Help with Ren's Beauty Pack (face / neck seam)

[Dent0n]

Hi guys, I'm not very comfortable with Oblivion modding but I managed to get the following combo working:

 

Ren's Beauty Pack

Better Bouncing Boobs

HGEC

Hi-res Skin Textures for HGEC (Ren's Mystic Elf pack)

Coronerras Maximum Compatibility Skeletons

Pretty Woman (sexy walk)

 

I thought it would be fun to go around the world of Oblivion with it's ugly people as a super-hot vixen on my 2nd playthrough. Yes, these mods are childish but I got them to work pretty much.

 

What I need help with is, no matter how many times I try and create a pretty face for my character, it always comes out blotchy and haggard. The neckline is also a different colour to the torso. I've uploaded a pic so you can see:

 

http://imgur.com/uundIs.jpg (click for full size)

 

I have set the "age" slider all the way to the left and it still comes out looking like she smoked 2 packs a day for 30 years. :(

 

Hope you can advise me on what I am doing wrong, oh and hello it's my first post. :) Thanks for listening.

[LFact]

She may look OK in game screen(not in menu), though it may depend on lighting. And, even if you can do fine tune for skin tone, neck seam cannot be eliminated completely. If you don't feel to live with it, put some necklace on your character.

[Dent0n]

She may look OK in game screen(not in menu), though it may depend on lighting. And, even if you can do fine tune for skin tone, neck seam cannot be eliminated completely. If you don't feel to live with it, put some necklace on your character.

 

Ahh, thank you. I guess I can live with it. But I have discovered another problem, when choosing Ren's Mystic Elf race the prisoner does not speak to me and the scripted sequence where the Emperor comes does not happen. If I choose a stock race (Nord, etc) the Emperor comes but he has a woman's voice. I only have vanilla Oblivion and no SI or other DLC yet. It is patched with the official patch but I don't have the UOP.

 

edit: Sorry, I'm an idiot, I installed the UOP and it works now.

[chaospearl]

Yeah, the neck seam is a common problem. You can mess with the skin sliders all you want and get it to look ALMOST right, but it will never disappear completely and it looks worse at some angles than others. There are tons of mods that add all kinds of necklaces, chokers, amulets, dog collars, scarves, and any other sort of neck-worn jewelry\ornamentation you can possibly imagine -- all for the specific purpose of hiding that seam. You can find anything from a spiked dog collar to a simple gold chain.

[Eiries]

The spotchiness is caused by Oblivion's craptastic racegen textures... they also cause the neck seam you're experiencing and is oftentimes quite difficult to get rid of. Best way is to, well, shut off the textures.

 

Go to your oblivion.ini file located in My Documents/My Games/Oblivion and find the line "bFaceGenTexturing=1." Change it to 0, save the file, boot the game. No more splotchy textures.

 

Be warned though: depending on the race, you may end up looking very plain. You'll just have to try it out and see what you think. Good luck!

[LFact]

The spotchiness is caused by Oblivion's craptastic racegen textures... they also cause the neck seam you're experiencing and is oftentimes quite difficult to get rid of. Best way is to, well, shut off the textures.

 

Go to your oblivion.ini file located in My Documents/My Games/Oblivion and find the line "bFaceGenTexturing=1." Change it to 0, save the file, boot the game. No more splotchy textures.

 

Be warned though: depending on the race, you may end up looking very plain. You'll just have to try it out and see what you think. Good luck!

 

If you do that, the game will disable all FaceGen related textures. That also means you can't adjust skin tone, making some races, like Redguard look pretty plain(unless you're using some mod that gives Redguard and Altmer different textures). And, even with that, the neck seam may not go away. Sometimes it looks okay, but it depends on lighting condition.(Under some lighting, the difference of head and body can get worse)

[InAComaDial999]

IIRC Ren's original Mystic Elves use a fairly low resolution face texture. Try using NEC's Mystic Elf race, which adds a variant of Ren's races with higher-res face textures.

[LFact]

IIRC Ren's original Mystic Elves use a fairly low resolution face texture. Try using NEC's Mystic Elf race, which adds a variant of Ren's races with higher-res face textures.

 

Age maps, actually. Ozmo made high-rez skin textures for Mystic Elf, and they're included in Ozmo's texture pack.

[InAComaDial999]

IIRC Ren's original Mystic Elves use a fairly low resolution face texture. Try using NEC's Mystic Elf race, which adds a variant of Ren's races with higher-res face textures.

 

Age maps, actually. Ozmo made high-rez skin textures for Mystic Elf, and they're included in Ozmo's texture pack.

 

Ah, didn't know that Ozmo's package included face textures.

 

If age maps are the issue, the best thing is to install Improved Facial Textures, and then install whatever other texture packs over that. That way you get the much better age maps from IFT, but the base skin textures from the texture pack. I do this with IFT and Enayla's face skin textures, and I have no problems at all with blotchiness. I just use the standard body skin textures that came with HGEC v1.21, they are high-res enough for my taste and they blend very well at the neck with Enayla's face textures.

 

http://i86.photobucket.com/albums/k90/in_a_coma_dial_999/Oblivion2010-01-2304-31-57-20-S.jpg

[LFact]

IIRC Ren's original Mystic Elves use a fairly low resolution face texture. Try using NEC's Mystic Elf race, which adds a variant of Ren's races with higher-res face textures.

 

Age maps, actually. Ozmo made high-rez skin textures for Mystic Elf, and they're included in Ozmo's texture pack.

 

Ah, didn't know that Ozmo's package included face textures.

 

If age maps are the issue, the best thing is to install Improved Facial Textures, and then install whatever other texture packs over that. That way you get the much better age maps from IFT, but the base skin textures from the texture pack. I do this with IFT and Enayla's face skin textures, and I have no problems at all with blotchiness. I just use the standard body skin textures that came with HGEC v1.21, they are high-res enough for my taste and they blend very well at the neck with Enayla's face textures.

 

- Image Snip-

 

IFT and Natural Faces are for vanilla races. They do not affect custom race with custom head at all. If you want to use that for custom race like Mystic Elf, you will have to manually replace age maps with NF or IFT ones.