Repair your face (cleaner facial details)

Bored of half of Skyrim looking like a baby's first wood carving project if they used any other detail settings other than "none"? Try universal sandblasting! (Fixed Special Edition's terrible application of vanilla facial detail/age/roughness/freckle maps by lowering the opacity in the texture file.)

For whatever reason, when Bethesda jumped from the 2011 release of Skyrim to the 2016 Special Edition release, they decided in their infinite wisdom that the best way to get next-gen graphics was to set the game engine to apply facial detail maps to 130% opacity or something like that, making the "about 40" detail maps look like " 70 years old, my ancestral lines never even encountered the concept of moisture," and the "freckles" drawing (yes, that's supposed to be freckles, according to the file name) seems to have been badly burned.

The only workarounds I've found so far are for someone to replace all the detail drawings with blank images (so the aged Lilith Maiden Loom and the middle-aged Usgt Full both look as young as the new faces. Ysolde) or only seem to touch on the male detail drawings. Maybe they are planning to make normal maps for other ages, maybe not, but I can't stand it.

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End result: a weathered face that actually looks weathered, not like you blended it all over with Ctrl+F on the Unsharp Mask Tool. You do lose some finer details, but half the population of Skyrim now doesn't look like the Forsaken loading screen, so I guess it's a fair trade.

Install:

Use the Mod Manager of your choice to apply the files, preferably before other mods that may change the same file so they are overwritten.

These files are in a standard subfolder format and should be used normally.

If you're the masochistic type and don't use a mod manager, then (not judging, just saying), just drag the "textures" folder into the Skyrim SE\Data folder like you did. (I recommend saying "no" to file overwriting so you don't lose better facial detail mods you may have installed.)

As for uninstalling, just delete the file (if you are not using any Mod Manager) or disable the mod in your Mod Manager (if you are using one).

Process and technical information:

Lacking actual artistic ability, I opened the .dds file in GIMP, copied the background shade of gray, created a layer below the existing file containing only that shade of gray, and set the original detail layer's opacity to 50%. I then generated a new layer from the visible layer, renamed it "Main Surface", deleted the original and exported. (I'm not sure if renaming is necessary, though. Maybe it is, maybe not.)

Unfortunately, due to the way GIMP handles .dds file exports, the mipmap data built into the vanilla files is lost; however, the resulting performance hit should be negligible. If someone has the appropriate tools or knowledge and is willing to do so, please feel free to do so. The original, unmodified .dds files are uploaded to the "Other Files" section, so you don't even have to spend time trying to find the files in your BSA extractor of choice.

I'd also like to point out that I pulled the face textures from the 2011 Skyrim version just to confirm that they are exactly the same level of detail as the Special Edition version, just at half the resolution. The difference is not in the detailed graphics, but in the way the engine applies them. I could have spent an hour trying to figure out how to fix it in Creation Kit (and generate the YET ANOTHER.esp file to get into our already bloated load list), or I could have squeezed out some DDS files, and then I'd have spent over an hour longer than I should have (that is, I've spent at least an hour and a half, not counting distractions).

credit:

Original files from Bethesda. Edited by me. No need for anyone to take credit for changing/updating the file.

Also, I occasionally make music. Maybe you can give it a listen, maybe you like it, maybe you don't.

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