Occasional Face Discoloration Using Eeo...

[Sarathis]

I've been having a few issues with Ethereal Elven Overhaul and I thought I'd throw it passed the gurus here on LL to see if a solution could be found. I'm using EEO in conjunction with SG Textures Renewal. I know it causes a neck seam but it's minor and perfectly acceptable to me... most of the time. About I'd say 25-30% of the time elven NPCs have these very oddly discolored face tints that don't match the body at all. For the life of me I can't figure out why. Normally I'd go to the Nexus and try to contact HelloSanta or Nuska about it but Nuska's busy with real life and no longer answering questions about EEO and HelloSanta closed his comments section due to asshats causing drama.

 

I've been trying to see if there's a pattern to the messed up elves to see if it's just one particular group that's messed up or not but so far as I can tell there isn't one. I've seen discoloration with random bandits, necromancers, Vigilants of Stendarr (a lot of these), and vampires. For the record I do have the Dawnguard and Dragonborn addons for EEO.

 

Some of the elves look perfectly fine, like these:

 

 

 

But then you have this nonsense:

 

 

 

I'm more than happy with the top group but the bottom ones are just ridiculous. Has anyone tried running SG Textures Renewal and EEO and come across this same issue? As an experiment I tried taking all of the actual textures out of EEO to just leave the face mesh data but it didn't help. I still got discoloration. I'd appreciate any help or insight anyone might have into this issue.

 

(As a side note, I'm also getting some discoloration in the faces of vampires, though that is probably a completely different problem. I haven't delved far into Dawnguard areas yet so I don't know if it's a pervading vampire issue or not. The only human based vampire I've encountered with discoloration was Hert at Half-Moon Mill. Sadly, I don't seem to have a screenshot of her.)

 

Thanks in advance for any help anyone has to give.

 

 

EDIT: I completely forgot to mention that this facial discoloration ONLY happens on females. Male elves all look fine, which makes me think it might be SG Textures that's causing the issues.

[FastestDogInTheDistrict]

Double check EEO's filepath in case it uses a separate texture folder (I can't recall off the top of my head - I would need to check). Either that or a load order conflict/mod incompatibility, I would think.

[Sarathis]

BOSS tells me the load order is correct and I get no conflict messages with Mod Organizer when I check the mod information. I would think a conflict would make some of the male faces discolor as well and that's not the case. It's possible, of course. Using MO all the folders are compartmentalized and given priority according to your load order, so something may be screwy there, I'm not sure.

[Slammer64]

I have noticed that a few of EEO's face's are discolored, I just open up the CK, find the offenders and use Ctrl-F4 to re-export their face data and that fixes it.

[Sarathis]

I have noticed that a few of EEO's face's are discolored, I just open up the CK, find the offenders and use Ctrl-F4 to re-export their face data and that fixes it.

 

I don't have a lot of experience with the CK, just some playing around to try to make Followers. Do you mind helping me out a bit with it? 

 

I use Mod Organizer so everything has to be run through it or the mods won't be detected because nothing gets placed in the actual Skyrim >> Data folder. So I run CK through MO. Once it's up I hit Open File (manilla envelope icon) then double click Ethereal Elven Overhaul.esp to make it the Master then open up the directory. Once I hit Yes To All a lot I click on the Actor directory in the Object window and it brings up the list of loaded characters. After that I'm kinda lost. 

 

Just to play with it a bit I chose Avrusa Sarethi because I know she's all kinds of screwed up. I double clicked her and, when her information window popped up, clicked the Render Head check field. When she appears, though, her head looks the right color. I can't even be sure that it's rendering her with the EEO information or not. It looks like the vanilla textures, so I'm guessing I loaded it wrong somehow.

 

 

 

 

So, any advice you can offer would be more than welcome. 

 

 

EDIT: Definitely seems to be something weird going on in CK. I'm not sure EEO is loading correctly which is odd because it's showing my armor mods and SG body Texture fine. The face mesh seems like EEO's edit. The screencap below is Dinya Balu, one of the more screwy characters in my game. The lined texture on her face is common with most of the elf actors I've previewed in CK so far. It's even appearing on characters who display correctly in the game such as Faralda.

 

 

 

[Slammer64]

The lined textures on her face are from tintmasks that are not recognized in the CK as being tintmasks, you might have gottten the error that the tintmasks are not 256x256 or some such. As for exporting headmeshs, just use your mouse to select the NPCs in the Actors field of the CK, you can hold down control while selecting to do more than one at a time, then after everything has been selected, just hit the Control key and the F4 key at the same time, it'll ask you do you want to export these, you just say yes, and a few minutes later it'll say it's done.

[Sarathis]

The lined textures on her face are from tintmasks that are not recognized in the CK as being tintmasks, you might have gottten the error that the tintmasks are not 256x256 or some such. As for exporting headmeshs, just use your mouse to select the NPCs in the Actors field of the CK, you can hold down control while selecting to do more than one at a time, then after everything has been selected, just hit the Control key and the F4 key at the same time, it'll ask you do you want to export these, you just say yes, and a few minutes later it'll say it's done.

 

So, I did as you said, loaded EEO as the master then exported a character. I used Dinya Balu again because she's messed up. It did fine but when I started up the game and checked her out the lined tintmasks appeared lined on her face even in the game. I did get that error about the tintmasks not being 256x256, as you said. Any way to fix this?

 

 

 

 

Thanks again for all the help, by the way. You're brilliant.

[Slammer64]

It'll depend on what textures you are using, are you using the SG Renewal textures by chance or the Remove Dirt option in CBBE?

[Sarathis]

I'm using SG Renewal textures, yes.

[Slammer64]

Ok, there is a known problem with SG Renewal Textures, you'll need to remove the Data\Textures\Actors\Character\Character Assets\Tintmasks directory, I assume you're using the UNP version?

[Sarathis]

No, actually, the CBBE version. The tintmasks from SG are affecting the elves? I figured since Hello Santa didn't make anything for elves that the tintmasks only affected humans and orcs. They don't have a plugin, though, for EEO to overwrite... Hrm. 

 

Is this the reason why some of the human vampires are also appearing with discolored faces?

[Slammer64]

Could be...Anything in that Character Assets folder affects all races. One other thing you might try, the CBBE installer has an option to install beauty marks instead of dirt tintmasks, I could never get them to work on my rig, so following the advice on the CBBE forum, I deleted the 3 files that it installs; femaleheaddirt_01.dds, femaleheaddirt_02.dds and femaleheaddirt_03.dds, again under the Data\Textures\Actors\Character\Character Assets\Tintmasks directory.

[Sarathis]

Unfortunately, that didn't work. I removed the Character Assets\Tintmasks directory from SG Textures Renewal but Dinya Balu has the same lined face she does in the last screencap I linked.

 

EDIT: Didn't see your addition about the CBBE beauty marks instead of dirt. I'll give that a try. It works when I create characters using it but it's possible it's messing up NPCs.

 

 

EDIT 2: No dice on the beauty marks tintmasks, either. Same lined face.

[Slammer64]

You may also need to use the Crtl-f4 trick in the CK after deleting those files.

[Sarathis]

I re-exported her face after removing the tintmasks but there was no change. 

 

Sorry, this is proving to be a bit of a pain, isn't it? Thanks for hanging in there and continuing to help.

[Slammer64]

Well, I'm out of ideas now, maybe somebody else has something to add, wish I could have helped more...Hold the fort, I may have one thing left to try, have you installed the Hi-res addon for EEO, if not, try that.

[Sarathis]

I've narrowed down which tintmask files are the culprits, I believe, and which NPCs are actually getting issues but I'll be damned if I can figure out a solution to the problem. After playing around with removing folders from EEO's texture directory then putting them back a few at a time I found that eyes_lower.dds and eyes_upper.dds are the files that are causing the lined texture to appear on the faces. The problem is, if you remove those files the NPCs are displayed with brightly colored foreheads, purple, red, etc...

 

 

 

 

After checking a few of them in CK I believe the NPCs that are being affected are ones that have war paints or tattoos. I tried simply removing the war paints tintmasks but it didn't make the lines go away. Likewise, removing ALL of the textures from EEO entirely does not fix the discolored foreheads. I'm not sure if that means there's something wrong with the vanilla textures or what.

 

It's definitely a problem within EEO, though, not tintmasks from other mods. I just wish I knew what to do about it. I'll look into the hi-res texture pack to see if it makes a difference.

 

EDIT: No, the hi-res textures made no difference. It's definitely a problem with those eyes tintmasks and elven NPCs with face paints. 

[Sarathis]

Update time...

 

I still haven't managed to fix this issue. I'm convinced that I'm correct in that it's all elves with warpaint tintmasks who are being affected and that it's liplines.dds, eyes_lower.dds and eyes_upper.dds that are causing the lined face issue. Those three tintmasks are double the recommended size according to Creation Kit. Reducing them to the recommended 256 x 256 in Photoshop "fixed" the lined faces so theoretically I should be able to just choose every elven NPC with warpaints and reexport their face meshes in CK.

 

Theoretically.

 

The problem is the discolored foreheads, as shown in the screencap I linked above. After checking quite a few characters in CK I've discovered that EVERY human, elf and orc female in the game has that discolored forehead when you open them in CK and I can't for the life of me figure out why. The only way I've found to get rid of the forehead color is to choose each individual tintmask per character in CK and lower the "Interpolation value" for each to 0, leaving only Skin Tone, warpaints, head dirt, and Nord Eyeliner at their given values. Needless to say there's no possible way I can do that for EVERY elf who's affected so that I can reexport each of their face meshes after they've been cleaned. It'd take bloody years.

 

So, does anyone have any advice or ideas about what I can do to fix this issue? Does it sound at all familiar to any of you who have played around in the CK? Since it's affecting all the non-anthro females is there something in CBBE I should be looking at that can be causing this?

 

Anything anyone can contribute to help would be appreciated. I feel as though I'm close to figuring out the real issue but it's still elusive.

[Slammer64]

One last thing to suggest, then I'm out of ideas, you can try the NPC facetint files for EEO: http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/download/105818 but if you're getting the discoloration on all NPC's that tells me you have tint files that are affected all races somewhere.