Any bounced lighting mods?

[Alton82]

I've been playing with Skyrim for a short while and just found it has an amazing mod community. Tried a few enb's and lighting mods (RLO and ELFX with different enb's).

 

One thing i've noticed with the more "realistic" mods is that the shadow contrast gets very harsh (I suppose that's one reason Bethesda added a lot of ambient light), and it gets difficult to make things out that are in shadow (even in daylight).

 

Is there any way to mod Skyrim so that you get the immersiveness of more realistic lighting, but also soft shadows and bounced light (so you get the ambience where you should, and dim/dark places more playable)?

 

I'm guessing this is just how the engine works (and even if I were so lucky to find a mod like that my GTX 580 would probably choke to death), but I thought i'd at least ask. :)

[mrpdean]

You're right in that the engine doesn't support true bounce lighting. Not many do unfortunately. You can fake it to some degree by adding more lights but you soon run into performance and engine limitations e.g. the limit on how many lights can affect an object before the flickering light issues starts.

 

I almost never leave enb settings at their defaults. Most of the newer enbs have a heap of settings you can tweak to try and find a good balance with indoor lighting.

[chanchan05]

What I've noticed is that because shadows get darker and more pronounced with ENBs, it causes that effect. And since I run on a laptop, the performance decrease I get from an ENB is something I'd rather not have. So your choice probably would be to not use an ENB in that case, or use a shader or ENB preset which makes the world a bit brighter then inlcude a "realistic lighting mod" so that it would sort of cancel out.

[trold]

It's been a while since I've tried "Climates of Tamriel", but I remember that the shadows seemed much lighter, which I liked.

Unfortunately CoT has so much other stuff I don't really care for.

 

I'm still trying to tweak a basic enb to my liking, mostly the vanilla bloom and stuff like that.

[Jermungand]

ENB releases used to include this feature you speak of, referred to as "indirect lighting". I don't know what the technical complications were, but it's been left out of later releases, and I've been told that earlier editions don't work properly.

 

I really hope the ENB team straighten it out and put "indirect lighting" back in at some point. You can only do so much with ambient occlusion.