[solved] Softbody causing dark face and distortion bug on follower

[Sp4ceSpectre]

I've been trying to set up softbody on my 1.5.97 installation and it works except for one of my custom followers in particular. I have other custom followers, they all use vanilla heads to avoid issues I've had with High poly Head. Most of my followers work, but one of them seems broken. She loads fine but after initiating a scene with sexlab she will get the dark face bug and her face is all distorted. It looks to me that the game is trying to load the wrong head, but all of my followers use the vanilla head and she is the only one with the problem.

If I load the character preset as the player it works completely fine, there is only an issue with the follower. I have tried clearing out the character slot and resaving it but that didn't work. For reference, I am using Familiar Faces. I know this is an OLD mod but Proteus was giving me MAJOR issues while FF seems to Just Work.

I tried messing with the different FOMOD settings that may affect the head, and obviously I have been building my bodyslide files too. When I disable the entire mod and fix my bodyslide files it works, it only breaks when softbody is enabled.

Any suggestions?

edit: Unrelated to softbody. I had a facegeom data error.
Deleted the character's exported jslot file in chargen/Exported and resaved custom follower.

Edited September 14 by Sp4ceSpectre
solved

[traison]

Since you said this starts after a SL scene I would look at this with More Informative Console. Gather all head related information from before and after then play the "find 5 differences" game.

[Sp4ceSpectre]

On 9/10/2026 at 11:41 AM, traison said:

Since you said this starts after a SL scene I would look at this with More Informative Console. Gather all head related information from before and after then play the "find 5 differences" game.

I've looked through most of the menus and have only found the textures which seem fine. Do you know if there's a section with mesh information that I'm missing?

[traison]

My guess then is going to be that during a SL scene that character's race changes. MIC will show this information too.

[Sp4ceSpectre]

7 hours ago, traison said:

My guess then is going to be that during a SL scene that character's race changes. MIC will show this information too.

The race is remains set to nord. I've spent many hours looking into this and I might just have to go without softbody which is unfortunate. 

[traison]

7 hours ago, Sp4ceSpectre said:

The race is remains set to nord.

 

Is that the race name or the race editor id?

 

Nord = "Nord"

CustomNord = "Nord"

 

Otherwise I would have to see this problem for myself to figure it out. The brown face bug happens when the facegen records do not match the records that were used when the facegen mesh and textures were made. There's this workaround, but personally I would prefer fixing it properly.

[Sp4ceSpectre]

16 hours ago, traison said:

 

Is that the race name or the race editor id?

 

Nord = "Nord"

CustomNord = "Nord"

 

Otherwise I would have to see this problem for myself to figure it out. The brown face bug happens when the facegen records do not match the records that were used when the facegen mesh and textures were made. There's this workaround, but personally I would prefer fixing it properly.

I ended up finding the facegeom data for that character and it looks like there was some corruption or mixup that specifically affected softbody. Simply saving over the file, even with a different appearance, didn't fix it so I deleted it and saved a fresh copy. Not sure on what happened there but I got it to work.

[traison]

2 hours ago, Sp4ceSpectre said:

I ended up finding the facegeom data for that character and it looks like there was some corruption or mixup that specifically affected softbody. Simply saving over the file, even with a different appearance, didn't fix it so I deleted it and saved a fresh copy. Not sure on what happened there but I got it to work.

 

Well done. 👍