I'm making a mod for personal use. It incorporates Slofs Xivilai meshes.

I'm fairly new to modding and CS but I have decent understanding of it. I used blender and nifskope as well as PH CS5.

Normal textures for say an imperial (514x514) are smaller then those needed to wrap Slof's Xivilai head mesh so they look awkward when creating a race. I attempted to resize Oblivions imperial mesh to 1024x1024 dimensions (the same dimensions as Slof's Xivilai head textures). However, when this new texture is matched in CS with my new race the facegendata displays a completely pitch black skin.

I can't figure it.

What's odd is if I match her original mesh with her original texture it is still turns the face pitch black.

I'm pretty sure some kind of base color scheme is in affect here and overplaying the brightness/hue of the texture but I can't discover a solution as to where that kind of option might be.

Should you have an answer or a suggestion I implore you please to share it.

Thanks in advance.

~Friendly neighborhood noob.

Try a simple test. While you look at the black texture, press 'A' to turn on the CS ambient light. If the textures look Ok when you do this, but black with the CS light off, that's a symptom of no mipmaps, probably with your normal map. (Do not ask how I know this thing).

Thanks for replying. I tried this and nothing happened. I just got the windows error sound.

Pressing the 'A' key in the CS just toggles the CS ambient light. You should not get a Windows error message or sound. If necessary, try loading a .esp file you know is correct, press the 'A' key a few times and see what happens.

Relative to your black texture: If it's black w/o the CS light and magenta with the light, there is no texture (for example, if you misspelled the texture name in the .nif file). If it's black w/o the CS light, but looks Ok with the light, either the normal map is missing or it has no mipmaps. There may be other possibilities, but I just re-checked these two conditions.

Edit: It may be that the issue is something unique to NPC's that is different from those described above that apply to inanimate objects. If so, hopefully someone familiar with skin/NPC issues will post.

Yeah I'm still wrestling with this.

I guess I'll just start my own head mesh from scratch.

What do you have the Nimaterial settings set to in the Nif file --- IIRC if the emmisive color is set to black it will make the texture look black in the CS !

Bingo. Well done and thank you!

Thank you all.