Question about how ENB settings are applied

[asd000]

I've recently started a new Skyrim AE (technically SE since I don't use creation club mods, but the version is 1.6.1170) game. I played LE for years and finally decided to make the change, so the install and load order are totally fresh. Before I start making any major changes I want to make sure the ENB I want to use is working, so all I've got installed at the moment is SKSE, NAT.ENB III (https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/27141) and its requirements/recommendations, and Alternate Start so jumping into the game is quick.

As far as I can tell everything is working as intended. I disabled parallax in the enbseries.ini file because I don't have textures/meshes downloaded for it, but that's the only alteration I've made directly. The problem is that everything looks wet/slimy, or like it's made of shiny plastic. Barrels, ropes, clothes, etc. What I noticed in the enbserieis.ini file is that all of the specular settings in the [ENVIRONMENT] category are extremely high (2-5x default values). Lowering these settings does fix the shiny plastic effect.

This leads me to my question (sorry it took so long). Since this mod has a TON of weather-specific .ini files (many of which include even more extreme specular settings, up to 5000% of the defaults), do those modify the enbseries.ini settings or replace them outright during their respective weather conditions? I'd like to tinker with the absurd specular settings to make the otherwise very nice ENB look good before I continue modding, but I don't know about combing through 50 different weather files.

Unfortunately, it's hard to come by any good details on how ENB works. Every google result and youtube video seems to be some variation of "how to extract the contents of the 'wrapper' folder into the game directory."

Edited Monday at 10:01 PM by asd000

[scorrp10]

As to HOW ENB works is too technical a question.   But the ENB binaries you get from enbdev are just a platform with some basic settings.   What you generally want is get an ENB settings mod that matches your weathers mod.   For example, if I have Obsidian weathers installed, and I decide to use Desmond's Lusty ENB, I manually download its Obsidian Weathers file, unzip it, and copy its contents into root Skyrim directory.  It will overwrite the default enblocal.ini with its own, and also add an enbseries folder with a bunch of other ini and shader files.

[asd000]

I guess what I want to know is, do the weather-specific .ini files completely override the enbseries.ini in the main folder, or are they still somehow based on it?

So when it's foggy and there's a foggy.ini file that matches the weather mod's foggy weather condition, do the foggy.ini values say "adjust the numbers in enbseries.ini by x amount" or do they say "forget enbseries.ini and use this value instead"?

[scorrp10]

I am not 100% sure about this, but if you look into enbseries.ini, you will see that each section starts with a line:
IgnoreWeatherSystem=false (or =true)

If set to false, then ENB for that section will use a weather-specific .ini  inside enbseries folder.    And if set to true, that for that section, settings in enbseries.ini will be used.

In my current ENB setup,  things like EYE, LENS and SKINSPECULAR are set to ignore weather system.     And ENVIRONMENT, OBJECT, SKY and others are set to not ignore it.