I'm having an issue where body and face color isnt matching on npc's. I've heard of this problem before but i can no longer find where I remember seeing it. What causes this and is there a known fix for it?

I use Better Males with the Geonox Faces and i use CBBE with the CBBE Face pack.

Are they vanilla NPCs? Or have they have been edited/added by mods?

Search bar is your friend. It's a bug that causes NPC's created or edited in the Creation Kit to have gray/mismatched faces. Only way to fix this is to save the plugin as an esm and export the face data of the NPC(ctrl+F4 I believe). Look it up to find the exact method.

It's not a bug actually, and you don't need to save anything as an esm. You do however need to do the ctrl+f4 export on the affected NPCs.

Was it always like this, or did they let you export from an esp recently?

So i would have to first figure out what mod causes it for a particular NPC, then go into that mod, find that NPC and press F4?

That svcks. I think PISE is my culprate because it seems to be NPC's that spawn randomly. Like I have a save where i am in Riverwood and i begin to travel the road headed to Whiterun, and every time i reload it's something different waiting for me on that road. Each time its a human/elf NPC they have that issue. That sounds like a lot NPC's i would have to cover.

Is there a planned fix for this? I know you said its not a bug but is there anything planned on modders or Beth's behalf that will fix it and not be as time consuming?

The solution to your problem is the link in my Sig

Yeah but i have no hair mods besides AOF which is just a texture replacer and i uninstalled all of my eye mods. The ones i have noticed with the problem are just randomly created npc's with no actual name. Like a group of soldiers where each one is just named Soldier or Imperial Soldier (something like that) or the random thief that appears from no where and attacks you that is just named Thief. I havent checked but i'm sure that all the random Bandit types will also suffer from the same problem. Thats a lot of Npc's I'll have to go in and edit isnt it?

Have you tried disabling or changing the load order of your mods to check if the problem still appears.

This mismatch problem usually happens when existing npcs are edited.

The only 2 mods i can think of that would alter npc's in any way would be PISE and a mod i have that adds carriages to most of the towns. The drivers also suffer from the issue. I'll try disabling them and starting a new game and see if that fixes it.

If it persists, try a different body mod (Although I've not heard of this problem with CBBE at all), I'm using UNP Base / Better Females by Bella / Cover Eyes with zero problems.

Lol it was late when i wrote the OP, but now that I think of it i had noticed the problem before i had installed them with the carriage drivers in the extra towns.

But if we're on the issue of body mods i have a strange problem with female feet. They dont match up to the rest of the body and have strange shadowing on them. This issue was around before i started using CBBE. In fact i decided to use CBBE to try and fix it.

http://i1022.photobucket.com/albums/af341/charon711/ScreenShot10.jpg

http://i1022.photobucket.com/albums/af341/charon711/ScreenShot9-2.jpg

Hmm.. Have you tried installing the FemFeet mesh, link http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=3666
If you haven't got the latest, I think you'll need the new CBBE 3.1 to work with FemFeet, link http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=2666

Hope that helps.

Yeah i got the latest and actually just installed it yesterday.

Ill give FemFeet a go.

Update:

Nope didnt fix it.

As has been said, it's not a bug, it's a modder failing to properly create new NPCs.

It's not really your responsibility to fix it. Find out which mod the affected NPCs are from (this is very easy; just select them in the console and take note of the first two digits in the formID) and report the problem to the author.

Are you using PISE, or ASIS? Have you tried disabling PISE and checking to see if the issue persists? Are you using Automatic Variants, a previous version without the NPC exclusion? PISE has never had issues of that sort, I'm quite sure. It would be the first report of anything like that, and I haven't updated it in months. If you can confirm it though, it would help; if it's something I need to look into, I'll take a look. It only edits NPC's though, and does not create any. The issue persists with created NPC's, not edited NPC's.

The ctrl+f4 procedure is the fix. That's how NPC faces are supposed to be done now. If you were to unpack the vanilla BSAs you'd find Bethesda did this for every NPC in the game. The grey-face bug was present only because the export procedure had been broken in mods and was silently fixed with CK 1.5.24.

The mod author responsible for the NPCs you're having problems with needs to go back and fix this themselves. It's unreasonable to expect that we should all fix someone's NPCs after downloading a mod.

I'm using PISE and actually i am using AV. I'll see about updating and see if that fixes it. Though i am sure that the carriage drivers will still suffer from it because i took note of that long before i tried AV. Maybe i can find a mod that does the same thing without the same problem.

Update

I checked and i actually have the latest version of AV 1.3.1 Alpha. I'm going to check over my mods some more and see if i'm missing something.

Also i still have not figured out why my female feet are strange looking.

Ok as far as PISE goes i cant seem to get Skyrim to work without it now. It will load up to the main menu and then instantly crash if i uninstall it in WB.

Ok so i forgot to rebuild my Bash Patch and my AV Patch... silly me

The problem still persists without PISE so thats not the culprit.

It's still possibly AV, then, as I'm not sure if he added the NPC exclusion to the program. You might check the thread for any reports of it? I would, but I don't remember the format of the exclusion nor the file, and I'm studying for finals. Since AV operates by dupping NPC's outside the CK, without support for the export of faces, it needs to exclude those NPC's but the latest build might not have that exclusion added to it's ini config file.

alright ill check into that tomorrow. Gotta get some sleep

This is a long shot but if you happen to be using Tales of Lycanthopy - Werewolf Overhaul, it currently has a grey face bug along with a few other body bugs.. Took me a while to find the mod causing it in my mod list. I hope this helps