Where do you specify body skin/tint for new actors in the CK? The Skin dropdown under the Traits tab didn't work. Changing values on the Character Gen Parts and Character Gen Morphs aren't being rendered on the body until clothing is placed -- unless I'm missing something.


Details
Created a sandbox to play with new meshes and textures. Made two new actors where I only specified values on the first page (ID, Name, Short Name, Race) then placed them in a new cell with only a bench. It's quite obvious that the default facial settings aren't being transmitted to the body.

At first I thought it was the meshes and textures I'd been using so I removed the meshes and textures folders from my Data folder. No effect. Then I wondered if something else had messed up internally so I took Steam offline and moved the High Res texture packs out. Same deal.

Figured maybe the defaults don't work so I modified the female actor. Under the Character Gen Parts tab I specified "SkinHeadFemaleBretonComplextion_Age40" under Face Complexion then changed the Preset under Face Tinting Color to "HumanFemaleSkinWhite05". On Character Gen Morphs tab I set Nose, Mouth, and Eyes to type 10. Back in game I could see the color and feature changes yet they still didn't get mirrored by the body.

On a Side Note: When previewing the Head I could see these chances as I made them. After changing the Zoom Speed to "0.01" I was able to zoom in on the Full Preview... yet that didn't show any of the changes I made. In fact, going back to the Parts tab, Full Preview didn't render any of the changes to Base Head Parts either. *shrug*

Moved the Hi Res stuff back in then went on the offensive. Figued the engine might require clothes to render skin correctly. I attacked Orgnar and Delphine inside RiverwoodSleepingGiantInn. Under the Inventory tab I set the Default Outfits of their base objects to "None". Back in game when I coc'd in, Delphine got clothes back (from a script I'm guessing) yet Orgnar stayed undressed. It was difficult to tell since his long hair style got in the way, so I changed it from Nord06 to Imperial1. Then ran into the setnpcweight bug.

But is this true, that a body will only render face colors/tints when armor is placed? The seam appears less noticable with some sort of clothing specified. Very new to modding and the Bethseda tutorials are very introductory. The Creating an Actor tutorial only touched on the seven or eight fields required to get one going.

To my "creative brain" having to place an article of clothing doesn't make sense. The entire body should be drawn then the clothing placed over it. Yet from a performance stand-point it might make more sense to render only the default texture then change it only if required. Or perhaps this is a "bug" in the sense that if nothing is placed on the body, the body is never tinted.

I need to do more reading and poking around but I'm wondering if anyone else has noticed this and there's some checkbox I forgot to tick. TIA!

Sounds like that bug with the CK. Very frustrating.

This may help. http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1343692-color-mismatch-facebody/

@magicpanda, thank you! Obviously I didn't search well enough since that post is dealing with the same issue. And there's three pages of info in there to sort through. Yay!

As I've continued doing my own skulking about I noticed something about one of the error messages. Sorta got trained in the Tutorials to just hit "Yes to All" and move on. Yet I finally got one that I paid attention to when editing. It said it couldn't find a model in Meshes\Actors\Character\FaceGenData\FaceGeom\NewActorText.esp\00000D63.NIF. Whoa! Somehow the name of my ESP got embedded or appended there.

Now I've read about textures being exported but not the wireframes! Maybe the dialog was reporting it wrong but it got me thinking. Maybe something in the constructor for the Actor object is off. Or maybe the CK isn't exporting some or all of the values correctly. Could be reading values from the Race definition wrong, etc.

For someone stubborn/adventurous like me there's got to be something that can be done. Like open the ESP and see what values are there after editing an Actor in the ESM then look at the diff. If the values are lost or mangled, we could write a tool to import our own or de-mangle the ones that are there. Tried opening one of the ESPs, hoping it ZIP or TAR compressed but didn't seem to be. Something else to look around for.

Of course all this is only possible if it's a data problem. The game engine itself maybe handle ESPs differently--which I've read a number of posts suggesting. The load order if nothing else. There are SO many moving parts inside that Black Box called "TESV.exe"!!