Seeking help / advice altering a mod (discolored face bug fix)

[Sarathis]

The saga continues! 

 

People may recall from my previous thread that I was having an issue with some elves in my current install getting discolored faces. After playing around with that with some help from the awesome Slammer64, I discovered some painstaking work arounds but it just ended up causing more issues. Reluctantly, I left the issue for the time being and moved on to playing with other mods.

 

What I found was that Ethereal Elven Overhaul was NOT the culprit causing the issue with the discolored faces. I installed Feminine Females the other day in an attempt to reverse the really annoying opposite gender animation feature Bethesda decided to use on a lot of the women in the game. As soon as I installed the mod, however, I started getting discolored faces on a lot of the humans, Gerdur, Delphine, Beitild, Lami, and several others to name a few. The REAL culprit of my face discoloration woes is the mod Decent Women.

 

I use Decent Women as a female NPC replacer as I find most of the vanilla models are godawful ugly and I'm not tremendously picky about lore when it comes to looks. All DW replaces are face geometry .nifs and face tint textures. In all honesty, I'd be happy just using the meshes without the tints as I just want the face shapes altered and SG Textures Renewal does a fine job with the skins. 

 

By simple load order manipulation I found that moving FF below DW the female animations would apply but I'd get the discolored faces. Moving DW below FF overwrote it. The faces returned to normal but no female animations. It turns out that ANY mod which alters the CK ID of certain NPCs would interfere with Decent Women causing the face discoloration. This is why Ethereal Elven Overhaul was causing some of the elves to look like face painted clowns. If I uninstall DW completely all the face coloration issues go away and the women move like women... but the humans have their horrendous vanilla face geometry.

 

 

That was a long summary.

 

 

Anyway, what I'm really asking here is, does anyone know of a way I can have my DW cake and eat my FF animations too?

 

I COULD do what I discovered in the previous thread, go into CK, pick out every single NPC with issues, turn the Interpolation value of every tint mask individually on each NPC down to 0 to eliminate the multi-colored forehead problem I was getting, then use Ctrl+F4 to export their faces. I'd prefer not to because, A. I don't know every single NPC affected, and B. it'd take bloody forever.

 

What I was thinking is, is there a way to alter the .esp files that come with Decent Women so they play well with FF and EEO? Let me state right now that I would NOT release it afterwards. It'd be for my personal use in my own playthrough only. I would be fine deleting all the elf entries as EEO does a lovely job on its own with them. How would I go about doing that? Also, is there a way to perhaps merge DW and FF so they're essentially the same .esps and have no conflicts? I can't say I've ever used TES5Edit for anything other than cleaning dirty edits. 

 

Another possibility I'm thinking would be if there were a way to simply take the .nifs from DW and create another mod altogether with just them. Would I still get the same discoloration if I did that, though? 

 

If worse came to absolute worst I'd be happy to take suggestions on other NPC replacers people use besides DW that would look good. An age ago I tried out Better Females and Coverwomen but they both seemed to clash with SG Textures body.

 

 

Thanks in advance to anyone who actually read all the way through this novel of a post and especially to anyone with any helpful advice to give. It's greatly appreciated.

[Sarathis]

An update, of a sort... I kinda sorta fixed most of the issues I was having but I can't say that I'd recommend the solution to anyone. Still, in case anyone else is having this manner of a problem I'll mention what I did.

 

Basically what I ended up doing was giving myself a crash course on how to use TES5edit. I opened up the program and let all my mods load. Afterwards I pressed the + to open DW Commoners.esp from Decent Women mod then pressed the + next to Non-Player Character (Actor) to extend the list. From there I had to click on each and every entry (NPC) highlighted in Red, indicating a conflict with another mod. Any of the entries that conflicted with Feminine Females I wound up altering the "ACBS Configuration - Flags" entry so that the entry for DW Commoners.esp no longer had Opposite Gender Anims selected. To do this I right clicked the ACBS Configuration - Flags field, waited for the warning to come up and hit "Yes, I'm sure", selected Edit, then unchecked Opposite Gender Anims in the Edit Value menu that popped up. I discovered later that you can simply drag and drop entries from other mods to copy and paste the values from one mod to another. After that I just dragged the values from Feminine Females into Decent Women and things went much faster. 

 

For those entries that conflicted with Ethereal Elven Overhaul I simply right clicked on the entry in the left column and hit Remove to delete the entry entirely from the .esp. THIS WAS PREMATURE! DO NOT DO THIS RIGHT AWAY! Although this removed the entry from the DW .esp, the .nif mesh file was still loading when I started up Skyrim and began playing, so all the elves whose faces were previously discolored were still that way. I had to actually go into the meshes>>actors>>character>>facegendata>>facegeom>>skyrim.esm folder in DW Commoners AND DW Enemies and Wanderers and remove every .nif for all the elves I removed entries for previously. This would have been a hell of a lot easier if I'd done so while the entries were still in TES5edit right in front of me. As it was I had to try to cross reference with EEO's entries and I still think I missed a few.

 

I did the above steps for both DW Commoners and DW Enemies and Wanderers and it basically took me hours. In the end I THINK I fixed the problem. I did a couple tests with both an active game and a new one. From what I saw all the women had female animations and only one or two of the elvish NPCs had discolored faces. I'm still attempting to isolate and fix those but it should be a lot easier now that they're few and far between. For the moment I've left Feminine Females active as I'm not sure if every female with opposite gender animations is present in DW but it may not even be necessary anymore. DW loads after FF in my load order and there appears to be no conflicts between the two anymore.

 

At any rate... it's been a long haul and I'm not certain if I've completely fixed it or not. There may be some random encounter NPCs who still have discolored faces or walk like apes in the game. I guess we'll see as I play more. Hopefully if anyone has any kind of issue like this one my painstaking directions above will help them out.