Light Limit Fix

[Dashyburn]

Light Limit Fix by Doodlum and the Community Shaders team is revolutionary.

 

So many magnificent player homes on the Nexus and the majority of them have poor lighting, not really the fault of the author as the engine is limited and most tedious to work with, but there's nothing that breaks atmosphere like a home with glowing windows with a bright interior in the middle of the night, that looks identical to the middle of the day. The first time I opened the render screen was to redo the lighting of a castle that was identical during day/night.

 

Most authors know about the simplest thing which is setting matching external emittance on windows and bulbs, with just these settings windows will change brightness (and colour with some settings) according to the time and the bulbs will match, so lights go dim at night but they are still there, with any bulbs in close proximity the light level will still be too bright for a satisfactory night interior so this can be fixed, most authors either don't know or do know that this will triple their work as well as add a bucket load of tedious.

 

This also allows you to actually do two separate sets of lighting for day and night so you don't have to squeeze in night bulbs with day bulbs, you assign a bulb as a master parent bulb which holds a script to turn itself on/off at the selected times (6am and 8pm are good times) then you enable every other bulb to that parent bulb, you can also enable your light source on/off meshes to the master bulb to swap your lit/unlit candle meshes, if your master is a night bulb then all day bulbs and meshes can be set to enable to the opposite of the parent.

 

This is where the tedious is, enabling every bulb and mesh to the master and placing meshes on top of their opposite mesh, lot's of copy/pasting co-ordinates, but the result is worth it, you can still keep your emittance even with day bulbs being banished, they will follow the emittance cycle until they swap out and resume emittance when they swap back in. Banishing the day bulbs also makes the cell go nice and dark giving a decent atmosphere to work with.

 

Before the release of SE I started making my ultimate home, went right overboard with a huge solitude manor style home lined with windows because I just didn't know anything about lighting, then when it came to lighting it I discovered it was actually impossible, after all that work, but thankfully I discovered another mod that taught me the above mesh swap, I just added bulbs to the swap. There are over 90 windows and the cell is large so I had to place large radius bulbs very carefully, after much tweaking I managed a large window lined interior with a visually acceptable day/night cycle, now I maxed the day time out with 12 large radius bulbs, I was happy with it as it is the best I could possibly do with these restrictions.

 

Then Light Limit Fix was released, tested it out by redoing just one room that has 10 windows, placed a bulb at every window, 10 bulbs in a 4 by 3 room, upon checking it looked glorious, 10 actual true light source windows with absolute zero flicker, the surrounds all illuminated correctly, glorious. What was previously lighting this room was a single bulb placed in the centre with a single bright spot disguised as a skylight.

 

So I went ahead and redone the entire cell, I have lost count of the bulbs, there's well over a hundred on the day cycle and just as many at night, revised my whole mod, I was most likely never going to finish it but this just changes everything, I will need to redo all 6 cells...Oh and opposite to what I thought, removing the 12 large radius bulbs and replacing them with a multitude of smaller ones actually increased performance, rather dramatically at that, I would assume this is because of light limit fix.

 

I want to show other authors what we can do now, there's just no limit anymore, granted at the moment this only applies to non portal strict bulbs which means they will shine through roombounds but all good for this layout plus I haven't set any room bounds. I will be uploading an excerpt of the mod with just this cell very soon as a demonstration.

Edited September 21, 2023 by Dashyburn

[NikiRandom]

I've just added this to my load order for a new playthrough. Haven't really tested it out yet but looking for ward to seeing what it does.

I've had a year or so away from Skyrim, and I'm honestly blown away by how many advances have been made in modding since I last played. It's fantastic < 3