SG Female Texture looks abnormal

[M3galodon]

Hello Everyone,

This is a long post as I want to include all relevant informations so bear with me (you can skip the intro though).

 

Intro:

I've been playing Skyrim for a few months now. I've spent two weeks modding it the first time and played about a month, I wasn't very happy with it so I uninstalled everything and started from scratch again. I've spent another two weeks modding it, this time I followed the RealVision ENB as a guide for installing all textures and visual enhancements. I've also added plenty of other mods for various aspects of the game. I used the RealVision ENB both times.

I'm having a very frustrating experience with the SG Female Textures Renewal by hellosanta. I love the face normal map and I have Skyrim Beautiful Followers which is dependednt of the SG texture mod, on top of that this is one of the best UNP body texture mods so changing to a different body texture is not an option.

My problem:

The body texture looks as if my character has a skin disease, it looks spotted and dirty, especially in low light conditions as can be seen in the screenshots from the attachment. I had the exact same issue with the SG textures when I modded skyrim the first time which makes me think the issue is with the SG mod.

 

 

I also have the Jessica Alba follower mod which uses different textures. Her body texture looks perfectly fine in exactly the same conditions:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Screenshots showing all mods installed, load order and the female texture folder. I can upload anything else if required.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What I've tried so far (Prety much everything I can think of):

1. Checked load order with boss and followed the install instructions in the description of each mod
2. Tried various textures, issue is only with the SG Texture
3. Made sure there are no extra files in the texture folder
4. Tweaked various ENB settings, no improvement
5. Tried different sk.dds files
6. Uninstalled and reinstalled the texture mods

I'm hoping that you'll be able to spot something that I haven't, I've been bashing my head for days as I can't get this resolved. Any help will be greatly appreciated, thank you very much in advance!
 

[Sailing Rebel]

The SG textures are pretty good but do suffer under certain circumstances. A pale skin under ambient lighting, particularly in shadow, really gives that unnatural glow that highlights the otherwise reasonable colouration. If you have a mid-to-high-end GPU you could try turning on Ambient Occlusion in the ENB settings (SHIFT+ENTER by default) which can greatly reduce this effect. But be warned, AO will absolutely murder your frame rate, you will be running hot.

 

If you're feeling up to it you could always try copying the body textures from the Alba mod to the default locations in your Data folder, see if that works.

[Deedlit]

agree with sailing rebel, try testing with others enbs or light effects, belive its that.

[Shadowhawk827]

Sailing is right about the pale skin and lighting issue.  a 2 setting on skin tone is as low as I'll go on a Breton or Nord because of that.

 

As for the main problem...  It looks to me more like your character has freckles or beauty marks.  I use a freckles overlay, so I'm having a hard time remembering if the SG textures base files have much in the way of them. :|

[M3galodon]

Thaks for the info guys. I've tried some of these steps but I only managed to briefly test the solutions.

 

The SG textures are pretty good but do suffer under certain circumstances. A pale skin under ambient lighting, particularly in shadow, really gives that unnatural glow that highlights the otherwise reasonable colouration. If you have a mid-to-high-end GPU you could try turning on Ambient Occlusion in the ENB settings (SHIFT+ENTER by default) which can greatly reduce this effect. But be warned, AO will absolutely murder your frame rate, you will be running hot.

 

If you're feeling up to it you could always try copying the body textures from the Alba mod to the default locations in your Data folder, see if that works.

 

I'm running a high end GPU, (4GB GTX 770). Ambient occlusion was already on switching it off did improve my frame rate by a factor of 5-10 FPS, however to me the skin looks better with AO off. In my case the skin color looks less saturated thus more realistic and the marks on the sking are less visible.

 

agree with sailing rebel, try testing with others enbs or light effects, belive its that.

 

I'll install "ENB FXAA SweetFX Manager and Remover" and try a bunch of ENB's to see if I can isolate the issue to the ENB.

 

Sailing is right about the pale skin and lighting issue.  a 2 setting on skin tone is as low as I'll go on a Breton or Nord because of that.

 

As for the main problem...  It looks to me more like your character has freckles or beauty marks.  I use a freckles overlay, so I'm having a hard time remembering if the SG textures base files have much in the way of them. :|

 

The SG textures come with a few options and I was using the smoothest one. I downloaded a fresh copy of the mod and checked all textures in Photoshop. There is no freckles option, basically all textures have the same base to which the author added extra effects like scars. I'm using the one with no effects at all.

 

I've also installed the mod exactly as the author provides it, overwritten everything and ran BOSS again just to be sure. The issue is exactly the same.

 

 

So, I will test a few other ENB's tomorrow. Any other suggestions, anyone else encountered a similar issue and was able to resolve it?
 

[M3galodon]

 

 

I'll install "ENB FXAA SweetFX Manager and Remover" and try a bunch of ENB's to see if I can isolate the issue to the ENB

 

 

I've tried a different ENB today (Project ENB, the Realistic Preset) and now the skin looks perfectly fine, so the issue is with the ENB.

I'll try to find a fix for the RealVision ENB and I'll post back here if I find a solution. I'll start by using a different RealVision Preset.

 

If anyone has a suggestion you're more than welcome to share