Anyone know how to fix this shadow problem?

[Dburwebby]

I didn't have this problem earlier today. What happened was, I installed some mods and didn't like them so I uninstalled them. Well, I got the save file corruption that way, and I read somewhere running steams file integrity check might fix it, which it didn't. So I loaded an earlier save file, but what happened was, steam reset my video settings and changed some values in my skyrim.ini and skyrimprefs.ini file. I had followed this guide http://www.geforce.com/Optimize/Guides/the-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim-tweak-guide/#1 a week ago, and I have an ATI card so I just followed the ini file tweaks. Everything looked great, so I went back and changed some of the values like I had before which it looked fine. However now when I load my game, the shadows look weird.

 

Here's a screenshot, and as you can see how the shadows look messed up now.

 

http://i.imgur.com/D336A.jpg

 

 

How do I fix this?

[xlcr]

Dburwebby, hi, looking at your snapshot, i'm guessing the annoying 'feathered' shadow edges look more to me like

some weird ENB mod effect or other post-processing; but, you did not say you were running any rendering plugin like that.

 

anyway, shadow sharpness/edge quality is usually controlled by Skyrim in a few settings found in skyrimprefs.ini,

here are my settings which are just a balance between quality/performance, included comments about each:

 

[Display]

iBlurDeferredShadowMask=3 (shadow sharpness, 0 best, 7 worst).

iInteriorShadowDistance=3000.0000 (indoor quality, increasing reduces, decreasing causes fade-in, don't mess with this lol).

fShadowDistance=2000.0000 (outside distance shadows appear, 8000 optimized default, lowering increases detail, experiment).

iShadowMapResolutionSecondary=1024 (1024/2048/4096/8192, increases detail, use lower value, high messes up performance).

iShadowMapResolutionPrimary=2048 (see above).

 

hope this helps! :turned:

oh, i'd suggest whenever you're happy with skyrim tweaks, make a backup of your install/profile folders somewhere.

at least make a backup of your skyrim.ini and skyrimprefs.ini files; also,

you cannot realistically expect bethesda/steam to protect/support skyrim mods/tweaks.

For troubleshooting reasons it's understandable why they're primarily interested in only maintaining the integrity of

the standard default skyrim build, as a result, always have a contingency (plan b).

 

you may have to dig into your AMD Catalyst Control Center GPU global/game profile settings and

tweak your effects settings there if necessary to further fix things.

Edited August 24, 2012 by xlcr

[Dburwebby]

Dburwebby, hi, looking at your snapshot, i'm guessing the annoying 'feathered' shadow edges look more to me like

some weird ENB mod effect or other post-processing; but, you did not say you were running any rendering plugin like that.

 

anyway, shadow sharpness/edge quality is usually controlled by Skyrim in a few settings found in skyrimprefs.ini,

here are my settings which are just a balance between quality/performance, included comments about each:

 

[Display]

iBlurDeferredShadowMask=3 (shadow sharpness, 0 best, 7 worst).

iInteriorShadowDistance=3000.0000 (indoor quality, increasing reduces, decreasing causes fade-in, don't mess with this lol).

fShadowDistance=2000.0000 (outside distance shadows appear, 8000 optimized default, lowering increases detail, experiment).

iShadowMapResolutionSecondary=1024 (1024/2048/4096/8192, increases detail, use lower value, high messes up performance).

iShadowMapResolutionPrimary=2048 (see above).

 

hope this helps! :turned:

oh, i'd suggest whenever you're happy with skyrim tweaks, make a backup of your install/profile folders somewhere.

at least make a backup of your skyrim.ini and skyrimprefs.ini files; also,

you cannot realistically expect bethesda/steam to protect/support skyrim mods/tweaks.

For troubleshooting reasons it's understandable why they're primarily interested in only maintaining the integrity of

the standard default skyrim build, as a result, always have a contingency (plan b).

 

you may have to dig into your AMD Catalyst Control Center GPU global/game profile settings and

tweak your effects settings there if necessary to further fix things.

Thanks for the reply and yeah I am using the TV enb, but like I said everything was working fine. I tried your settings as well and it didn't work. So I just deleted both the skyrim.ini and skyrimprefs.ini and adjusted my tweaks with the same settings as before and it seemed to work this time. And yeah I'm going to start backing up my ini files, saves and the entire skyrim folder from now on.

[Georgiegril]

For shadow striping, less shadow resolution is actually better. So higher shadow bias scale values combined with lower resolution and distance values are more likely to lessen your striping effect, by making the shadowing less crisp.

[xlcr]

Dburwebby, cool, glad you were able to recreate your original ini settings.

geez, this is powerful ENB rendering post-processing mod you've got installed:

TV ENB by Trillville - http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/11930

you may want to backup your enbseries.ini also lol.

in the future for troubleshooting purposes, i think you can press F12 to toggle it off.