What causes this somewhat tame but annoying skin bug? [Skyrim]

[shunter]

I'm not sure why but I can't upload images to LL right now (it gets stuck in the uploading process), but the bug I'm talking about is basically when you load a save and your character's body (not the face, though) is 'gray' but not because its colour changed, but rather because it's suffering of a weird 'lightining'' glitch, where if you look at your character's body from certain angles it goes back to normal, and it keeps 'shifting' back and forth between gray/black/normal in different parts of the body as you move the camera. I have never seen anyone discuss this glitch (to pin a cause and how to avoid it/fix it once and for all). In my case, if I load up a save and notice that bug, every single female character in my game is affected by this, not just my character. I can even see this bug before I actually load the game if I get one of the vanilla/default loading screens where it shows a female character that show any amount of skin (usually the arms).

 

The way I fix it is by simply rebooting my game (though, sometimes I get this bug multiple times in a row so I have to load up my game, undress my character to see if she's affected by this bug, then if so, reboot).

[Yuni]

It's based on texture memory. I know that some Skyrim memory fix patches allow an increased allocation of memory and reduce the frequency of this error, but if you get black/grey textures across female bodies, it's likely because your Skyrim install ran out of allocated memory while loading up all the textures.

 

It primarily occurs on females most of the time because let's be honest, more people mod their female textures than their male ones, so that's usually the bug you see. Many female skin texture mods have very high-resolution options for you.

 

Sometimes rebooting it fixes it, and using a lower-resolution or lower-quality texture compared to the one that's breaking will ALSO help reduce the frequency of this bug.

Remember: Even if  your computer has the RAM count of the gods, Steam only lets Skyrim allocate so much memory, normally.

 

Hope that helps. <3

[Pauduan]

If it is what I think, it's a texture problem, usually I fix this by running DDSOpt or Ordenador on the body textures.

 

This sometimes happen when you switch to an unoptimised texture, or save it without mimaps after a texture change (for example after using TexBlend).

 

It is best described as bunch of grey/black triangles overlapping the body texture. Of course, without a picture it could be something else too.