[LE] Extremely large follower mod suddenly not linking its facegeom

[ReallyDazed]

I've been making my own follower mod for almost two years now and I continue to add groups of new followers to the same esp. I was up to over 200 when I decided to use a High Poly preset for the next batch of followers. I added High Poly as a master and used its KL script - not thinking it would change all the existing followers but just added the morphs. I made the next batch of followers and went about starting another playthrough.

 

When I got to the respective areas of....any....of my followers. I noticed every single of one of them with the exception of two newer followers were all missing their facegeom and had black faces. They did have the hairs I assigned them though.

 

I disabled any new skin or morph mod I could think of and that didn't work. I checked the Creation kit if allllllll the facegeom data were suddenly given different IDs but that wasn't the case. I tried exporting one follower to see if it turned into a new ID, no. I merged the newer mesh with my preset again with a single character to see if something went horribly wrong and forced me to have to merge them all again, but no. That follower was still black face. I started a new game to see if the build I was using screwed with the meshes, but no. Of all the followers, two new High Poly followers had their meshes and It made absolutely no sense why their other HP counterparts did not work as well.

 

The most confusing bit about this situation is that even if it was HighPoly parts causing the issue on my low poly followers -- why are my new High Poly followers affected. And how did two make it out ok. The deviations of batches of followers is large but within the batch, it could simply be different hair, eyes, and skin color. Nothing else changes. These two followers that work fine do not have the same skin color or hair, one has KS hair, the other has SG hair.

 

I tested the HP part theory and quickly changed the parts in SSEdit of some low poly followers back to lowpoly parts and eyebrows but no, nothing changed.

 

This is draining trying to figure out what broke. Does anyone have any ideas.

 

 

EDIT: I was able to fix my newer followers. Apparently their eyebrows were causing the issue and were carrying over their actual eyebrow for the mesh when it should've been a default brow and all but 2 didn't merge correctly.
Now for the glaring and gigantic issue after that. What broke the old followers, because their meshes were all perfect before. Ugh this is going to really suck. I'll continue to update this post until I find an answer so others can reference this if they run into the same problem.

Edited August 29, 2021 by ReallyDazed