

1: Each character needing blushes will need two free face overlay slots. If this mod cannot secure two overlays on a given character, it will not display blushes on that character. Keep in mind that other mods also use overlays. The overlay count can be increased, if needed, with an adjustment to the SKSE\Plugins

ioverride.ini. The default count is 3.

2: The blushes packaged with this initial release have a resolution of 512x512. This is minimal. I have also provided 1k textures for a potentially more satisfying result, and also a set of compressed 512x512 textures for anyone who may be picky about resource usage. (2k is the resolution used during creation.)

3: This mod does not use tints to achieve the visual effect. This means several things:

3a: The blushes are not tints of the face but rather overlays, so they will look different on different face complexions. If the color seems off, it is recommended to make use of the color adjustment sliders. If that doesn't help, download the optional "bright" blush package, install it, and enable it from within the menu, and then see if you can get an acceptable result with those. I have also made a point of allowing users to adjust overall saturation on a per-race basis, but keep in mind that the default settings for this are based on vanilla females. You are free to tweak them.

3b: Being overlays, the blushes will appear on top of any tint-based facial modifications that may exist, be they tint-based complexion tweaks or makeup, tint-based tattoos, tint-based scars, etc. However, in the case of facial modifications that are themselves overlays, it is possible to ensure that the blushes appear underneath those, though this would depend, most likely, on the order in which the mods are installed and set up.

3c: Glow effects, such as from spells, may visibly highlight the outlines of the blushes on the face. There is no getting around this; it is a limitation of Skyrim's effects engine (in how it treats alpha levels). Other mods which use overlays suffer exactly the same problem.

3d: At some unusual camera angles and under certain circumstances, the blush may disappear entirely from a character (until the camera angle or other circumstance reverts). It's a phenomenon limited to NiOverride but probably cannot be fixed. It is not common.

3e: Occasionally, when a blush is first applied / loaded up on a character, it will appear dark gray. This is another quirk of NiOverride. The problem typically goes away, for whatever reason, when the character begins walking.

3f: Color control over the blushes is not ideal. I actually don't know whether this is specifically a bug with NiOverride or an unavoidable (and heretofore generally unnoticed) limitation of Skyrim's rendering engine, but the colors you choose are not what you end up with. In the end, even if you set blue and green to zero, some of both will still be there. The only way to address this problem is to limit the amount of green/blue that's in the texture itself, which then obviously reduces the amount of color control one gets. This is the reason why I have provided an alternative "bright" blush set. Said set will enable brighter blushes, but, thanks to this curious problem, they can never be either pure red or even a little dark. Between the two sets, at any rate, one should be able to reach the color of their choice. If I discover or am alerted to new information on this aspect, I may rework the mod accordingly.

3g: I have noticed that for some NPC faces with certain (vanilla) tint combinations (scars and such), overlays will not appear at all. Definitely a bug.

So why use these overlays instead of tints? Specifically because the push of this mod is to enable visibly smooth transitions from one fade state to the next, which means many visibility updates over a span of time. When you make an adjustment to a tint, Skyrim effectively remakes your entire face texture on the spot, which is not an instantaneous process - in fact it is almost guaranteed to cause the game to noticably hiccup. That is not good when you potentially need to make constant adjustments. This dealbreaking weakness of tints is the greatest strength of overlays.

4: As far as bugtesting goes, I have done as much as I can within my own specific constraints. I am taking pains not to play through the game in any meaningful capacity until all of my projects are done and all the mods I want to use are finished by their respective authors. This means there's every chance that some unforseen circumstance might cause this mod to do something unexpected.

