How to stop grey/brown faces with NPC hair replacement mods

[ScarredMercy]

Alright, so I'm gonna start off by saying that this is my final, desperate attempt at doing this after two days of trying. It's actually my first time asking online for help, or even using a forum of any kind, so any proper forum-etiquette I fail to follow is due to a lack of knowledge and not general ignorance of them.

 

 

Disclaimers aside, let's start with the issue.

 

The problem is rather simple, actually. I've been trying to install a hair replacer for Skyrim's various NPCs, because I like things looking nice. I have tried both Shiva's Hair Replacer as well as the one for Apachiiskyhair.

 

Unfortunately, both have ended in failure despite my best efforts to try and fix it.

 

At first, I was under the impression that it was conflicting with my other mods - for the longest time I thought it was conflicting with UNP. Tried various methods; uninstalling, reinstalling, replacing mods with substitutes, even trying to see if CBBE would work instead. Nothing.

 

Finally, I got myself a fresh version of Skyrim and realized that there really is no conflict. Something is just wrong.

 

So, I assume I'm missing some vital step to this regarding that facegen stuff I can hardly understand.

 

Any advice?

[DarkRudra]

Any mod that changes a vanilla NPC's hair style requires an update to their facegen to prevent the dark/gray face issue. I haven't tried the Shiva replacer you mentioned, but for the Apachii one (version 2.20, I guess?), you need to install the main file and both of the Color Mismatch Fix files. The Fix files contain the facegen files needed to stop the dark face bug. You'll also need another mod to fix brown foreheads that appear on certain characters.

 

Finally, keep in mind that if you later install any mod that edits an NPC affected by the hair replacer, you need to edit that mod manually to carry over the hair replacer changes in the .esp. That's because the second mod uses the vanilla head layout and expects the vanilla facegen. This is fairly easy to do in TES5Edit, once you've gotten a handle on using that program.

[ScarredMercy]

Any mod that changes a vanilla NPC's hair style requires an update to their facegen to prevent the dark/gray face issue. I haven't tried the Shiva replacer you mentioned, but for the Apachii one (version 2.20, I guess?), you need to install the main file and both of the Color Mismatch Fix files. The Fix files contain the facegen files needed to stop the dark face bug. You'll also need another mod to fix brown foreheads that appear on certain characters.

 

Finally, keep in mind that if you later install any mod that edits an NPC affected by the hair replacer, you need to edit that mod manually to carry over the hair replacer changes in the .esp. That's because the second mod uses the vanilla head layout and expects the vanilla facegen. This is fairly easy to do in TES5Edit, once you've gotten a handle on using that program.

Thank you so much for replying. I have both of the mismatch fix files. Do I just extract them into Skyrim's facegen folder?

[DarkRudra]

Yeah, pretty much. There's a facegen folder under both meshes/ and textures/, but the files should already have the correct folder structure reflecting that. So, just extract the files into some temporary location and then copy the whole lot over to Skyrim/data/.