CK - Character Creation - Body and Face-color mismatch

[Sigurd44]

I had the "dark forehead bug" on Serana once although I had saved all FacegenData for Serana to an .esp file once, ages before. The dark forehead bug occurred as I experimented with a new eye mod. Those "dark head bugs" occur sometimes when you change anything that effects the head mesh, be it a mod for eyes, hairs, face animations, eyebrows or be it a setweight or setscale console command. The dumb thing is, that this interpolation error might appear on NPCs before you actually realize it and therefore the color mismatch error will be baked into your saved game. Having all NPC facegendata correctly saved to an .esp that will be loaded with your saved game, won't help.

 

To get rid of my dark forhead (or any other "dark head bug") you need to do a so called facegendata extraction. The steps for that were already explained before:

 

-start CK and load the affected NPC. If you have an .esp for this NPC load the .esp.

-Look up the CharGenParts window and try to find out what face part causes the discoloration. Often it will be lower or upper eye socket, forhead (in my case) or eyeliner style. You realize the face part that causes issues, when you are able to recolor the affected face part to it's normal color by reverting the interpolation value.

-Revert the interpolation value to its opposite to revert the color mismatch

-CTRL + F4 to export the "healed" facegendata to your Skyrim Data folders

-Do NOT save this to any .esp

-close CK and launch Skyrim, REMEMBER the ID of this NPC, write it down somewhere

-load a saved game and look up the affected NPC, there should be no color mismatch anymore, BUT it might be, that the NPC misses the complete facetint aka makeup and looks somewhat pale and colorless

-save the game and close Skyrim

-get NPC Editor and install it

-load a random NPC in the NPC Editor and go to Appearance -> Makeup

-adjust the makeup as you would do it for your "pale" NPC

-when finished click "create mod", at best to desktop

-ignore/delete the bsa and the mesh (.nif, .tri) and the .tga files, you only want the .dds file

-RENAME this .dds file to that ID you remembered from above

-drop this .dds file into C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\Skyrim\Data\textures\actors\character\FaceGenData\FaceTint and the according folder there (Skyrim, Dawnguard etc.) and let it replace the old facetint file

-launch Skyrim, load your game and TADAA ! you see a perfect colored NPC without discoloration and a perfect make up.

 

Although NPCEditor does not support Dawnguard, Hearthfire or Dragonborn NPCs, the above method works for discolored Dawnguard etc. NPCs too. Load a Skyrim NPC into the editor, apply the make up, extract it from NPC Editor, rename the .dds file to the ID code of the according Dawnguard etc. NPC you want to change. Drop it into the according folder and enjoy.

[texastim]

I simply hit the reset button in character face Gen and saved the edited file.