i made the very noob mistake of not backing up my oblivion data file and some how through playing with some mods i seemed to have deleted my orc and dark elf face textures.... the face appears but is completely black.... the eyes, ears, and teeth(orc) still appear fine but the face looks like the have black paint covering the whole face which leads me to believe i have some how deleted the textures for those races and it appears on both npc and pc characters.... my questions are

1. did i delete the textures???

2. and either way how do i fix this very annoying bug???

You have not deleted the textures. You have just incompletely installed or uninstalled a mod. Uninstall the mods that installed textures to the Textures\Characters folder. I think that the issue is specifically missing normal maps (_n.DDS).

i thought of that and uninstalled all mods i have in obmm and still have the same effect

Delete your Textures\Characters folder. OBMM is not the most reliable cleaner...

Edit: The original files are packed up in BSAs, so I am sure you did not delete those. You would've noticed... Also, make sure BSA redirection is turned on in OBMM (Utilities > Archive Invalidation.)

delete the textures/characters folder???? but i dont have any backups.... i dont understand..... why would that work???

and i looked and bsa redirection is on so thats not it

You delete the textures/characters folder because the vanilla textures are in the .bsas. That makes the game revert to those vanilla texture so everything will show up. You'll need to reinstall any facial texture replacers you've been using (and races, probably, if you use custom ones), but all that is really trivial.

And yes, Tomlong, you're correct. Pitch black texture means a missing normal map. That makes this situation rather intriguing... with no textures at all, it'd show up purple, so the diffuse map is still there, it's just the normal map that's gone. Weird :shrug:

Actually! Before deleting your textures/characters folder, use OBMM's Archive Invalidation utility and click the "reset time stamps" button and try it out. If that doesn't work, continue as above.

YAY it worked :celebration:

and i figured out what it was i had roberts male v5 beta installed without what it needed from v4 so it was for some reason making them disapear but now it works fine thank u :goodjob:

Robert v5 Beta includes everything? What files did you seem to need from v4? Did you, perhaps, install the "Average" v5 beta? It says you need to download the main v5 beta mod. Version 4 should not be necessary.

Hey, sorry to bump the thread and junk, but I'm having a similar problem- some of my chainmail armour normal maps are missing, it seems (specifically all of the male ones except the cuirass, and only some of the female ones).

The thing is, my Textures/Armour folder doesn't actually have any chainmail textures in it- I've never downloaded a chainmail armour replacer. In fact, the only armour in the chainmail folder was from the Castle Seaview mod by Mr Siika I think (and that had a different filename to the vanilla chainmail armour), and I've deleted it in case that was the problem- in fact, I deleted the whole Armour folder, and I've had no luck.

Have you properly installed v5 yet? Ooh, different person, bumping is fine. I appreciate that more than redundant threads. How many BSAs and plugins do you have installed, total? If you have around 300-400, you probably need to cut down. Otherwise, http://sites.google.com/site/oblivionpoinfo/troubleshooting/postlo, preferably with Wrye Bash, if you have it. If you use OBMM or BAIN, do you have archive invalidation on? (For OBMM, go to Utilities > Archive invalidation.)

Edit: typo...

Ah... archive invalidation. I should've known. Thanks, I fixed it.

Aaah, you quoted my typo (though that was how I found out about it), but I am glad your problem is resolved...