Heard back but because I had mentioned I had a mod on the game they decided that it wasn't anything to do with them. I wrote back to inform them that the problem was also apparent on my game from a vanilla restart where every trace of the game had been wiped from my computer and am waiting to see if that helps them to rethink their 'nothing to do with us' response.

Mr Reiper - Slight differences in shading is one thing and yes i noticed it slightly in Oblivion, was fairly easy to ignore, after all a character who goes round critter bashing for half her life is going to have a slightly more weather beaten sunburnt face but that is nothing to what we are seeing now. Sickly grey green faces that make our characters look like they have been drowned - totally spoils the game from my point of view (or rather from 3rd person view) .
I wouldn't mind that so tremendously but because the effect on all the NPC's in the game seems to have carried over from my previous game (even though I removed absolutely everything from steam apps and the ini files and reloaded both steam and the game from scratch) its difficult to even enjoy being in a town or city and looking at these NPC's. I'm going to have another go at removing everything and starting again, will run diagnostics and ccleaner once the game is uninstalled etc try to remove every trace of the game before restarting it and see if that helps at all.
Bit sad about it really but I have played the main quest and the civil war quest through once so haven't really lost anything by having another go - just wish that the game didn't have these buggy issues and I could just enjoy it without spending more time trying to fix problems than actually playing it.

OK it's definitely not an OS issue, I just tried running it on another partition on the same machine I usually use, except with Windows Vista installed.

Exact same problem.

My game looks fine. Clean shadows and textures indoors and out. From the picks i'm thinking maybe a conflict of some kind. That is shadows are CPU generated and not finding their way to the GFX card to be properly renderd.

I did 2 picks. 1 is low settings and no DCL. The other is Ultra with DLC. Both are with the face in the shade. Good shadow rendering from low to Ultra.

low setting
http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/470862413657475931/C90A65CADF427BE01D8A65867D40F4A2329A05C4/

ultra setting
http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/470862413657536092/BD8CD4DEE90611B57410D7763ACEE49FA55F0E26/

edit... this pick shows how the grey should look at noon time... The body does not have a grey base like the face. No need realy.
http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/470862413661618999/1D4F5D636B449E22618ACA58F3041062F88016F5/

In this pic. Look at under the arms. You can see where the gray could show through. You can see how the grey is used as a base. It shows up in around the neck. Also a little under the cheek bones.

With the all grey face pic's. Seems the only color you get. Follow's the HDR or bloom path. Its not just the face missing a big chunk of color. Its the whole game.

Yup, that's the way it should look.



I was about to delete the poll since as I said it doesn't seem to be OS related after all, but I have to say I'm a bit surprised at the unanimous result. Does really everyone use 7-64?

47% of the player base on Steam uses windows 7 64bit. Just loaded up my old Might and Magic yesterday. Windows 98 ME. Runs great.

Not all Windows 7 64 bit is the same. Pro and Ultra come with full support for all windows OS 32 bit to 64 bit. I had Morrowind, Oblvion, and Skyrim running at the same time. Wanted to see the ram amount for each game and see if maybe they would have some conflict with each other. No conflicts.

They ran perfect. All 3 theme music running at the same time. Pulled 7.3 gigs of ram total. Each provided a clean fresh 32 bit ( 340K) OS by the Windows 7 64 bit OS. Morrowind used about 245k of ram. Oblivion 540k. Skyrim 1.56 gig. Hehe could be TES VI could be around 4.5 gigs.

Well

I uninstalled the game, cleared everything out remotely skyrim related.

Reinstalled

Totally vanilla, not even Beths own high texture pack

and got the same thing. if anything she looks even worse this time out. I'd post a tiny pics link for but some reason this forum won't let me tonight.


She looks pretty horrible tbh


Have sent DxDiag and MSINFO32 to Bethesda to see what they make of it.


I'm not holding my breath it will get me anywhere.

You're the first person to post in this thread with a male character, I think. I'm starting to think the issue, whatever it is, is far more prominent with female characters than it is with male. Would you be willing to try creating a female PC and see what that looks like?

I still need to go try creating a new PC myself. I may wind up doing two (one female, one male) to see what happens.

Also I should add that I'm not really seeing this issue at all on NPCs, at least not that I've noticed. My companion--you can see him in one of the screenshots I posted earlier in the thread--looks fine, for instance. Although come to think of it Ysolda was looking a bit gray-ish last I saw her.

And possibly related, I noticed last night that my character has been having http://img18.imageshack.us/img18/8263/screenshot2mk.jpg already reported in the unofficial bug list. That is there's odd "cracks"/magic-related visual effects on her skin, which persist even when I unequip everything she's wearing. They aren't as bad in the picture shown, but they're still noticeable. Anyone else seeing this? I wonder if they're related.

Just an update to my post: I created a new female PC last night and ran her through the tutorial, just to see what would happen. End result? She looks fine in the chargen screen, but out in the proper world, gray face and lighting/shadow issues ahoy.

http://i.imgur.com/MAp51.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/PjneS.jpg (very noticeable difference between her face and body there)

I'm also seeing some weird shadow issues in general with this character. I think this glitch definitely has something to do with how the lighting engine handles character's faces.

I am getting this issue and I have windows 7 64bit (premium I think). I've been working on a mod at the minute and my new NPC has the grey head quite badly, although if she had clothes a with a slightly higher neck line it would be harder to notice. I haven't however, noticed anything unusual with the heads in gameplay with other NPC's but I can't say for sure as I haven't played for some time now since I've been working on this mod.

Is it an issue with the game or with ck? (or even a driver issue) - If other people use my mod will they also have the grey head issue?

The charging screen? Not sure I understand what you mean.



You seem to be having the CK issue, which is similar but I think different. Your head probably isn't just discolored like ours, but actually sort of brown/beige, regardless of lighting.

Im getting this issue. but on my game,the decoloration is kinda more obvious then the previous screen I seen so far

(but I dont have still have rights to link ya the screen yet)

Im also using a 64bit version of windows 7 but still not like many here im not convinced thats related

"Chargen," actually--short for character generation. Sorry for being unclear.

I think the reason our characters look fine on that screen is, again, the lighting...the lighting during chargen is much brighter and more direct than anything in the game. (For obvious reasons--the better to see the adjustments we're making to our characters' faces.) No shadows to deal with either, unlike out in the game world.

You mean when you use showracemenu? That doesn't make it look better for me, in fact I thought at first it made it look even worse (though I think that's just because it moves the camera closer). But then I don't think I have any extra lighting then either.

Not necessarily when you use showracemenu after the initial character creation sequence--that puts you into the chargen screen wherever you are in the game world, and just uses the in-game lighting, as far as I can recall. (I only used it the once, on a now discarded character, shortly after the game first came out.) I'm referring to the initial character creation, right after you hop off the cart in Helgen. The lighting there is http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/630730981978418724/2DB8F86FDCE249340253813F19B42B3EB52C92AC/ from what you get in the rest of the game.

Ah I see, just the background in your first picture isn't where you normally are when you get off the cart, though maybe that's a mod. But yes I think I also couldn't see the issue in the initial creation.

OK just to clear up a few things that I checked:

- The issue happens for both males and females. It's just more visible on females because the skin is more even.
- It also affects NPCs, just as much as the PC. Though I noticed it seems less pronounced on Aela the Huntress for some reason.
- It doesn't seem to show in the initial character creation, which I first thought was because of the sun shining the right way, but based on Tyraa's screencap it seems the lighting is different from normal in-world.
- I tried a clean driver install as Bethesda suggested to Bethra, and that didn't fix anything.

Bump, even though Bethesda completely ignores emails, maybe someone found a workaround.