» Tue Jul 27, 2010 3:52 am
To follow on a little from Drake's response.
The vanilla body uses more textures than the replacers, which use less mainly to avoid seams. The single "foot" texture avoids the problems of matching the edges of one texture map to another because they are literally the same map, so that location can only have one shade of skin. The "head" and "hands" textures usually are separate, and so neck and wrist seams are the most common (Chokers and wristbands needed!)
That means that an armor needs to come in multiple versions to match the texture mapping of the body, with the vanilla version assigning the skin of the arms to "upperbody", and the HGEC/Exnems version assigning it to "foot:upperbody". (I don't recall if BAB and FF do the same) If you run the wrong combination, you get toes on your arms, or nipbles on your feet. IIRC all the custom races use the HGEC map assigments and have a "foot" texture for the whole body.
This is only a problem for playable outfits, an NPC-specific outfit can use any names it likes for the maps and assign specific textures in the nif file. I always avoid the use of "skin" as a texture name in these, even in situations where it would work OK, just to make it obvious if I accidentally put an outfit on the wrong character. I've also used custom bodies for NPC's (really a "nvde" outfit that has non-skin skin pointed to a custom texture) to make them immune to texture replacers.