And appropriate to the topic title, I thought I'd have a go at improving the hair anyway. A fairly low-effort attempt, just upscaling the DM from 512×512 to 1024×1024 and trying to smooth out the alpha channel a bit. If it's made any difference at all I can't really see it, though it looks worse in screenshots than in-game, I guess because the constant movement disguises the rough outlines a bit.

[Linked Image]

But I don't think I'm going to have any success as I suspect it's less to do with the texture and more a problem with the engine's aliasing, which I've never been able to get working satisfactorily even forcing all sorts of settings with the Radeon tool, as well as the awful jaggedy self-shadows which look really rough even on maximum quality, another of various "features" it shares with Oblivion.

I just noticed the date on the files I was working on which was mid 2012. No wonder I struggled to remember what I'd been doing! I can redo the textures easily enough now, though it's quite laborious, especially as some Gimp and/or Windows 10 bug means it takes forever for the file dialogue to come up, but for small numbers it's not too bad; I dunno whose idea it was to embed them in NIF files though! Which is part of the reason it takes so long as the dds needs to be repacked into a NIF, which then needs to be checked and fixed (sometimes with several iterations) and then the whole lot snuck into the Patch.dv2 archive. And I'm not even going near the models again (which is how come my character is wearing jewellery) as they're ten times more fiddly and arcane.

But actually it wasn't freckles or hair that incited me to do this but that I wanted to avoid the "silver" eyes thing: I know it's supposed to happen but I became quite weary of the way it looks. I guess I shall soon find out if it worked. She currently has hazel eyes as I made the base colour brown but forgot to change the specular map which is still blue/green.

J'aime le fromage.