What is causing this lopsided face glitch?

[BFG]

I'm an experienced Oblivion mod author who used to contribute to UESP regularly. I've spent dozens of hours reinstalling Oblivion after a 3 1/2 year hiatus - picking out the best mods, carefully Pyffing and DDSopting and TES4Editing and Bashing everything, reading the Readmes for everything, etc., only to find that, in-game, all of the characters are suffering from weird lopsided faces / facial geometry errors. That's after it looks perfectly fine during character generation. And I am pulling my hair out because, after 10 hours of debugging efforts, I cannot figure out the root cause. (The really annoying thing: I remember it also happened 3 1/2 years ago, and I fixed it then...but I cannot recall how!)

To see the error, look at the linked JPG below. You can see a weird growth on the right side of the character's face, in the space between the face and the hair. There is no similar growth on the left side, though there are similar, smaller, geometry errors in the left cheek not visible in the screenshot.

Short of a full reinstall, I've done absolutely everything I can think of to fix this, including doing all of the following at the same time:
Removing all of the Pyffi'd, DDSopted, and repacked BSA files from my Data folder, and reverting to the original, untouched, vanilla BSAs
Removing all loose Meshes, Textures, and other folders from the Data folder (to ensure I was only using the meshes/textures in the original BSAs)
Disabling every mod, even the unofficial patches and the Bethesda DLCs like Shivering Isles
Checking dates on all files to ensure they will load in the correct order
Deleting Oblivion.ini to force a revert of that file, and making sure the BSA list is correct
Turning off OBSE, Wrye Bash, ArchiveInvalidationInvalidated, etc.
Restarting the game to see if it would impact a second character

I know about the facegen errors that can occur if you alter the Oblivion - Misc.bsa file in any way, so I've been using the original copy of it all along. I also know about the errors that can occur when you Pyffi hair, helmets, or anything else with an EGM file - but, even though I used Pyffi Automater which is supposed to skip those, the error still occurs even when I go back to the non-Pyffi'd versions. I did have Blockhead installed but removed it after removing all mods that needed it. The only alteration I can't eliminate is the 4GB patch I added to Oblivion.exe.

So, based on the above, and the fact it still occurs even when I revert to vanilla assets, does anyone have any ideas? Is it possible it has something to do with my graphics card or driver?

My specs:
DVD-Based Oblivion GOTY edition, with final official patch
Intel Core 2 Duo P8400 2.26GHz
4GM RAM
Nvidia GeForce 9600M GS 1GB (yes, it's old), with the final official driver compatible with that card (R340)
Windows 7 Pro x64
DirectX 9 x64

Load order while bug is in effect:
Oblivion.esm
...aaaand, that's it. Yes, really.

Image of issue at: http://i801.photobucket.com/albums/yy29 ... xqrb5k.jpg

[BFG]

Anybody?

[Tingz0r]

Sorry, you've been looking too far into this. It's just the way the Khajiit face mesh is structured. When it's rotated in any way, some parts will stick out. It boils down to nothing more than the designers failing to compensate for stretching and complex animation. This problem is perhaps most commonly found in the shoulder region of character models. When the arm is rotated or lifted to a certain degree, the shoulder will squash and cave into itself. This happens because the mesh and skeleton aren't rigged to keep everything looking the way it does in the pose that they were original built from (T-pose, neutral pose, etc.) when the models are subjected to animation.

It seems silly but Bethesda is infamous for this sort of thing, especially where beast races are concerned. It's easy to assume that they let these kinds of things slide so they can work on other parts of the game. The Elder Scrolls is known for large amounts of content, not large amounts of polish.

[BFG]

It seems strange that that only occurs on one side of the face though, and that I've seen numerous screenshots from that angle of a Khajiit character that do not look that way. Ah well, it's a minor inconvenience, and I thought it was something I had done (perhaps a bad PyFFI optimization for example). Thanks for the reply.

[legoless]

I've seen this on Khajiit as well. Does it happen with any other face mesh?

[Tingz0r]

Part of the problem could be how you've customized your Khajiit's face, and part of the problem comes from the Oblivion face editor not keeping things exactly how they look before you actually start playing, but I really don't think it's possible to design a Khajiit that won't appear slightly off in the menu pose. Still, you most likely won't see that problem anywhere else. It just sucks that you have to stare at it every time you open your inventory.

Try switching to third-person view and standing besides an NPC. Your head should turn, but it will still look normal.