Infamous grey face bug. Can't get rid of it?

[uberwekkness]

So I know some mods have a way of just... not going away, after deleted. Last night I thought I'd try my hand at modding a new characters, got the grey face bug, it was late, and I was frustrated, so I decided to just delete the mod altogether. Removed it from Vortex, wiped it from my files in every location, etc. Grey face bug is still there. It's on new games too. Is there any way to reset it properly, so the characters go back to their vanilla appearance, short of reinstalling the whole game? Or should I just go back to trying to mod these folks until I get it right, to fix it?

[Niborino9409]

More details. Modding what characters? Skyrim npcs or? :huh: :)

[uberwekkness]

I'll preface all of this by saying that I got impatient after trying to fix it for hours, so I backed up my husband's save data, deleted mine, took notes on mods, and am now reinstalling the game. Still though, I'd really like to know what I might have done, if I want to give this stuff another go sometime.

I was giving some NPC modding a go, for Onmund, primarily. I made my changes and made sure to do the ctrl+F4 thing at the end. The data definitely saved. I found the files in both the textures and meshes folders. I think it's probably a mod conflict, to be honest. I'm brand new to doing this kind of thing, and didn't think to give it a go without any other mods enabled. :sad:

 

Anyway, I was only using vanilla assets for it, basically just tweaking his mouth/chin area, and changing his hairstyle. When I went into my game to check, it looked like it took the changes, but the skintone was messed up. I'd been trudging through learning how to do this stuff for ages, so I finally just called it, and deleted my work. When I went back into my save to look, he was still grey. I thought maybe it was just that my save was messed up, so I tried starting a new game, only to find the same issue.

 

I poked around in the creation kit some more, and saw I was getting the error of a "missing facegen tint map." Is that what's causing it? Is there a way to fix it?

 

I'm curious about how I might have made the mod work, but I'm more curious about why a deleted mod was still affecting new saves. Was it really just a missing file somewhere? Would there have been any way to retrieve it?

[Niborino9409]

The default facegen is inside Bethesda's archive files so you can't overwrite those by accident. My guess would be that the facegen files were still left in there. If the mod and the facegen are removed properly this shouldn't happen. However, one can never know when it comes to Skyrim :tongue: And yes, if you have any other npc overhauls or the like they would conflict with yours.

 

Filepaths for facegen:

SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Skyrim Special Edition\Data\meshes\actors\character\facegendata\facegeom\Skyrim.esm

 

SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Skyrim Special Edition\Data\Textures\Actors\Character\FaceGenData\FaceTint\Skyrim.esm

Edited November 1, 2018 by Niborino9409

[uberwekkness]

That wouldn't have been it, I don't think. :confused: Unless they were hiding, somewhere. I was pretty thorough in removing that stuff. :sad:

[Niborino9409]

In that case I don't know :sad:

Edited November 3, 2018 by Niborino9409

[Algabar]

All sorts of face discoloration (grey as well as dark brown) can happen, if several mods make changes to one and the same npc. These mods CAN be NPC replacers or NPC overhauls, but there are many other possible "culprits", among them mods that change faction alignments or give NPCs new clothes or weapons, e.g. "Immersive Weapons".

 

You can try to create a conflict resolution patch with "Mator Smash": https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/90987

Although the files is hosted on the "Oldrim" pages, it also works for Skyrim SE (and even Fallout 4).

 

Without a "smashed patch", I would have some dark brown faces in my heavily modded game, too. Mator Smash always did the trick for me...