I've searched on here and also on Google and can't find anything detailing the problems I am having... I'm trying to do some race customization and running into the following two frustrating problems:

1. When I try to make a glow map for the Dremora face, it makes the face translucent! I make my black texture with my white parts for where I want glowing to occur, and I name it the same name as the Dremora face texture but with the "_g" at the end... but for some reason it makes my Dremora's face translucent. Not invisible mind you, but as if the glow map is actually a transparency map. The face texture is just barely visible for most of the head (looks ghostly), but then the areas where I wanted glowing, are slightly more visible, but that could just be because they are lighter anyway. It results in a very strange translucent head but with visible mouth, teeth, and eyes.

2. When I try to make a super-shiny Golden Saint, I take the alpha channel of the normal map, and paint it solid white. In the game, I end up with super-shiny ears, but the head and body are dull.

Any ideas on either of these issues? Could this just be my video card not working properly, is there something I'm doing wrong?

Okay - got #2 figured out - i wasn't saving the body's normal map properly, and then for the head I just had to copy the alpha channel from the head's normal map into all the subsequent aging normal maps and now it is working beautifully.

#1 is still stumping me though... it SHOULD be possible to use a glow map on a head, shouldn't it? :/

I don't know how it is for heads, but for bodyparts it won't work.
For a glowmap to work the material's "emissive" property needs to emit some light, else there's no glow.

The material "skin", however, is constantly overridden by the game engine, so regardless of what you change here in the default bodyparts in the "_male" folder, the game will revert it.
No emissive property in "skin" means no glowing on the body.

If bodyparts don't use the material "skin" on the other hand, so they technically could have glow maps, they will loose all skin properties. They will only use the texture assigned to them in NifSkope and ignore whichever texture the race records assign (i.e. everybody's Imperial, even Argonians or Khajiit), and they won't react to any changes in skin tint and color during CharGen.

As I said I don't know what's the case for heads and faces, but I think I remember a similar keyword-material used on all heads and a similar name for their NiTriShape/Strips.

Wow... if that's the case then that stinks... and I would imagine it is, because the heads probably follow the same rules as the bodies in that respect... So poop... I guess no glowing patterns on my Dremora then... :T

Thank you for the reply though!