Yellow faces -- bodies normal?

[dannward]

My Oblivion install is heavily (and continuously) modded. I am fairly competent with the editor, Wrye Bash, TES4edit, etc.

 

Today, I installed Colourwheel's Sexy Oblivion Overhaul v 6.5 into my system. I deactivated a handful of other mods and rebuilt my bashed patch. Once I went into the game, all the standard NPCs had bright yellow faces. Normal HGEC bodies and textures, but bright yellow-green faces. (Perhaps untextured?)

 

I have tried a zillion different tests and cleanup tasks to try and right this -- I reinstalled my previous body replacer, body textures, and face textures. No luck. Here are the really odd facts I found in my testing:

 

- NPCs from Colourwheel's mod (using CW races defined in that mod) appear normal.

- Female NPCs modified by Colourwheels mod (females) appear to have correctly changed their race to the CW race, yet have yellow faces.

- Male NPCs (unmodified by CW's mod) also have yellow faces.

- Player is not affected by the yellow face issue. When I created a new character of one of the default races (High Elf) and of CW race, both looked normal.

 

TES4edit shows what I expect:

- The bashed patch is followed by CW's mod.

- Bashed patch makes various tweaks to standard races, but has no references to the CW races.

- CW's mod changes Jensine (as an example) to the CW nord race.

- Nothing else tweaks or changes the CW race definition from CW's mod.

 

I can't see how this is possible. If the NPCs have been changed to CW's races, and those races are not tweaked by anything else in my load order, why don't the standard NPCs have face textures like the NPCs added by CW's mod? If the other NPCs are of standard races, why doesn't a new Nord PC end up with a yellow face?

 

Has anyone else ever run into something like this? Any ideas how I can fix this?

[Nephenee13]

Sounds like your texture files are messed up.

[Keirgarth]

Have you tried using refscope or something similar to look at the details of the NPC's? This should let you know what might be missing if in fact there is something "missing".

[dannward]

Here's another couple of odd points:

 

- I deactivated all mods, leaving only oblivion.esm active and started a new game. All NPCs still had yellow faces.

- I installed Oblivion again, in a different directory, started a new game. All NPCs look normal, as expected.

- I copied data\textures\characters\* and data\meshes\characters\* from the old install to the new install. New install NPCs still look normal.

- I copied all the *.bsa files from the "bad" main install to the new install. New install still had normal NPCs.

 

Since a new game in the old install had yellow faces with no mods active, I assumed the problem would have to be in the meshes and/or textures within the old install's \data\ directory. I didn't copy all 30 Gb of my data directory, so I tried to narrow the scope of the files I copied to the new install. (I was hoping to cause the new install to show yellow faces so I could ultimately identify which texture is at fault.)

 

Refscope doesn't show the texture sources, but does indicate that with all the mods active, the NPCs are using the races I expect -- male NPCs use the oblivion.esm races, female NPCs use CWs, and both are yellow....

[dannward]

I found the source of the problem -- an OBSE plugin NPC_tex_tweak.dll. (Name jumped out at me as soon as I started copying my OBSE setup from the old install to the new.) Once I remove that dll from my main install, the yellow faces issue disappeared.

 

Now I just need to figure out where that file came from. The file is dated 10/23/2007, and may have been on my system for years now. (If so, why did it only start making yellow faces now? If it is new, what mod added it and why?)

[AnimalRiot]

Here's the culprit. -> NPC Tex Tweak by scanti

[dannward]

Here's the culprit. -> NPC Tex Tweak by scanti

 

Looking at my download directory, I installed that plug-in 2.5 years ago. No idea why it just wigged out this week. :biggrin: Still, I'm glad everything's back to looking normal.

 

Thanks for the assistance!