Old CK and NPC Editor Faces Coming Back and Not Going Away

[Breandan]

Apologies if this seems brusque, its late and my toddler refuses to go to sleep.

 

I have an issue wherein old faces and hairstyles that were added by a mod or modified by me a long time ago have suddenly reappeared and re-asserted themselves with a vengeance. This is happening with Aela especially, but it is spreading, and now affects Ysolda, Lydia and Camilla. Downloading mods that change their appearance do nothing, its as if they weren't even installed. I check the cue, and sure enough they should be working. Load it up in CK, and the appearance is as it should be- I can't even find where the old appearances are coming from, I can't find the files anywhere on my computer.

 

To make matters worse, I COMPLETELY wiped Skyrim- every file, folder, saved game, etc., even the obscure hidden ones- and then re-installed the game and CK. For a while, everything was fine, and mods worked. Then, out of nowhere, Aela went funky. A friend of mine claims that the old appearances were somehow saved by Steam on their servers and forcibly shoved down my throat by a file update, but I have no idea if that is even possible. I know it's not a mod conflict issue as I have tried without any mods, tried with all mods, and everything in between, and the game was working fine for a month before they popped up. So, I am about to go nuclear on my computer again, delete EVERYTHING, add Steam and Cloud to my virus blocker to keep it from molesting my computer against my permission, and then bathing my hard drive in chicken blood while waving the foot over it to try and get the bloody thing fixed. I, therefore, would be grateful for any advice as to how to fix this.

 

Seriously, the chicken's fate is in your hands, help me :D

[blitzen]

I don't use Steam for mods, so I'm not sure what it does, but I thought that if you subscribed to a mod, it automatically downloads updates. I think that would also mean that it would reinstall the mod if you removed it from your game, unless you actually unsubscribe from the mod. But if it did that, you should see the mod listed somewhere, I assume. The character appearance files are located under both the meshes and textures folders, and then in ...\actors\character\facegendata\facegeom\skyrim.esm. That might have a bunch of mysterious looking files with names like 000A2C8E.NIF for the mesh file, and names like 000A4E85.dds for the textures. These are the actual meshes and textures for the faces of the corresponding NPCs. The root name of the file is the ID for the npc. For example, Lydia is 000a2c8e and Aela is 0001a696. See if you have any files in there. These are the same files that are missing when a mod adds a new NPC, and he/she shows up with a grey face in the game because the modder forgot to include the facegendata.

[Breandan]

The mods in question weren't from Steam, which I avoid using like the plague, but that was the only way we could figure that they wound up back on my HD after I scrubbed the batsnot out of it. I knew the files were likely in the geom folder, but didn't know how to read them. Thanks for that, it's a BIG help! :)