UUNP-UNP Neck Seam Issue

[tedii]

Hiya everyone,

I have been using this fair skin complexion texture for a while now and really like it. I have come across an issue tho, something that has really been bugging me for a while but I have sort of been putting off fixing it but now am actually kind of bothered to fix it. I have looked over google etc to find a fix but haven't found anything that works yet.

Problem: My characters (elves/orc/human) have a very visible neck seam (yes not a neck gap I know the difference and this is an issue I understand many people have had).

Just some details on what I'm using. Body meshes are UUNP-UNP based but customized a bit. Texture is this fair skin v9.2 of UNP. I don't think I'm using any ENBs or anything.

Does anyone have any tips or tricks they could drop here?

Cheers,
Ted.

[Pauduan]

Without using ENB it's tough to remove the seam, and even with an ENB you can never guarantee a fix. And some ENBs will make it worse.

 

You can try Reshade or SweetFX and play with the lighting to reduce the effect, or try a matte specular map for the skin as the effect is more pronounced for glossy/shiny speculars. FSC is actually not too bad - you can try Graphene or Pure Skin, both of which have somewhat reduced the seams a bit. Far as I remember Mature skin has the best neck merge, but it doesn't really look that great without at least a light ENB (my subjective opinion of course).

[tedii]

Without using ENB it's tough to remove the seam, and even with an ENB you can never guarantee a fix. And some ENBs will make it worse.

 

You can try Reshade or SweetFX and play with the lighting to reduce the effect, or try a matte specular map for the skin as the effect is more pronounced for glossy/shiny speculars. FSC is actually not too bad - you can try Graphene or Pure Skin, both of which have somewhat reduced the seams a bit. Far as I remember Mature skin has the best neck merge, but it doesn't really look that great without at least a light ENB (my subjective opinion of course).

 

Thanks for the reply.

 

So you're saying there is no real fix for this neck seam issue?

[tedii]

I seem to have something that is causing the issue.

 

So I went into racemenu and under the Head tab, there is the complexion slider for different options that overlay the face. I have found that 2 in particular cause the neck seam issue while the others seem to be fine. Does anyone know which files these options in racemenu refer to?

[Guest]

Pauduan is right about harsh  lighting showing up tone differences or seams, and Fair Skin is about as good as it ever gets.

 

Just a thought, do you use a custom race, and if so, does it come with it's own file structure for meshes and/or textures?  I don't pretend to understand the logic behind this, but if the head mesh is in a custom folder and it's pointing to default texture paths, RM seems to struggle with applying specular maps properly. You can see this happening when you first load into RM, they suddenly appear when you go into the face sliders, then you come out of RM, later you save but when you reload you've got a subtle but obvious mismatch between head and body that particularly shows up in bright lighting. Going back into RM temporarily re-applies them correctly again. 

 

Even if this doesn't apply to you I'm putting it out there. A lot of old timers know about this but our newer members might not, and it's like looking for a needle in a haystack. 

 

By the way, this is a technical problem which has it's own section. 

[Neurosphere]

I had the same problem and I also have a big guess what causes it. Please post your complete mod list.

[Guest]

I had the same problem and I also have a big guess what causes it. Please post your complete mod list.

Well if you already suspect you know without having seen his load order, why not share your thoughts anyway? The OP may never come back to us but this is a perennial issue so it might help somebody else.

[RomeoZero]

all the neck seams are either from msn maps or a sk maps.If you installed new body msn texture without its head msn support texture  boom - wrong UV mapping. All races have their head msn maps in diff folders. "Female" follder is a default nord\npc race,other races heads are in respected folders.

"Femaleorc" folder have a femaleheadorc_msn.dds to be overwritten accordingly.

So when you update textures manually,always see what you are overwriting.Make a body reference mesh - copy head\arms\feet nif without skin modifier to the body nif and choose textures in their BSLightingShaderProperty.That way u will always see if the texture UV and lighting are compatible.

[27X]

case in point

 

http://www.loverslab.com/topic/84155-green-bosmer/?p=1999100