Neck Seam Has Defeated Attempts To Fix Please Help

[smokeybear187]

For the past 2 months I have been googling and searching all forums to get rid of this neck seam. No matter what I do, it won't go away. Any help would be greatly appreciated:

 

Pictures

http://imgur.com/a/IxzDA

 

Using:

-Mod Organizer

-UUNP Special

-Bodyslide(latest)

 

Things i've attempted:

 

-New game

-New game+Vanilla game with Ihud Skyui Usleep Alternate Start only

-Custom races/Temptress/Ningheim on new game(seams)

-ENB on/off(Seams)

-Fixtintgamma=false

-5+ different ENBs

-Setting LODBIAS=true, between -0.01 to -4.0

-Adjusting lighting/specularity settings

-Rebuilding the body

-Fresh Install of cbbe to test

-Only use matching skin textures, never mix match

-Demoniac/Leyenda/Fair Skin/ Sg Textures/ ThePure

-Disabling all Hair/Tattoo/Makeup Mods

-"Do it dirty! Fix that damn neck seam"

-Different Locations

-Never used Custom Head meshes, but for testing purposes tried Rans head mesh, ECE Mesh, Downloaded a vanilla head mesh(Seams)

-Extracted my vanilla head mesh, made a mod and checked if there were any conflicts(nothing)

-Deleted all the BSAs in my data folder, verified cache and still had seams

-Checked my Data folder for possible rogue installs(No meshes/textures folders in there, MO prevents this)

-Taking full set of meshes from a follower/NPC Overhaul(bijin) and making a mod(Seams, but my NPCS in game have no seams for the most part)

-Never touched my character with the CK

-Removing mod textures, using only vanilla(Seams)

 

As you can see, I did my homework on trying to work this out on my own before bothering to post, but none of the above has fixed this. Some enbs make it stand out more than others, but it is still there with or without an enb. The only exception to the above was Pride of Valhalla skin textures. With this on, the neck seam is pretty much gone, just a faint trace. But I've played with all of the above textures with no neck seams before, and this started happening randomly.

 

I have attached my plugins and modlist as generated by Mod Organizer. I have around 1400 mods so the mod list is long, but only the mods with a + are active. The Tattoos/makeup/hair mods make no difference on or off with the seams. If there is anything other info i can provide please let me know.

 

Thank you all for any help you can provide!

 

 

 

modlist.txt

plugins.txt

[Roggvir]

Interestingly, i am fighting the same issue, but in Skyrim SE (not sure if that is relevant to your problem in any way).

 

I tried eliminating all variables, one after another - diffuse, normal, specular... until i was left with this image:

 

 

 

..this is latest CBBE body, plain color diffuse, flat normal, no specular.

You might have to zoom in to see it, but the seam is still there!

It's much less visible under those light conditions and with the flat normal and plain color texture, but it is still there.

So, what is left if we eliminated any texture problems? (we did, right?)

I think it's the mesh, the face normals around the seam, maybe it has something to do with how the game "connects" (or rather - it does not) the neck to the body.

Whatever the problem is, adding textures seems to make it more visible.

 

Of course, lowQ/bad/incompatible textures can mess it up on their own - but that's not what's happening on my picture.

[smokeybear187]

Interestingly, i am fighting the same issue, but in Skyrim SE (not sure if that is relevant to your problem in any way).

 

I tried eliminating all variables, one after another - diffuse, normal, specular... until i was left with this image:

 

neck seam (plain diffuse, flat normals, no spec).png

 

 

..this is latest CBBE body, plain color diffuse, flat normal, no specular.

You might have to zoom in to see it, but the seam is still there!

It's much less visible under those light conditions and with the flat normal and plain color texture, but it is still there.

So, what is left if we eliminated any texture problems? (we did, right?)

I think it's the mesh, the face normals around the seam, maybe it has something to do with how the game "connects" (or rather - it does not) the neck to the body.

Whatever the problem is, adding textures seems to make it more visible.

 

Of course, lowQ/bad/incompatible textures can mess it up on their own - but that's not what's happening on my picture.

 

Yes it could be lowQ textures but I don't think it is. Ive tried the compressed and uncompressed versions of the above textures(all highly recommended textures) and still get the same results. I also do not mix them. Have you tried playing with the complexion slider in racemenu? Sometimes the last sliders after the mature settings can be better than the default one.

[Roggvir]

 

 

Interestingly, i am fighting the same issue, but in Skyrim SE (not sure if that is relevant to your problem in any way).

 

I tried eliminating all variables, one after another - diffuse, normal, specular... until i was left with this image:

 

neck seam (plain diffuse, flat normals, no spec).png

 

 

..this is latest CBBE body, plain color diffuse, flat normal, no specular.

You might have to zoom in to see it, but the seam is still there!

It's much less visible under those light conditions and with the flat normal and plain color texture, but it is still there.

So, what is left if we eliminated any texture problems? (we did, right?)

I think it's the mesh, the face normals around the seam, maybe it has something to do with how the game "connects" (or rather - it does not) the neck to the body.

Whatever the problem is, adding textures seems to make it more visible.

 

Of course, lowQ/bad/incompatible textures can mess it up on their own - but that's not what's happening on my picture.

 

 

Yes it could be lowQ textures but I don't think it is. Ive tried the compressed and uncompressed versions of the above textures(all highly recommended textures) and still get the same results. I also do not mix them. Have you tried playing with the complexion slider in racemenu? Sometimes the last sliders after the mature settings can be better than the default one.

 

Me mentioning "lowQ textures" at the end, wasn't the point, my point was all the other conjecture about the mesh causing it

Anyway, yes, i tried all sliders influencing either color, or any kind of overlay - and that screenshot is without any overlays (mature/old/freckles/rough/etc), and with no colors applied to any part of the face.

 

I think, at least in my case, the issue is caused by the mesh itself - by the normals of all the faces (as in tris/polys) alongside edges of the neck, on both body and the head.

Because the head and body are two meshes, the normals on those tris/polys are not smoothed the same way as they could be if the head and body would be one single mesh.

And often any textures applied on such surface make it even more aparent, so with the very best possible textures, you might get close to what you see on my image (barely noticeable seam, but still noticeable), but you can never get rid of the seam completely (not without doing something to the body/head mesh).

Curiously, vanilla females do have the seam, while vanilla males do not (or it is extremely hard to spot) - so there must be something one can do to fix this.

[Lifariz]

Install AIO and don't let anything else overwrite the body textures it gives.

 

Other than that, you guys are stuck playing with the texture color/normals/other texture related stuff.

This might help if you guys use UNP-based Textures: http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/30759/?

The seam would relatively go away, but color mismatch won't so you might need to fix your head textures to fit your body textures.

Edit: Oh wait, you guys are using CBBE? I think you guys might want to just do AIO. Only UNP textures have neck seam fixing using TexBlend... I'm not sure where you guys can get a TexBlend-powered CBBE neck seam fixing.

[smokeybear187]

Install AIO and don't let anything else overwrite the body textures it gives.

 

Other than that, you guys are stuck playing with the texture color/normals/other texture related stuff.

 

This might help if you guys use UNP-based Textures: http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/30759/?

 

The seam would relatively go away, but color mismatch won't so you might need to fix your head textures to fit your body textures.

 

Edit: Oh wait, you guys are using CBBE? I think you guys might want to just do AIO. Only UNP textures have neck seam fixing using TexBlend... I'm not sure where you guys can get a TexBlend-powered CBBE neck seam fixing.

 

I've used AIO and NON AIO with no difference. I use UUNP Special, no cbbe. I'm aware of texture blender, but I'm pretty sure this should not be needed if you use full texture packs. I do not mix head and body textures. Fair skin for example. I use the default FOMOD settings for install, and nothing overwrites it. This full set of textures should be out of the box seamless and would not be in need of texture blending.

[lucilleball]

I've been battling a neck seam issue for months and recently found the solution.

Much of your story seems exactly like mine, but I'll break it down:

Had been using AiO 3.3 UUNP with Leyenda Skin option, no neck seams. Tried other combinations in the AiO installer but all had seams. I had been wanting to change/upgrade to a new skin for a while, but almost every skin I tried besides the Leyenda skin that came with AiO had these slight white seams at the neck.

The only other skin I could install that didn't have this issue was "Pride of Valhalla"
 

I went through every single one of the troubleshooting steps you did, and eventually gave up and went back to the AiO setup that actually worked.

Recently however, Leyenda Skin 4.0 was released, and of course when I installed it, the seam came back.

This time I deduced a few things:

- It is not specific to a particular skin, but most skins

- I use exact same settings (even my ini's are identical) to Leyenda's that he shared on Patreon, and my PC is actually almost identical to his as well
- His doesn't have seams, mine does.

- It becomes much more visible with ANY ENB enabled EVEN WITH ENB GRAPHICS SETTINGS DISABLED (ENBoost)
- It might be something specific to my PC, my monitor or my system configuration

So I loaded up Skyrim without ENB at all and the seam was almost completely gone. Still visible due to how the vanilla post processing sucks, but much less visible than with ENBoost or ENB.

Which led me to deduce that it has to be something to do with ENB, and more importantly, how it works on my individual PC. Also, it couldn't be because of the 'Graphics' of ENB, since when I hit Shift+F12 to disable ENB graphics the seam was still there.

So, I did some google searching like "ENB neck seam" "ENB Leyenda Skin Neck" "ENB Fair Skin Complexion" and I found a little quip on the Fair Skin Complexion nexus page:

 

If seams appears depending on the camera distance, decreasing LodBias setting may fix it.
enblocal.ini
[ENGINE]
LodBias= (-0.1 -- -4.0)

 

I checked my enblocal and my LodBias was set to -0.3, and ForceLodBias was set to false.

I changed ForceLodBias to True and changed LodBias to -1.0, and noticed the seam was slightly less visible. So then I changed it to -1.5 and it was almost completely gone, so I upped it to -1.8 and the seam was fixed. Note that these settings stay enabled even with ENB Graphics settings disabled (Shift+F12)

But there's a downside, objects 10-20 feet in front of you and beyond will be noisy. I can live with that, what I can't live with are those damn neck seams.

I realize you've already tried this fix, but you mentioned you only went as high as -0.4 I think maybe if you try a much higher number you'll notice an improvement.

I'm sure there's some technical, underlying issue why this is happening, and why I'm forced to compromise distant quality with near quality when others have no issues. Maybe someone with better understanding of ENB and post processing could explain why this happens and a proper way to fix it, but at this point I've tried everything else and this is the only thing that worked, and what a "Eureka!" moment it was after battling it since late last year.

Good luck!

[smokeybear187]

I've been battling a neck seam issue for months and recently found the solution.

 

Much of your story seems exactly like mine, but I'll break it down:

 

Had been using AiO 3.3 UUNP with Leyenda Skin option, no neck seams. Tried other combinations in the AiO installer but all had seams. I had been wanting to change/upgrade to a new skin for a while, but almost every skin I tried besides the Leyenda skin that came with AiO had these slight white seams at the neck.

 

The only other skin I could install that didn't have this issue was "Pride of Valhalla"

 

I went through every single one of the troubleshooting steps you did, and eventually gave up and went back to the AiO setup that actually worked.

 

Recently however, Leyenda Skin 4.0 was released, and of course when I installed it, the seam came back.

 

This time I deduced a few things:

 

- It is not specific to a particular skin, but most skins

- I use exact same settings (even my ini's are identical) to Leyenda's that he shared on Patreon, and my PC is actually almost identical to his as well

- His doesn't have seams, mine does.

- It becomes much more visible with ANY ENB enabled EVEN WITH ENB GRAPHICS SETTINGS DISABLED (ENBoost)

- It might be something specific to my PC, my monitor or my system configuration

 

So I loaded up Skyrim without ENB at all and the seam was almost completely gone. Still visible due to how the vanilla post processing sucks, but much less visible than with ENBoost or ENB.

 

Which led me to deduce that it has to be something to do with ENB, and more importantly, how it works on my individual PC. Also, it couldn't be because of the 'Graphics' of ENB, since when I hit Shift+F12 to disable ENB graphics the seam was still there.

 

So, I did some google searching like "ENB neck seam" "ENB Leyenda Skin Neck" "ENB Fair Skin Complexion" and I found a little quip on the Fair Skin Complexion nexus page:

 

 

If seams appears depending on the camera distance, decreasing LodBias setting may fix it.

enblocal.ini

[ENGINE]

LodBias= (-0.1 -- -4.0)

 

I checked my enblocal and my LodBias was set to -0.3, and ForceLodBias was set to false.

 

I changed ForceLodBias to True and changed LodBias to -1.0, and noticed the seam was slightly less visible. So then I changed it to -1.5 and it was almost completely gone, so I upped it to -1.8 and the seam was fixed. Note that these settings stay enabled even with ENB Graphics settings disabled (Shift+F12)

 

But there's a downside, objects 10-20 feet in front of you and beyond will be noisy. I can live with that, what I can't live with are those damn neck seams.

 

I realize you've already tried this fix, but you mentioned you only went as high as -0.4 I think maybe if you try a much higher number you'll notice an improvement.

 

I'm sure there's some technical, underlying issue why this is happening, and why I'm forced to compromise distant quality with near quality when others have no issues. Maybe someone with better understanding of ENB and post processing could explain why this happens and a proper way to fix it, but at this point I've tried everything else and this is the only thing that worked, and what a "Eureka!" moment it was after battling it since late last year.

 

Good luck!

 

Ah the -0.4 was a typo on my end. Yes, setting lodbias=true was done and i pushed it to around -1.0 - -1.20 and it would reduce the neck seam a good deal depending on my enb. Enbs like rudy give me almost no neck seam where as enbs like antique dragon which has alot of sharpening effects make my neck seam pop out. Sadly it has the downside of compromising the distance quality like you stated. Playing with the complexion slider has taken down the neck seam to almost gone too. I don't understand why since in times past when i started a new character the main presets would have to complexion slider at 0 and i would have no neck seams. Now, complexion slider at 0 gives me a seam, and the slider at 4 or 5(Freckles complexion) gives me almost none. I assume that i have some texture installed that is changing the complexion sliders but I don't know what the texture names would be to search it out.

 

I've also read somewhere that setting imagebasedlighitng=false in enbseries removed the neck seam for some, but I haven't tested this. I also have a feeling that this would compromise the look of the enb too much but I've never tried this.

[Guest]

I see you are using SG textures.

I always had neck seam issues with that thing. I switched to either Real Girls or Fair Skin to fix it.

[smokeybear187]

I see you are using SG textures.

I always had neck seam issues with that thing. I switched to either Real Girls or Fair Skin to fix it.

 

I switch between them. SG was on when I posted the logs but I use Demonaic FSC Leyenda SG ThePure Pride of Valhalla.

[lucilleball]

You're killing me here friend, haha. After your post I got back into my nitpicking ways and have lost many nights of sleep over trying to fix my seam. I'm about to say I'm defeated, after months and months and months of messing with this, spending $1500 for a new PC to try to fix it because I thought my AMD gear was messing with textures, learning 3D modelling, bit perfect comparisons of textures, reinstalling 100 times and following every tutorial available on the internet related to "Neck seams" and still no progress.

 

Increasing Lodbias fixes it on some ENBs, but it's so damn ugly when enabled I might as well be playing vanilla unmodded.

I'm giving up, I wish you the best of luck in fixing yours!

[smokeybear187]

You're killing me here friend, haha. After your post I got back into my nitpicking ways and have lost many nights of sleep over trying to fix my seam. I'm about to say I'm defeated, after months and months and months of messing with this, spending $1500 for a new PC to try to fix it because I thought my AMD gear was messing with textures, learning 3D modelling, bit perfect comparisons of textures, reinstalling 100 times and following every tutorial available on the internet related to "Neck seams" and still no progress.

 

Increasing Lodbias fixes it on some ENBs, but it's so damn ugly when enabled I might as well be playing vanilla unmodded.

 

I'm giving up, I wish you the best of luck in fixing yours!

 

I feel your pain. I've spent 2 months trying to fix this and the best fix i've found is moving the complexion slider to the far right, which for some reason gives me the least seam. I find this weird since the base complexion=0 was normally seamless for me, but not anymore. Thanks for your help though, All these suggestions were helpful in their own ways. It might not have solved our seams, but this thread contains a sort of compilation of neck seam fixes that might be helpful for someone else down the road if they stumble upon this thread. If it does, then it at least our troubles weren't for nothing.

[Lifariz]

Wait, before anybody gives up, it's crucial to know whether you're getting the line neck seam(just a thin string of pixels between the neck and body) or the large neck gap(weight problems mostly, you need a compatible head mesh for that) and whether it happens whenever the camera is NEAR or FAR.

I also experience seeing the neck seam whenever the camera is too far during certain lighting conditions (torches mostly) but I don't have problems on most other lighting sources. Do list the conditions you get the neck seam and maybe someone can help you.

I for once cannot get rid of the thin neck seam when the camera is too far for certain lights... for some reason.

[smokeybear187]

Wait, before anybody gives up, it's crucial to know whether you're getting the line neck seam(just a thin string of pixels between the neck and body) or the large neck gap(weight problems mostly, you need a compatible head mesh for that) and whether it happens whenever the camera is NEAR or FAR.

 

I also experience seeing the neck seam whenever the camera is too far during certain lighting conditions (torches mostly) but I don't have problems on most other lighting sources. Do list the conditions you get the neck seam and maybe someone can help you.

 

I for once cannot get rid of the thin neck seam when the camera is too far for certain lights... for some reason.

 

Its a line, no gap. I linked a imgur album with images. The neck seam is visible up close and far. It  tends to be more pronounced when i zoom the camera out. From what i've read if the neck seam is more pronounced the farther the away the camera is, then setting forcelodbias=true in enblocal/in game window and using settings between -0.01 - -0.4 help with this. I found this to be true, but it does not do away with the neck seam and it has the downside of degrading the image quality of your surroundings. The only fix i've found is so far is using the #4 setting in the complexion slider. #0 tends to be too light to match the bodies where #4 now seems to blend in well enough to make the neck seam near invisible. I don't know why this is since i've never mixed textures and only use full sets and this problem persisted across multiple full texture sets.