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Neck gap with new NPC faces

PostPosted: Thu Jun 21, 2012 4:55 am
by Vickey Martinez
I made some NPCs with the Skyrim NPC Editor and the Creation Kit, and many of them have a noticeable gap or seam on the neck which visibly separates it from the body.

[img]http://i.imgur.com/rBI2y.png[/img]

After checking several threads, here's what I've tried:
  • I tried to make the NPC face in the Skyrim NPC Editor AND separately in the Creation Kit. Neither worked. BSA or loose files, same result.
  • Ctrl-F4 in the Creation Kit to export facegen data. This seems to only work for textures, so it did not help.
  • Turned the esp into an esm using TESVSnip. Didn't seem to work.
  • isGenPreset is turned off. No effect.
I was able to resolve the mismatched face skin tone and body skin tone, it's just the huge and unsightly gap between the neck and body that's causing problems. I know it has to do with the fact that I edited the weight on the character, but I would still like to do that if possible.

I checked the http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1352954-unofficial-creation-kit-modding-bug-list-3/, and it's not listed as far as I saw... It had the grey skin tone issue, but my issue is the gap caused by (I assume) the weight scale change.

Can anyone let me know how to fix this issue, or whether it even is fixable without not adjusting the weight scale?

Neck gap with new NPC faces

PostPosted: Thu Jun 21, 2012 12:03 pm
by Emmi Coolahan
Found this in the description of the mod on Nexus... is it the same issue?

----How do you fix the neck seam that appeared after some editing?----

The NPC weight might be altered in your savegame, by another mod or by yourself using console command. Whatever the altered value is, it needs to match the one you set in the editor. If you have this problem i.e. you set the weight of the NPC to be 75, and a neck seam appears in game - you must then use the console command setnpcweight to set the NPC weight to 75 to match it. This will make the seam go away.

Neck gap with new NPC faces

PostPosted: Thu Jun 21, 2012 4:33 pm
by Lil'.KiiDD
Thanks Hanaisse. After uninstalling mods in batches and starting a new game with and without my mods, I realized that it probably is something in my old save game that's enforcing older weight standards like you pointed out. In a brand new game, the seam doesn't appear, so at least there's that. However I would guess that most people install mods for games that are in-progress, and so that makes my mod at best ugly... and at worst unusable.

In my mod, I have some changed NPCs and I know this will be an issue if so, but I can't use the console commands because I have 30 different changed NPCs, which makes the console command too much of a hassle. I also don't want to require that an end user uses the console either, because that will turn off a lot of users. I also saw that you have to set the console each time you load the game or change cells, though I have to confirm that.

So I guess my options are to make a script to adjust the weights, or don't change NPCs weights.

It's frustrating because it seems like it should not rely on body weights in a saved game file for an NPC's body while not relying on the saved head weight. Oh well.

edit: I am going to attempt to create a script that batch changes all of my NPCs with their new weights. Not sure how to do that exactly, but I think that's my best bet at this point for end-users.