Skyrim [SE] - Eyes progressively morph out of shape whenever a save game is loaded or showracemenu is opened.

[Derpakiin]

Hi everyone, this is a problem I've been dealing for a long time now. Every time I load a game or open showracemenu, the player's eyes will gradually and progressively morph out of shape on its own, and it appears the only fix is to reload the head morph to put the eyes back into shape. 

 

Does anyone else have this issue and is there a fix for this?

 

Here is the first load of the morph, everything looks correct before I exit showracemenu.

 

When I open showracemenu, or load the save, the eyes look a little out of shape

 

On subsequent loading (showracemenu or a save), the eyes move further out of shape. 

[belegost]

Check Eyeball Depth slider in Eyes tab.

[Kastagir]

Looks like the eyes are being moved forward with each reload of the morph (.tri) which happens whenever you open Racemenu and presumably when you load your save.  I've seen something similar happen using a mouth/teeth mesh replacer and there is bad or mismatched transform data.  In that case the mouth mesh would move every time I changed the mouth part in Racemenu, eventually moving outside the head mesh.  You can try changing the eye shape slider back and forth to see if it resets but it may just exacerbate the problem.  You can also try clearing sculpt data in the sculpt tab with only eyes set to editable to see if that resets them, assuming you didn't sculpt them intentionally at some point.  Otherwise you can just reload the preset.  

 

To solve this problem you must look at which mods you have installed that might be replacing the eyesfemale.nif and associated .tri files.  Verify that you downloaded the one that is compatible with your other mods that contain morph (.tri) files (e.g. head mesh replacer, expression mods, chargen morph replacer, etc.)

Edited June 1, 2025 by Kastagir

[Derpakiin]

On 6/1/2025 at 4:08 PM, Kastagir said:

Looks like the eyes are being moved forward with each reload of the morph (.tri) which happens whenever you open Racemenu and presumably when you load your save.  I've seen something similar happen using a mouth/teeth mesh replacer and there is bad or mismatched transform data.  In that case the mouth mesh would move every time I changed the mouth part in Racemenu, eventually moving outside the head mesh.  You can try changing the eye shape slider back and forth to see if it resets but it may just exacerbate the problem.  You can also try clearing sculpt data in the sculpt tab with only eyes set to editable to see if that resets them, assuming you didn't sculpt them intentionally at some point.  Otherwise you can just reload the preset.  

 

To solve this problem you must look at which mods you have installed that might be replacing the eyesfemale.nif and associated .tri files.  Verify that you downloaded the one that is compatible with your other mods that contain morph (.tri) files (e.g. head mesh replacer, expression mods, chargen morph replacer, etc.)

Thanks for the suggestion. I haven't come back to this but I'll post what has happened since in case someone else is looking for a solution:

 

It appears that having multiple eye mods can cause this problem. The issue is that:

 

1) Different eye mods come with their own unique .nif shape and .tri files.

2) These unique shapes deform and transform differently.

3) Switching from a modded eye to for example, a vanilla eye will cause a mismatched transform data, causing the game to mis-read the vanilla eye as the modded one and trying to apply a modded transform data to the vanilla eye, causing it to move each time. 

 

I've uninstalled all eye mods and kept mods that only affect textures. It stabilized the issue. 

 

I am also trying out Complete Vanilla Eye Overhaul (CVEO) by LDD which has their own modded .nif and .tri files, but it seems the modder is starting a new eye framework which separates the eye from the eyelashes which helps with fixing potential mesh issues in the future. For now all transforms are applying properly and it seems compatible with the vanilla eye shapes, but I'll monitor if the same issue comes up again.