daddel0815 Posted November 2, 2012 Share Posted November 2, 2012 (edited) Hey Guys (and girls?!)! Just got in the mood to play Skyrim again (after some time now) ... but there are some issues I wanted to adress before: I know that some of my following problems might have been discussed in some other topics already but I seem to be unable to fix them to an (visual) acceptable end and maybe there are some fresh solution brewing up ... Issue No1: Shadow tweaksI think that Skyrim's vanilla shadows are quite at the bottom of the bearable uglyness and not really improving with higher quality levels. I've searched on the nexus (and off-nexus) for tweaks and solutions almost five hours today and tried some of them (INSS Low/Med/High), but aside from newest ENB (0.119 or so) nothing worked to my ultimate satisfaction, maybe the land and/or distant shadows are quite allright, but the blocky character shadows especially outdoors made me choke. With 100+ Mods installed my machine could not handle 0.119 ENBs like UNBLEAK (SSAO manually switched off already) without dropping below 35-40 fps in most areas and I think when there are some additional NPCs battling and flame-balling around I can count my FPS with bare eyes without running fraps ^^!. I think my ultimate solution would be to disable on-character shadows entirely (sigh!) and try to get the land shadows as good as possible. Edit: Just forgot; in case this is helpful: I'm running CLENB right now (it's ENB v. 0.102; SSAO forced off) with average FPS around 60 (outdoors) up to 90 (indoor). Nice lightning and colors, no improvement with shadows though! So now the big question: How to get rid of the on-char-shadows? Or to improve them without needing a 1500€-PC? The command "bActorSelfShadowing=0" doesn't do anything in SkyrimPrefs.ini. Also tried to mess around with some "ugrid"-thingies which resulted in a new installation of the game, so no more of them please ... (continous c2d even after reverting to a backed up vanilla config). Is there something else I can do? I'm asking myself how all the screenshot artists on the nexus do it without the blocky shadows!? Surely not all of them have high-end machines runnning ... Issue No2: The 'lightning' lines on skinThink this is also shadow related, occurs mostly in interiors. Is there any possibility to get rid of them too. I've minimized it (or so I think) due some work with INSS-suggested values but they are still there. In some places this is really annoying. Issue No3: Mouse LagIn some areas I've encountered a serious mouse lag best recognizeable while in skill or inventory menus. It may be since the last Update (v. 1.8?) cause I've not played Skyrim for a time now. Any hint on this one? I hope there is someone around able to help me though I think I may have to excuse for my bad english grammar ... PC Specs: Intel i5 760@2,8GHzASUS P7P55D-E4 GByte OCZ 1600-RAMSapphire Radeon HD 7870 (think it's 2GByte VRAM)Win7x64Further specs ->> Sysprofile Greetings, DaDDeL! Edited November 2, 2012 by daddel0815 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tom2681 Posted November 3, 2012 Share Posted November 3, 2012 Let's see if I can help a bit. Exterior shadows:In skyrim.ini and skyrimprefs.ini, look for iShadowMapResolution and set it to 4096 if your PC can handle it.iShadowMode and iShadowFilter need to be set to 4 (ultra).Then, lower fShadowDistance until your character's shadow looks okay.A resolution of 4096 with a distance of 5000 looks pretty darn good to me.You can also use iBlurDeferredShadowMask to make your shadows more blurry and less pixelated. Anything from 0 to 7 will work. Lighting lines:I presume that's the shadow striping bug.I use ENB 0.113 with the following shadow settings in enbseries.ini:[sHADOW]ShadowCastersFix=true ShadowQualityFix=trueDetailedShadowQuality=2UseBilateralShadowFilter=trueUseShadowFilter=trueShadowObjectsFix=falseNo more shadow striping for me. The bug is still there (can't be helped), but it's almost invisible.Try to find a modern ENB that's optimized for performance and play with the shadow settings in enbseries. Don't know about the mouse lag, sorry.fMouseHeadingSensitivity in skyrimprefs allows you to set the speed of your mouse, if that helps. Good luck with that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
daddel0815 Posted November 3, 2012 Author Share Posted November 3, 2012 (edited) Hi there, first of all thank you for your reply!Exterior shadows:In skyrim.ini and skyrimprefs.ini, look for iShadowMapResolution and set it to 4096 if your PC can handle it.iShadowMode and iShadowFilter need to be set to 4 (ultra).Then, lower fShadowDistance until your character's shadow looks okay.A resolution of 4096 with a distance of 5000 looks pretty darn good to me.You can also use iBlurDeferredShadowMask to make your shadows more blurry and less pixelated. Anything from 0 to 7 will work.Tried that one before. It makes the shadows a little less ugly but they're still quite pixelated. Kills approx. 10-15 FPS for me so I can't use this with any ENB. That's why I look to disable Skyrims messed up character shadows completely and let some ENB do the work. BLEAK ENB makes quite nice shadows but kills my performance in most areas while Skyrims shadows are active and they're still visible in the background of the ENB shadows. I've not found any up2date ENB-preset which meets my desires and I'm not so deep into ENB settings that I'm able to receive a acceptable result myself. Most of them ENB guys have a real issue with dof and/or major background blurring. This may be a matter of taste but I'm not into such effects. Any suggestions which keeps my performance in check (aiming at approx. 50-70 FPS overall)? Lighting lines:I presume that's the shadow striping bug.I use ENB 0.113 with the following shadow settings in enbseries.ini:Nope, got rid of shadow striping with this one: Shadow Striping Fix (8043) (File's set hidden right now, but I've saved it away in early 2012 :whistling: ) My problem is the 'line of light' (dunno how to better describe it ...) on skin and some other surfaces when standing between a light source and another shadowed area or something like that. It's visible only in certain camera positions and situations. They mentioned it @ the INSS mods but never posted any working solution. Though I never see this on screenshots I think there have to be some way around ... At least I got my Mouse lags fixed through setting "iPresentInterval" to "0" and ensuring that "iAdapter" is also set to "0" in skyrimprefs.ini. I think one of them affects vsync, don't know what the other one does ... fixed it, I'm fine with that! Still need more help with fixing or at least disabling on-character shadows and the minor lightning lines on skin though. Greetings, DaDDeL! Edited November 3, 2012 by daddel0815 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
daddel0815 Posted November 7, 2012 Author Share Posted November 7, 2012 Oh boy, that special a topic? Nobody any clue? G Daddel! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Adalwulf Posted November 8, 2012 Share Posted November 8, 2012 Try using these settings, they did wonders for me before i upgraded my rig: Shadows for Medium-Range PC by defosh369 As for the mouse-lag, have you tried turning off mouse acceleration? Add this line under [Controls] in SkyrimPrefs.ini : bMouseAcceleration=0 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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