AAARRRGGGHHHH!!!!!!!!!

I'm trying to create my new character, a Breton woman called Lilith. I've got everything else set up, but I'm completely jammed at the exit of the tutorial. I just can't get the face right.

Of course, it doesn't help that she's a Breton, which means that by default, her face, or skin at least, is more craggy and weatherbeaten that the mountains of Skyrim, an old leather sack bleached and forced into an unnatural shape. And that's without cranking up the age slider. *shudder*

So I tried the other approach, keep hitting random until I find a face I like and modify it, only to find that more than half the time it spits out the face of a male Breton! And no, I'm not joking or exaggerating here, literally half of them are guys in drag.

It's not often I say this, but I'll say it now.

I HATE Oblivion!

I don't think facegen is really that bad. Oblivion faces and the whole facegen process get a lot of heat in the community, but I've never really had a lot of problems with it. Yeah - it's a bit more difficult to deal with than it should've been, but still...

The biggest key to getting good faces, IMO, is that the shape sliders are FAR easier to deal with than the tone sliders. Tone has too many unintended consequences, so it's too hard to adjust it without screwing something else up somewhere. So the first thing I do is take off the characters shirt or cuirass, so I can see the neck seam, then randomize until I get a face (and body) with the tone I want. Shape doesn't matter at this point - the ONLY thing I'm interested in is the right tone, and that means everything. Pay particular attention to the beard, since it's especially difficult to adjust, so it really needs to be the way you want it right from the start.

My hope is to get exactly the tone I want so I don't have to touch those sliders at all, but if necessary, I'll adjust the eyebrows and eye sockets and the overall tone and complexion. Those are about the only ones I'll mess with though - the rest have too many unpredictable effects.

And yeah - one of the common problems is the faces tend to look masculine (well - a problem with female characters that is). That's easy enough to fix though. The biggest issue there is almost always the chin and jawline. Generally you can make the jaw narrower and a bit more convex and make the chin smaller, more pointed and less jutting and that'll fix most of it. You'll see when you're heading in the right direction. There are a lot of overlapping adjustments that change all that though - for instance, changing the tilt of the mouth and giving it a bit more overbite downplays a chin that's too masculine and changing the neck slope softens the line of the jaw - that sort of thing. But the beauty of the shape sliders is that they generally only alter specific things and they're all reversible - if you're not getting the effect you wanted, just move that slider back to where it was and change a different one.

And every time you get something that you think looks better than it did, SAVE, and in a new slot. So if you do work yourself into a corner, you'll have something to which to revert.