After a bit, my character turns purple

[Anunya]

So I'm building a new modlist, and have gotten well into it.

 

Now when I'm testing the list, I run around for a bit but once I undress my PC her skin textures turn purple (body, face, hands, feet). Since my character starts out with the correct textures I'm assuming it isn't a missing textures issue but some sort of VRAM thing?

 

I've gone fairly heavy on texture sizes in the world, but with a 4070 I wasn't expecting that to be a problem

 

Does anyone have a link to a good guide to troulbeshoot this, or some hints about things to check or settings to change?

 

Is the main thing I should do just use lower res textures across the board or are there some other settings that should be tweaked somewhere?

[traison]

When your character is purple, open RaceMenu and save a preset of it. Open the jslot file in Notepad and find all references to dds files. Query your mod manager for which ones are missing.

[anjenthedog]

if you happen to already be doing what @traison suggested (or have tried other things to no avail) and are still repeatedly having to fix your player as it goes p[urple again and  again, maybe install (and execute) NiOverrideClean

 

I had that issue for years (~mid late 2019 through early this past spring 2025) and nothing seemed to actually fix it, until I loaded the aforementioned mod (and ran its MCM payload)

 

basically 

1. install mod
2. open game and save you want fixed
3. open NIOverrideClean MCM
4. click the 'clean' button (can't think of what it's called but it's the only actionable item)
5. make new save immediately
6. exit game entirely

 

Have not had even one incident of the player body going wonky since. it used to be routine during playthroughs on cell changes, equipping and unequipping slot-32 clothing/armor,  etc.

 

Also, you'll need to fire it on any unique player incident, and it probably only "permanently" fixes the save in which it was run and save made from that specific vector (so don't be surprised if you cough up some really old save and see purple again, since that save file would never  have been "treated/inoculated"

 

Edited June 27, 2025 by anjenthedog

[Wast1980]

"After a bit", do you mean at first all is fine, but after while it turns purple? If so, are you using the mods Slavetats or Wetfunctions or another mod which dynamical change skin overlays? Then you might miss some requirements.

If you are editing skin textures yourself, be sure to use BC7 Linear compression, sRGB is not supported:

[RedHeadAngel]

I had this same problem. Even after digging through everything (RaceMenu, my skin replacer, tattoo mods, etc.), I never found the problem. I had to reinstall everything, but the reason for that is unrelated. I haven’t had this issue since, though.

[Anunya]

On 6/29/2025 at 7:36 AM, Wast1980 said:

"After a bit", do you mean at first all is fine, but after while it turns purple? If so, are you using the mods Slavetats or Wetfunctions or another mod which dynamical change skin overlays? Then you might miss some requirements.

If you are editing skin textures yourself, be sure to use BC7 Linear compression, sRGB is not supported:

 

When I say "after a bit" I mean that I'm starting the game, but still hanging out in the Skyrim Unbound starting area setting up my game.

 

As I'm setting up, I remove my player character's clothes and suddenly she turns completely purple.

 

Even more weirdly, as I'm doing it right now and once I removed her armour she turned purple (it hasn't happened for a few days, but now it did). But next I put the armour on and took it of, and then the body slot texture came back. Same thing happened with the feet and hands (after equipping boots and gloves and removing them).

 

This leads me to believe it's not a path issue (since the texture is there), but some sort of memory allocation thing? Is there some place I can increase allocations to texture maps or some other setting I should change? I've been fairly generous with texture resolutions in this mod list, so maybe that's the issue?

 

Also thanks for the tip re: textures. I haven't been editing skin textures, but I've been looking at tweaking a few other textures and I never knew what the right setting was. Now I do

[traison]

6 hours ago, Anunya said:

This leads me to believe it's not a path issue (since the texture is there)...

 

What texture? Did you do what I suggested in my first post in this thread?

1. What overlays did your character have? Do they all exist? Are they using a dds format commonly used around Skyrim like BC7? Are they of a sane size, i.e. 2^n squares?
2. What overrides did your character have? Do they all exist? ...
3. Are there any invalid overlay or override entries, such as one with no texture assigned to it?

You're most likely looking for a missing or invalid overlay or override. These both show up in the RM preset as I suggested.

 

6 hours ago, Anunya said:

...but some sort of memory allocation thing?

 

Doubt it. Memory allocation issues would be more like:

1. Null pointer CTD. Might happen if you're entirely out of memory, but you'd get massive amounts of other problems long before this happens.
2. Garbled data from an uninitialized memory area, which *might* show up in a texture as random color pixels.

Edited July 9, 2025 by traison

[Anunya]

17 hours ago, traison said:

 

What texture? Did you do what I suggested in my first post in this thread?

1. What overlays did your character have? Do they all exist? Are they using a dds format commonly used around Skyrim like BC7? Are they of a sane size, i.e. 2^n squares?
2. What overrides did your character have? Do they all exist? ...
3. Are there any invalid overlay or override entries, such as one with no texture assigned to it?

You're most likely looking for a missing or invalid overlay or override. These both show up in the RM preset as I suggested.

 

I have not yet done what you suggested in this thread. My first working theory after posting the message was that I'd gone too gangbusters on high res textures. I installed VRAMr and after the first few minutes the issue hasn't cropped up yet. If it does, however (I'm about to spend some time with the game right now), I'll follow the steps you outline (and also thank you for that, even if I don't use it now it's a great diagnostic process I can likely use in the future).

 

To answer the questions - the textures that were missing were the skin textures - I'm using Lovergirl at the moment.

 

In terms of overlays, I haven't applied any at all myself. The character was the first default vanilla female preset (I was testing other stuff, so didn't change the character at all).

 

That said, I may have a mod that dynamically applied an overlay with issues.

 

17 hours ago, traison said:

 

 

Doubt it. Memory allocation issues would be more like:

1. Null pointer CTD. Might happen if you're entirely out of memory, but you'd get massive amounts of other problems long before this happens.
2. Garbled data from an uninitialized memory area, which *might* show up in a texture as random color pixels.

 

You're probably right. I think that was a case of me using a technical term without fully understanding what they mean.

Edited July 10, 2025 by Anunya

[Anunya]

Well... I can report that VRAMr did nothing. After a few moments of switching bodies in OBody, the character went all purple. Curiously, when I open racemenu, the head texture came back.

 

I saved the character as a preset and am looking at the json file to find the .dds files on the character - I've attached it here (as a txt) in case anyone is interested in looking at it.).

 

I am not sure how to query my mod manager (Vortex, by the way) for which ones are missing, however.

 

 

Also

WTFIishappeninghere.txt

[Anunya]

In continued updates, I installed NiOverrideClean, and it did not fix the issue.

 

However, using @traison's method I looked at the jslot file and saw that SpankThatAss NG had a dds listed in the overrides. I disabled the mod, and so far (~30 minutes in) haven't seen the (whereas before it manifested within a couple of minutes). I'll have to figure  if I can get a version of Spank That Ass that doesn't have this issue (assuming it doesn't crop again up as soon as I post this, of course ) 

 

I'll update the thread if the issue crops up again. Conversely, I'll update the SpankThatAss NG thread once I'm more confident it's the issue (i.e. the issue doesn't show up for an extended period of time).

 

Thanks for the help!

Edited July 10, 2025 by Anunya

[Siudhne]

On 7/10/2025 at 8:28 AM, Anunya said:

Thanks for the help!

Thanks, I had the same issue. 👍