Gray Faces

[Monsto Brukes]

Sigh, yeah yet again...

 

Here's the thing tho: It's every female face. After months of this being viable with no problems, not to mention years of gray-face-free play (had it once about 6mos after game release), I now have this problem pop up. I'm not sure exactly when it happened, but it was during the half-day where I was trying to figure out how to make zap sliders in bodyslide . . . which seems excruciatingly unrelated. 

 

I've done more than this, using Mod Organizer, but these are the higher-level things I've done that over-write a lot of general tips.

• used a blank profile and incrementally added stuff.
• incrementally removed stuff starting with the newest.
• searched both the MO and vanilla Skyrim directories for 00*.nif and 00*.dds.
  There was nothing newer than 1 yr old in the MO dir, and nothing at all in skyrim/data.

• Spodum mannequins are always grey, even after I've rebuilt facedata. (there was never a problem before)

• At some point while adding mods, all the rest of the faces go gray.

I've got a "simple" profile (with very few mods loaded, most of which are utility like font change, hardcoded key tweaks, skyui, borderless window, etc.) and a full profile (with ~130 mods, mostly armors/outfits). Even when it's base as hell, spodum mannequins are greyface, even when player/npcs are not. 

 

I have built a personal "sovngarde" that is my home space. I copied the original and removed all the scripty bullshit. I have put in mannequins from SPODUM with my own Chicks 4 Spodum. I then hand-placed a few name females from the game using creationkit. I have rebuilt facedata for both of these mods. I'm using my own bodyslide creation (NSFW: FFW body)

 

ALL female faces are grey. Therefore, it seems less likely that rebuilding facedata being the solution than there's some global file that's either missing, overwriting, or changing everything. 

 

So my question here is . . . well a solution would be great, but I'd settle for just a couple of thoughts on things to try, places to check.

 

Thoughts?

[Guest enip]

When ever I get dark faces from vanilla NPCs, it's always due to my load order and not my mod list in mod organizer. In order for me to have SBF work with IOS, I have to put IOS esp and the USKP compatibility plugin below SPF esp. Otherwise I'll get dark faces for the vanilla followers. So I would take a look at your load order and make sure what ever mod is being effected by the dark faces, change the load order.

[Monsto Brukes]

When ever I get dark faces from vanilla NPCs, it's always due to my load order and not my mod list in mod organizer. In order for me to have SBF work with IOS, I have to put IOS esp and the USKP compatibility plugin below SPF esp. Otherwise I'll get dark faces for the vanilla followers. So I would take a look at your load order and make sure what ever mod is being effected by the dark faces, change the load order.

 

What are these acronyms? I have no idea what any of these things are (except npc).

 

Also, I've gone back (using MOs profile backups) to load order before I started fuxoring with Bodyslide, back to a time beofre i had the problem. . . and the problem persisted.

[Gameplayer]

SBF is Skyrim Beautiful Followers,

IOS likely to be another Follower mod.

 

Getting gray face when combining more than one NPC overhaul happens, and as the previous poster said its likely a load order issue with the ESP's.

 

I had an issue recently with NPC's of Dibella where all the female vampires had a grey face, plagued me for a while.

Well of course I checked which meshes and textures were where and of course looked at what overwrote what.

I looked through and compared the ESP's in TesVedit.

 

Had the problem for weeks,

Just yesterday night, decided I was going to do a Vampire Playthrough....

So got the vamp infection and when my character turned she looked ugly as sin....Off to download a no ugly vampire face lift mod....

Well once I got my player characters face sorted out, I went out adventuring and what do you know....

 

The issue I was having with Vampires was gone.  It was basically a missing texture map for the female vampires that NPC Dibella likely didn't have packed.....The faces were not gray colored in mine, they were brown....I was basically missing a normal map and texture that the overhaul was probably designed around.

 

So

 

Check

Mod Order and Overwrites,

Load Order of the ESP's

Open the Pluggins in TesVedit, look for overwrites there.

 

After all that, its likely coming down to files being outright missing.

[Monsto Brukes]

Welp, I had a backup from May 7. I went back to that and everything works as expected. Your suggestion was top shelf troubleshooting. Thanks.

 

After 3 days of beating my skull on this shit, and somehow not overwriting my oldest backup, your suggestion of load order had me go back.

 

So now, since i have a working one and a broken one, I can run a diff/compare on them and see where the problems lie.

 

Thanks.

[Monsto Brukes]

 

Check

Mod Order and Overwrites,

Load Order of the ESP's

Open the Pluggins in TesVedit, look for overwrites there.

 

After all that, its likely coming down to files being outright missing.

 

I don't use any follower overhauls. I use Extended Follower Framework, but it is follower free. 

 

I use coverwomen faces and a custom body skin. Even putting those last (with all their layers) didn't fix it. 

 

I'm not sure where the problem lies, but thanks to all the shit I looked at, it's got to be distributed somehow.

 

As i said in my previous post, going to a 3wk old backup (not terribly different) fixed the problem... so the load order suggestion was what was needed.

 

Thanks for your reply.