Dark gray snow problem

[steelfeathers]

I'm trying to get my SSE mod setup going again so I can play the anniversary edition when it comes out, but I'm running into an infuriating problem:

Gray snow masks.

Everything that has a snow overlay - rocks, mountain sides, wooden walkways - is showing dark gray snow.

After doing a cubic butt-load of research, I eventually found out that when bEnableProjecteUVDiffuseNormals is equal to 1, you have to have a texture named projecteddiffuse.dds in textures/effects that exactly matches your snow texture. I also added projectednormal.dss as well (a copy of the snow normal texture) since I've seen people do that as well.

So I gave that a whirl....and it worked! The snow overlays went back to being white instead of dark gray. All was right with the world.

...

Now, it's stopped working. I have no idea why. I took a break to generate terrain LOD for the texture pack, and the snow went back to being borked.

For testing, I'm down to no mods except a texture pack that I'm using snow texture from (the same texture pack where I got the fix working one (1) time) . I've disabled EVERYTHING except Alternate start, the basic texture pack, and the raw ENB wrapper files (no ENB presets of any kind).

If I set bEnableProjecteUVDiffuseNormals to 0, then the snow is the correct color, but it's super flat and ugly

Someone please help, I'm pulling my hair out over here, this is stupid silly. What am I missing? Is the engine just screwing with me???

[steelfeathers]

If I also disable the texture pack and just run vanilla skyrim, the snow is the right color.

So the problem HAS to be with the texture pack, but it's set up the same way it was before when I got the fix working...I am very confused...

[steelfeathers]

So, after further testing and lots and lots of tiny variations for comparison:

 

-ENB dlls (no presets) help enhance the appearance of the snow overlay layer for plain vanilla textures and for texture pack textures, but doesn't otherwise fix (or cause) the dark-gray snow problem.

-Plain vanilla texture pack does not have the dark gray snow problem.

-Majestic Mountains, which has the projecteddiffuse.dss fix, fixes the dark gray snow problem.

-Tamrielic Textures does not frickin work no matter how many times I try to copy snow01.dss into textures/effects and change the name to projecteddiffuse.dss I don't know why. People on the internet say this should work. Other mods are set up this way. But I was only able to get this fix working for this texture pack once and now never again.

[steelfeathers]

For posterity:

 

The vanilla projecteddiffuse.dds texture is way, way brighter than the default snow01.dds

When I edited the snow01 texture from Tamrielic to be much brighter...boom, fixed.