Black Circles, z-fighting and texture shimmering

[torminater]

NEW UPDATE:

I have tried the Skyrim Special Edition, and there seems to be no more z-fighting for me. As if that is linked to the fixes towards the shadow processing or has something to do with the new 64bit engine, I cannot say for sure. If you have further insight, please share below.

 

OLD post:

I am still working on my fix, as it does not solve all of the z-fighting and there is a performance drop of about 0-8 FPS. Further testing is therefore welcomed!
For the original little fix head over here !

For the guide (WIP) against z-fighting head over here !


Hey folks,
at the moment I'm fiddeling around with nvidia inspector, skyrim ini and prefs to get rid of black circles on mid-distant terrain, reduce z-fighting as much as possible and eliminate texture shimmering if possible.
I don't remember if z-fighting has been such a big problem for me before the last drivers update, but now it really gets on my case. It's only visible on very distant mountain sides but in a large area. The good thing is, if it's cloudy I don't notice it as much. The bad thing is, if it's sunny all of the great graphics cannot overshine the flashing mountains in the Background.
Texture shimmering is annoying but it's on the very end of my 2dolist.
What annoys me know the most is this black circles glitch. I just can't find the setting that causes me all that trouble.
It is very prominent and extremely disturbing. Reading through this forum I stumbled upon a lot of threads that were highly interesting and revealed that there are a whole lot of bright minds around.
I guess if STEP tries to make Skyrim an unforgettable experience, then it should include some details about very common bugs and glitches as those three I'm referring to. If anyone of you guys knows any tricks considering them I would be too glad to try them out!
I have had problems with artifacts probably caused by too much graphic mods and ini tweaks (no ugrids changes whatsoever...)
My rig is the following:
Crucial m4 SSD 128GB, 2.5"
Samsung EcoGreen F4 1500GB
Intel Core i7-2600K, 4x 3.40GHz
Kingston ValueRAM DIMM Kit 8GB
2 x Gainward GeForce GTX 570 Phantom, 1.25GB GDDR5 SLI
ASRock P67 Extreme4
Corsair Professional Series Gold AX750 750W
All drivers are absolutely up2date. By all means I should be able to run Skyrim without problems. So far that doesn't work out...
EDIT: Those Black Circles seem only to pop up in the lower half of the screen o_O but somewhat diagonal... maybe cuz of the Sun angle?
I found out how to remove them:
fShadowBiasScale=0.1500 revert to fShadowBiasScale=0.2500 in SkyrimPrefs.ini
There are still black stripes on some rocks and mountainsides. they disappear from the center the closer you come...

[frihyland]

This post may be relevant.

[majin662]

I've tried to fiddle with OSCAPE before and it was disastrous for me, but I am always up for learning. I'll re check it out, hadn't though about it much though since Z-fighting is just as bad with his HQLOD meshes as it is without them....then again, I do not have first hand knowledge of what all he was correcting when he made them and defer to his awesomeness in anything modding related. Thanks for link.

[torminater]

thanks for the link! i think this will not work for mountain flicker though. if there was a way to automatically adapt the z-buffer values of all the lod textures then maybe this would eliminate z-fighting. i don't think this works using the described way.

it's just a too far range of distance.

I personally think that the z-fighting in the mountains is caused by 3 things:

- the lod of the mountain

- the lod of snow

- maybe the lod of "clouded mountain peaks"

if one could directly access those three lods and give them appropriate z-buffer-values... dunno. worth trying though.

Imho skyrims z-buffer is just not precise enough OR the developers messed up mountain z-values...

i personally would love to be able to dive in to the ck and fix everything i like, but i got too much flying around my head and honestly i think i lack the skill.

[majin662]

after playing with the creation kit a little last night I think it may be possible to reduce the z fighting even on mountains. If you go into the CK and begin looking at mountain meshes with snow attached to them you see the z fighting in an object by object breakdown. You can also see where the ground plane is raised too high into the mesh/textures and you end up with this little black piece of nothing just flickering away.

 

I experimented with removing some snow, lowering ground planes, changing depths, a bunch of stuff. In no way shape or form am I confident in the CK yet, but I will say that after fiddling with it and watching an object by object breakdown of mountains and snow and seeing z fighting up close on textures/meshes as they are before any LOD settings and then peeling away layers and just tinkering until it was gone I am hopeful of the CK being able to at least help.

 

For anyone who just wants to see for themselves. Open up world objects in CK, go to Static, mountains, then look for mountainslopsnow heavy or light or snow rock anything basically with snow attached and try to edit it, you don't have to actually edit it, just open it up for edit and rotate it around etc, you'll see it.

 

I actually wiped my entire skyrim install and reinstalled and am going to just play with the ck for awhile in spare time on a vanilla set up to see what I can learn

[torminater]

i am so happy that you are messing around with this and i think everybody will be thankful for your work and effort you put into this. if you manage to fix the issues you might just make a mod of it and put it on the nexus. there are hundreds of experienced modders that would help you out if you have problems with this!

[majin662]

the issue has interested me for awhile now. I use not have a lot of it, but as mods progressed and I was no longer stable at 7 ugrids , the issue became worse and worse.

 

I am a complete noob at the CK so right now it's all exploration, but it is definitely interesting poking around. What interests me at the moment is if most of this is due to :

 

Z-Fighting

In videogames, this term refers to a common visual bug where a surface flickers erratically because two objects are co-planar. Z-Fighting in the Creation Kit is commonly caused by the accidental duplication of static objects, or placement of decal objects directly on a surface with no offset.

 

that quote is directly from the CK site. I know that with the HD DLC packs there are a bunch of duplicate textures and things like that, so I am wondering if the same applies to meshes.

 

If I come across something cool I'll relate it. I know it may be a fruitless endeavor but who knows, at the worst at least I'll learn a little more about the game.

[majin662]

so I've played around quite a bit over last night and today, and it's a mess in there. Skyrim's beautiful mountains are just hodge podged together out of multiple different rocks, snow, slopes, etc. They look great in game , but it looks like they were just placed in all sorts of random places with no regard for collision or co planar geometry. You can pick one massive model if you like and expand it along z to "overgrow" some of the other models it is fighting with, but then you start messing with the possibility of blocking something or changing something someone elses mod may call on. 

[torminater]

what a mess... just as i thought it would be... well any chance there is a simple solution to it?

[majin662]

what a mess... just as i thought it would be... well any chance there is a simple solution to it?

I don't know. I've only messed with it for a day or so, but I have tried a bunch of different things in that day. I do know the meshes have ALOT of duplicate vertices. The main culprits (the mountain/rock snow materials) have a single pass shader and only does alpha testing. The mountains themselves, like I said, are just a collection of different mesh/textures/decals in varying nonsense configurations stacked on top of one another. If I'm not mistaken, exterior landscapes have 0 occlusion at all and instead rely on multibounds which are simpler/"easier" for the rendering engine. The list goes on, but thus far no simple solution. 

 

It is fun to learn though, but then it's also sad to learn because you see just how much this was designed for consoles and medium settings. 

[torminater]

this is from the open cities skyrim readme:

I am seeing extremely long load times when exiting into Whiterun from an interior.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

It has been confirmed from several sources that this is due to some anti Z-fighting tweaks that have been provided by the STEP Guide. You will need to reverse these changes in order to resolve the problem. It may be possible to refine these to allow you to keep them, but I know nothing about what's being done so you'd need to ask for that advice on the STEP forum.

ok, i don't really get any long load times from whiterun, but my rig is pretty good...

afaik, this can only be caused by the blockdistance-settings. i'm pretty sure there is no other possibility to reduce z-fighting using those settings. plus: i think i know why load times increase. yesterday i read something about increasing the distances at which meshes are loaded to reduce stuttering, which would also cause slightly longer loading times. increasing the fblockdistance-settings may, too or only, may result in a exponential increase of loading times.

anybody willing can test this for themselves, as i don't want to rely on my rig solely.

[majin662]

That makes sense. the blockdistances refer to LOD meshes. As you push them further and further out I can definitely see how that could extend load times. Those who are experiencing it though are probably also using ugrids to load tweaks so then there distances are pushed out even further.

 

If NifOpt were working for skyrim meshes could be optimized the same as textures. I looked over all the LOD meshes with nifskope and those are the meshes I found a good deal of duplicate verticies on as well so all in all, makes sense those are extending load times.

[torminater]

ok, thanks for the feedback. then where the heck are all of those godsent tools everybody needs for skyrim? they were created a whole lot faster for all the other (new) bethesda games iirc...

is nobody motivated?

[majin662]

ok, thanks for the feedback. then where the heck are all of those godsent tools everybody needs for skyrim? they were created a whole lot faster for all the other (new) bethesda games iirc...

is nobody motivated?

I never played Oblivion or Morrowind but I think it actually took them a year or two before they even began to see the real decent tools/overhauls. Also it was more of a community supposedly back then. A lot of the main modders have probably moved on or are not as interested in Skyrim as they were the previous titles. 

[LeetMiniWheat]

I've been in contact with OpticShooter about the z-fighting the bottoms of Lush Trees have (even up close). He says he has no clue how to fix it. (I believe tormentor said something about tweaking z-buffer values in the CK?) A lot of people have reported the issue on a vanilla install, so I'd like to see this fixed if anyone has information they can relay to him or to me so I can forward it. He seems to think a .esp is needed if the CK is required for a fix?

[torminater]

nottin easier than that: