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Probably a Newbey question


bhorton22

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This is probably a question that has been asked in the past and answered, but if it has I cannot find anywhere in these forums or through google that answers it, so....

There is a 'glitch' that shows up on the face of the female characters in oblivion (see screen shot), just below the nose. I have tried everything I can think of to remove it but I am not sure what causes it. Can someone tell me what causes this and if it can be resolved. (I know if I install head06 then it is resolved, but I don't want to use this mod at the moment).

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It's there, just below the middle of the nose, above her mouth. It appears on all female characters from standard GOTY oblivion (no mods loaded except IFT - which doesn't cause it as I removed the mod to make sure). I was just hoping that someone can remember how you fix the problem.

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If you mean the slight but barely noticable oddity in vertex normals between the nose and the lips, that's part of the head mesh. Can't be fixed unless you use another (or a fixed Vanilla, haven't yet seen any though) head mesh.

 

There are a few oddities like that in the Vanilla meshes, like superfluous hidden polygones floating somewhere inside the surface, and they make editing them a pain, as deleting or merging them alters the vertex count and order and renders the EGM and TRI morph files useless.

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OK, but is it the head mesh itself that is the problem or the normals? (the _n.dds file). Also, it seems that most do not see or even notice the glitch, but if your graphics card and screen resolution are damn good then yes you can see it, very easily.

Edited by bhorton22
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It is the head mesh. A mesh consists of vertices (points in 3D space) and polygones (here triangles spanning between 3 vertices). The vertices also have a so-called 'normal vector', sometimes also 'vertex normal', which is used to define the perpendicular 'up' direction for the surface. If you have all 3 vertices' normals pointing into the same direction in parallel, you will have a flat surface. But if they're slightly pointing outwards or inwards, you can create the effect of a 'bent' surface and 'smooth' edges between them.

 

What you mentioned, the "..._n.dds" files going along with the regular textures, are so-called 'normal-"maps"'. They have nothing to do with the vertex normals or normal vectors though. But they're doing something similar as vertex normals just 'within' the polygon. Normalmaps can create the effect of 'structure' on the physically flat triangle surface. It's a little like 'carving' heights and depths into the plane.

 

Without 'light sources' to create highlights and shadows though you won't ever be able to see the effect of either, vertex normals or normalmaps.

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Since this thread started I've been looking up close at all the female faces. I'm pretty sure that I *don't* have this glitch. Or at least I can't spot it. I'm using Oblivion GoTY ed. (with the UOP 3.4.3 mod, if that matters). In my spartan list of mods there's nothing that alters the NPC bodies - as far as I know.

What's the OP's game version?

Edited by Foina
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