I'm having some issues with unusually dark shadows under the breasts in-game. They seem to appear when I align the normals after editing the body mesh even when I do nothing but cut the body away. I do subdivide faces on the body where i need to attach backfaces, but all of those areas are underneath the top and are only in the cleavage area. How do you go about getting rid of the shadows? The only thing I can think of doing is loading a fresh LOD1 nude base and replacing the one I've aligned the normals on. I'm starting a new, really complex layered mesh tomorrow and if I can't get this worked out on a simple one, I'm in a lot of trouble!

Are you aligning all the normals or selected ones? I try to align only spots that need it and leave the rest of the mesh alone.

I was trying to align the entire body at once. I was hoping you'd have a magic solution for me. Working with normals can get really monotonous, and it takes SO MANY trips back and forth into the game to check the results. After looking closer at the normals on the nude body that are in the WSO file kicked out by TSRW, there are some very light areas in that region, especially on the thin and fit morphs. I think the easiest thing to do in this case it to replace the body mesh and regroup the thing so I can morph the body parts separate from the T shirt. That way it will keep the body normals in all the morphs. Seeing how bad this body turned out though has given me new hope for the breast rework I did a couple of weeks ago. I thought they looked really deformed in-game, but it could have been just a shading problem. They looked very similar to these under the breast, and I know this is a good body mesh with nothing but a normals issue.

Yes, aligning the whole body at once rarely gives a good result. Selecting the verts for parts of the body (one breast in this case) and aligning should be better. When working with breasts, what I've done is select the body of the breast (not the verts where it joins the body), align, then if necessary I can select the verts around the breast and align to get a smoother transition. I find that the smooth-shaded Milkshape model is a pretty good predictor of how it'll look in-game so IMO you shouldn't have to do a lot of intermediate testing.