Skin issue

[keds99]

I am having a problem where the face of character all the way to the neck is one color but then there is like a seam on the neck and below the line it is a different color. I think Exnem's HGEC mod may be the problem. I was told it was required to wear most of the clothes so I downloaded it along with beautiful people. Now its like someone cut off a head and put it on a different body. Please help. Thanks!

[Ivoryhammer]

Try HGEC.

[keds99]

Still no luck. :(

[roquefort]

This seems to happen with some of the body mods. One work-around is to put a necklet or amulet on the NPC to hide the seam.

[Striker879]

Something to keep in mind is that in the game the clothes or armor become the part of the body they're covering. If you use clothes or armor that isn't compatible with your chosen body you'll see effects like you're describing. As roquefort indicates above, some seam will always be visible at the neckline, and you can use mods designed to help hide the seam.

 

To determine whether your problem is due to incompatible clothing/armor or not, see if you're seeing the problem when your character is nude.

[MotoSxorpio]

Some body mods (mostly older) have the skin texture that is packed WITH the clothing/armor. Newer ones mostly rely on the textures that you already have. If you stick with one body style for all your clothing/armor, you will not come across this too "seam" problem often. I recommend OZMO's hi res HGEC installer for almost seamless textures., and stick with HGEC clothing/armor mods. :thumbsup: Edited July 21, 2011 by MOTOSXORPIO

[DrakeTheDragon]

Some body mods (mostly older) have the skin texture that is packed WITH the clothing/armor. Newer ones mostly rely on the textures that you already have.

 

I'm sorry, but this is not true. There is no skin texture packed with clothing or armor and they will always use the textures of the race or they were done wrong in the first place (the items, not the body mods).

If you're not using so-called Stock Replacers for your body mods, replacing any item of the original game with a new one fitting the respective body, then you will basically have the Vanilla body underneath your clothes, no matter which body mod you're using.

 

The Vanilla body meshes now, unlike meshes from body mods, use 1 different texture file for each bodypart. The final files these will be are still determined by the current race's texture records, but there are settings inside the NIF telling which texture "slot" (upperbody, lowerbody, hand, foot) the mesh will use.

 

To further evaluate now all body mods I know of make it so those meshes only use the "foot" slot, with an exception being the Exnem family by excluding the "hands" from their full-body textures.

Still the items have no say over what texture files will be used in the end, as this is solely controlled by the body mods, but they can make it so it's like using the wrong body mod or none at all, and the textures will not fit anymore, or in case of Vanilla races and Vanilla items be the wrong ones, the left-over Vanilla texture files (body mods only replace those files they use, being foot, and hand for Exnem's etc., everything else remains Vanilla and will still show on Vanilla body meshes, at least in general).

 

As for the issue at hand, the neck seams, this is like trying to align a straight line border to a curve, for every body mod I know of. Just take a look at the UV maps of upperbody and head and you'll see for yourself how impossible it is to get the texture to align right in this area. For smooth featureless skin it's not at all as apparent as it is for scales or fur, of course, even.

Then heads and bodies are using two different materials, both controlled by the game engine, but not at all matching.

And even if they were, there'd still by the EGT files, containing age map, facial hair and skin tint/coloration texture info among other things, again two different ones for heads and bodies, and again not at all matching in the border regions.

 

That's why there are so many attempts in making it "better", but none of them is really a "perfect" solution. There's just too much to fix beforehand for this to ever become seamless.

[keds99]

Yes but It worked fine until I installed new races. I had installed cute elf, ren's beauty pack, and a few others. It is not really a seam. It's more of a color issue I guess you could call it. The body's color is different from the face and neck. Is there any way I can get the regular body back and still use the HGEC clothes?

[DrakeTheDragon]

Basically installing a race mod adding a race to the game should only affect this race and no others, but there is a chance there were different EGT files coming with these, and as there is only 1 body but several heads they could have replaced the body EGT, messing up even the other races in the process. Body and head EGTs never perfectly matching from the start was an issue already, but replacing one of them with a different version making it yet less matching is of course only worse.

 

You cannot use a Vanilla body AND Exnem/HGEC items at the same time, as the latter will require their special Exnem textures for the bodyparts inside them to look even remotely fine and the Vanilla body requires the full set of 4 (5) textures to be Vanilla or will look horribly wrong.

Your best bet would be to get a fitting set of body and face textures for every race and a fitting combination of body and head EGT files, as from Luchaire's famous Body Seam Reducer mod for example.

 

I'm not using Exnem or HGEC though, as their UV mapping is driving me crazy when trying to create my scaled textures (those bodies are considered pretty unmoddable by me), so I can't be of much help with more detailed mod infos to this matter.