: at least Bing, preferably something like DuckDuckGo

[Frozium]

7 minutes ago, mircislav said:

That was not my point - that face bug is discussed last 5 years across the web and on LL zillion times... all you have to do is spend 15 minutes of your time to solve the problem and to never encounter it again.

Except I've spent more than 30 minutes trying to find out and navegating those threads. I wouldn't have opened this one if I had found the solution, don't you think?

I know what's causing the issue, I just want help isolating the the culprit, because I've already tried disabling all the mods I thought could be the cause and nothing.

Edited December 6, 2023 by Frozium

[izzyknows]

2 hours ago, Frozium said:

I just want help isolating the the culprit

If I remember right, the root cause is a setting on the nif. Something about high accuracy or maybe it's detail. Not an nif guru. So it's not actually an entire mod per say. It's also why the "fixes" don't really fix the root cause and only sorta kind a work. At least the ones I've tried.
It's also not only overlays, skins and tattoos,  it's also hair mods, eye mods.... But the real root cause is the shitty Bugthesda coding.

Useless tip of the day:

You can have a bad mesh that the game will load without issue, but the Creation Kit will instantly crash just trying to load the mod. Works the other way around too.

[Nuka Cherry]

Your own face and/or NPCs? Can you clear it with "setnpcweight 35"?

 

As a general rule, assume all mod added NPCs and edited NPCs use 1k. So, it is always better to use 1k textures to avoid this conflict.

 

As a second general rule, the most common cause of the 2k/1k mismatch in textures is makeup or eyebrows.

 

 

 

 

[Frozium]

Turned out to be the normal maps and I just skipped the file like a bozo.