Dark faces strike back

[dreamzuki]

Ok, it's gonna kill me. AE 1.6.640. Vortex. Large stable (or so I thought) build of mods including Dibella's Blessing, Pride of Skyrim, RS Children Overhaul and Children of the North.

 

Sometimes I could find dark faces but that was rare and they didn't piss me off. But a few days ago a new version of DAR came out, so I finally added some animations to my build and started a new game. And found all the children in Solitude with the same dark bald heads. Angeline Morrad looked the same. Before that, there was only one dark-faced boy in Solitude, and he wasn't bald.

 

So I armed myself with Google and tried to find out what the hell. I found a way to restore facegen data using Creation Kit (ctrl + f4 magic). This worked for me once in the past so I decided not to be too smart and update the facegen data for all unique base game NPC. It was a fatal mistake.

 

At first, all the women and children from the base game were dark-faced and bald, and the men were dark-faced and selectively bald. Then I read more guides and many times uninstalled and installed things back. Now I somehow managed to fix women and they look exactly as they should with Dibella's Blessing. But to fix children and men does not work.

 

Let me summarize:

1. Something happened;
2. With the help of CK I made a small problem universal;
3. I have the final patch that I made using SSEEdit. Everything is ok here, no unwanted overwriting;
4. The folder Meshes\actors\character\facegendata\facegeom\Skyrim.esm (and the same for textures) contains files from the desired mods;
5. When I disable Pride of Skyrim, RS Children Overhaul and Children of the North, the normal (boring and ugly) faces from the base game are obtained;
6. Same for old and new saves;
7. Oh, and of course I tried to return everything to the way it was before installing the animations. Nothing.
8. ????

I'm desperate. I really hope someone can help me.

[scorrp10]

I found a way to restore facegen data using Creation Kit (ctrl + f4 magic). [/size]

Never, ever, ever, ever use that accursed feature! When you do that, you overwrite the beautiful sculpted custom head mesh that came with a mod, with the ugly auto-generated head and vanilla head parts. Then when you deploy, Vortex sees that the mesh changed, it likely will ask you to confirm that change, and if you do, it will save the ugly head to the deployment directory of the mod. Only way to get back the beautiful head is to by fully reinstalling the mod.

 

The folder Meshes\actors\character\facegendata\facegeom\Skyrim.esm (and the same for textures) contains files from the desired mods;

When I disable Pride of Skyrim, RS Children Overhaul and Children of the North, the normal (boring and ugly) faces from the base game are obtained;

No, rather deployment directories of the mods now contain the ugly face-genned heads. If you get NifScope, you can check for yourself. ( There's just a couple steps you need to do in order to make sure NifScope can find the needed textures.)

In any case, you would have to completely reinstall the mentioned mods - meaning Vortex will re-extract the archives and re-deploy the files.

Another variant is that the custom head meshes are in a .bsa - which is how Botoz and TKAA do it. And by generating the ugly facegen heads, they now override the ones in mod .bsa

 

Then, you will need to make sure your load order is right. Easiest checked using SSEEdit.

 

Let's consider one specific example. Pride of Skyrim - Farkas. (0001A692)

If I launch SSEEdit, expand Skyrim.esm, Non-Player Character, and look for formID 0001A692, I see this (I already scrolled properties to the important bit - the head parts)

 

 

This tells me that Farkas is overloaded by USSEP,, and then further by PA44_Companions_NPC, which is one of 'Pride of Skyrim' esps. I also see that PA44 has different head parts. from Skyrim or USSEP.

 

A quick bit about NifScope. Once you set it up, launch it, and go Options - Settings - Resources

You want to go Add Folder, and add the path to 'Data' in your SSE directory.

Then switch to 'Archives' tab, Add Archives - and add all Skyrim - Textures .bsa files under your SSE Data directory.

That should be enough for now.

 

Now, I go to Data\meshes\actors\character\FaceGenData\facegeom\Skyrim.esm and look for 0001A692.nif file. I open it in NifScope, and see this:

 

 

In the upper left section, I already expanded the root (BSFadeNode), and under it, the 'BSFaceGenNinodeSkinned' entry, so I can see all the head parts.

Never mind that in the image, neck is sticking up above head.

What's important, that's the handsome modded Farkas, and the list of head parts in the .nif matches the list of head parts in the .esp.

Well, the .nif has a few extras. Mouth part is supplied by Race. And _zzSDWings1114HL and _HumanScalp are sub-parts of the _zzSDWings1114 part.

 

I bet if you go to that same directory on your PC, and open same file, you will get this:

 

 

Note that head parts there are same as those from Skyrim.esm (and USSEP)

 

The gist: the head parts in the head .nif file of an NPC must match the head parts listed in the highest overload of the NPC form in the esp. (rightmost column in SSEEdit).

If my load order got messed up and USSSEP became higher priority than the PA44, I would get a black face Farkas.

 

You need to:

A. Reinstall the affected mods in order to restore the good head files.

B. Go into SSEEdit and make sure that mods that provide heads have priority.