[LE] Elder Race Females not looking Elderly in CK

[EinarrTheRed]

I've been working on a mod that revises Whiterun, one of the things I've been doing is updating the appearance of all the NPC with better hair models and so forth.

 

My problem is that when I got to working on some of the older female NPCs (ElderRace), in CK they do not look elderly. If I save my changes and export the facedata, they no longer look elderly in game either. I cannot figure out why and nothing I've tried so far has fixed it.

 

My first thought was that maybe some other mod was the cause, so I loaded CK with only the Skyrim.esm and then did a preview of the ElderRace female, didn't look elderly. So that should rule out other mods.

 

Next I thought maybe the skin pack I had installed was the cause, I checked the ElderRace Head parts, it shows that its using the textures for SkinFemaleHeadOld. So I checked to see what dds files it was pointing at. The texture's skin is the new skin I downloaded and installed, but the normal/gloss is the wrinkled dds for old people. So it looks like it should be rendering an old person, yet it doesn't.

 

Based on that the best I can figure is that for some reason CK isn't rendering that wrinkled normal map, but I've no idea why not. I thought maybe the new skin was somehow causing the issue (maybe too hi-res or something) so I tried extracting the original skin texture for female heads from the BSA, dropped it into the femaleold folder and then updated the texture for the SkinFemaleHeadOld to point to that diffuse skin (the original). When I previewed a female ElderRace, the old skin texture was there but still no wrinkles.

 

Oh and the femalehead.nif is the default one still in the BSA, I also tried extracting that and dropping it in the correct mesh folder to see if it helped, no luck.

 

So I'm stuck, I can't finish my elder NPCs (the female ones, which seem to be the only one's affected) until I figure this out because when I save and export the facedata, they're young looking which doesn't fit what I want.

 

If anyone has any ideas or solutions, I'd be grateful, cause its got me puzzled at this point and I don't know what else to try.