Apachii hair, Facegendata and the sweet mystery of life

[aerynn]

I know I'm doing something wrong, but I have no idea what it is...

 

I am trying to do something quite simple that I have already did before: since some Skyrim characters have aestetical issues but most "cosmetic" mods that alter NPCs are too much "beautification" for my tastes, when the CK came out back in the days I made a couple of plugins in which I tweaked some NPC appearances (yes, plugins as in plural, I made one for each DLC instead of having a single one) changing hideous beard styles, facial paints, jutting mandibles buit keeping the characters looking like themselves. I exported the facegendata, no grey face bug, everything was nice, everything was cool, life was perfect.

 

Then, one day, I decided "what if I tweak hair also and add some nice Apachii skyhair on people?" HA! Little I knew... Some characters I edited showed nicely the new manes I gave them, but others didn't and they got the grey face bug, as if the I didn't export the Facegendata. Now, I have recently switched to Mod Organizer and I'm SURE I'm doing something wrong with it, but I can't figure out WHAT. In addition, saves with the modified plugin keep crashing (yay), so I basically have a very limited statistic over what went good and what went bad (basically only the characters I modified in riften which are about a dozen)

Now, before you ask:

• Yes, I DID export the facegen data
• Yes, the plugin remembers what kind of Apachii hair I gave those characters.
• No, the hair doesn't appear in game: they are rendered with vanilla aspect + GFB
• Yes, I ran the CK through mod organizer and moved the plugin from the overwrite folder into my mod
• The mod is in the bottom of both load order and priority lists

Now, I don't think it's exactly a MO issue or I'm using it wrong, I am more prone to believe that the problem is in Apachii's meshes, since they are like... strange even in the facegen data nifs: some appear huge, others appear several feet over the head. Also, only SOME of those hair give this problem (like ApachiiMHair04, 06, 47, 50, 53 and ApachiiHairM11) while others appear correctly in game (like ApachiiMHair10 and 26).

 

Since I have SEEN mods that use Apachii hair and seemly run without much reported bugs... what am I doing wrong? Should I edit the hair/facegen meshes somehow? I have looked into this problem for two days but I haven't found something like that happened to anyone, does somebody have an idea of what's going on?

 

PS: I have reverted to my backup of the plugins I edited in the non-apachii version overwriting all, I should redo the plugin to give you examples of what happened, but I can do it quite fast, I still have notes on what hair I gave to whom I'm just a couple of keys away on reproducing the issue: I already tried redoing it and the behavior of both CK and game is consistent: gray faces, vanilla looks, boring life.