help troubleshooting a "blocky halo" effect on torches, and other lighting issues

[Brambleshire]

Greetings folks!

Can anyone please point me in the right direction on where to troubleshoot lighting issues in my build?

I am so close to my dream load order. I successfully completed STEP, then added some extra mods. However there are some moderate lighting issues that are giving me fits. This is confusing me even more, because I haven't departed far from STEP when it comes to lighting and shadows.

The only deviations from STEP that I can think of that have to do with lighting are:
-different ENB (I am on bjorn right now, but was going to try others)
- wearable lanterns
- torches cast shadows

Problems I am experiencing:
- torches and small campfires have blocky monochrome halos
- lights turning on and off as I move and look around
- occasional architecture flickering, especially in the vanilla player homes. 

Things I have tried so far:
- disabling and enabling all the mods I can think of that touch lighting or torches (ELFX, Embers, Ambiance- V+LO, Relighting Skyrim, EVLS, etc)
- checking that bethini is set correctly for my MO profile
- regarding the architecture flickering, some of it is caused by ELFX. I used console to get ref for the flickering texture, it says its last modded by ELFX, so I found it in xEdit, copied the ELFX mod,  then replaced the ELFX changes into a Null reference. That stopped the flickering on that specific house or wall.

Load Order: https://paste.ee/d/252n1

Torch and small campfire blocky halos:
<a href="https://imgbb.com/"><img src="https://i.ibb.co/XyFYGRt/torch-halo.jpg" alt="torch-halo" border="0"></a>

Here is an example of lights turning on and off based off of slight camera movement in the Alternate Start Dungeon
[url=https://imgbb.com/][img]https://i.ibb.co/LJRkbPR/light-on.jpg[/img][/url]
[url=https://imgbb.com/][img]https://i.ibb.co/3kJgz1F/light-off.jpg[/img][/url]

There is also a minor issue, such as some lights casting bizarrely intense shadows, such as this candle:
[url=https://imgbb.com/][img]https://i.ibb.co/kmQb8MQ/candle-shadow.jpg[/img][/url]

Thank you for helping this noob!

Edited December 8, 2023 by Brambleshire

[Brambleshire]

Well it says it wont let me edit anymore....

But here are the screenshots since I couldnt figure out how to embed them lol

Torch and small campfire blocky halos:
https://ibb.co/q0mJ2Qp

Here is an example of lights turning on and off based off of slight camera movement in the Alternate Start Dungeon
https://ibb.co/F03xNW3
https://ibb.co/mSxf8Jy

There is also a minor issue, such as some lights casting bizarrely intense shadows, such as this candle:
https://ibb.co/41PvTJP

[Mercury71]

Did you test your STEP before adding those mods?

Particle Patch .esp should be disabled, ELFX Exteriors .esp should be disabled, EnhancedlightsandFX.esp should be disabled, ELFX Fises .esp should be disabled, ELFX Ragged Flagoon Fix .esp should be disabled.

You have not followed the STEP Guide in the first place.

There is a very large number of mods you have added to the guide. Some may conflict with the STEP Patches.

[Brambleshire]

Yes. My testing prior to adding to STEP was successful. My Loot is clean and very happy with me. I started the adding to pure STEP in a different MO profile.

There is one possible conflict with the STEP patches: I may want to remove Lanterns of Skyrim, but that's a different issue for a different day. Actually, my only two remaining problems in this build are the one I am posting about here, and floating lanterns in the towns. Other than these everything looks really great and seems to be running well.

It's a lot of plugins, but other than the enb, its almost pure STEP when it comes to lighting and shadows. 
It was texture and wilderness/city mods where I went all out. Something like a 3rd of all of them are just for city mods and northern roads. JKs in particular and all its associated patches is like 100+ plugins. The next largest deviation from STEP was improving the look of the environment. I went all out with parallax, textures, and mods that add vegetation to the wilderness. Outside of those areas, its still very close to pure STEP.

Edited December 8, 2023 by Brambleshire

[Brambleshire]

31 minutes ago, Mercury71 said:

Particle Patch .esp should be disabled, ELFX Exteriors .esp should be disabled, EnhancedlightsandFX.esp should be disabled, ELFX Fises .esp should be disabled, ELFX Ragged Flagoon Fix .esp should be disabled.

Pardon me, I forgot to say that I did disable them per the guide, but then enabled them later. I've been tinkering with those trying them enabled and unabled. They just happen to be enabled right now. 
As a side note, I was very confused why the guide told me to download those mods, then just disable the whole mod.

Edited December 8, 2023 by Brambleshire

[ButchDiavolo]

I had a short peek at the pics. The torch light is actually a missing mesh/ texture. The give-away here is the purpleish color. Check with More Informative Console which mesh it is using, then check in MO2 which mods alter that mesh/ texture. Tinker around a bit to find a mesh that does work.

The shadows issue is caused by a conflict in (lighting) mods. It could be caused by a host of the mods you have installed. You could try finding the culprit, or learn to live with it.

As for your posted modlist: is that the installation order (left side in MO2) or the plug-in order (right side in MO2).

If it is the plugin order, then the order is wrong. Nothing should come after DynDOLOD and Occlusion. Re-run Loot and don't make adjustment manually afterwards.

if it is the installation order, it is also less than ideal. When adding mods on top of a STEP install, the best thing to do is put the extra mods in the same categories as the STEP guide (i.e. JK Skyrim under Locations, it's patches under Patches etc.). That way it is easier to see what mod overwrites what. Exception to this is ENB Parallax mods, they should all be put under a new category (call it Parallax or something), right before the Post-Processing category. Then move them around within that category to get the look you want. Parallax enabled mods should always overwrite everything else, or you will lose the parallax effect. And of course make sure you have the effect enabled in the ENBseries.ini.

In short: move the mods to their respective categories, keeping an eye on what is overwriting what. Then rerun xLodgen, TexGen and DynDOLOD. Then re-run LOOT and don't make manual changes to the loadorder. Maybe that will already sort out the issues.

Good Luck

[Brambleshire]

1 hour ago, Mercury71 said:

You have not followed the STEP Guide in the first place.

I just want to be clear I spent a solid 4-5 days following the guide to the TEE. Its my first foray into modding, so I had to go slow. I still made mistakes and was utterly dumbfounded at times, but I made it all the way through successfully. I did playtesting in addition to the testing in the guide and everything appeared to be working great. 

Again thank you to the step crew, because 1. I never would have been able to mod skyrim to any meaningful extent on my own, and 2. I learned so much about how everything works. There's just no way I would have been able to do any of this on my own. 

Anyways, I'm rambling, but I just want to be clear that I followed the guide to the best of my abilities. In fact, I've still been using it as a a continual reference. 

[Brambleshire]

13 minutes ago, ButchDiavolo said:

The torch light is actually a missing mesh/ texture. The give-away here is the purpleish color.

That is huge! Thank you! That really narrows it down. 

14 minutes ago, ButchDiavolo said:

As for your posted modlist: is that the installation order (left side in MO2) or the plug-in order (right side in MO2).

I actually am not sure. I just went to loadorder.txt in the MO profile folder and copy pasted. 

It is freshly sorted by loot. I think I've a only manually placed a mod maybe one time. Other than that I have exclusively used loot for sorting.

I actually have been sorting the mods into separator categories and I created a paralax category just as you said. I got the idea from lurking old posts on this forum. In fact I was using a particular post as a paralax guide, I think it might have been by you... 

Thank you for the helpful advice! 

Too sleep for now 😴

[Mercury71]

3 hours ago, Brambleshire said:

As a side note, I was very confused why the guide told me to download those mods, then just disable the whole mod.

Only the plugins from those mods are disabled. The textures and meshes are still visible ingame.

[Brambleshire]

@ButchDiavolo Hey it actually was you! This is your post I used as my parallax guide;
Thank you for this, it was very helpful!

 

9 hours ago, ButchDiavolo said:

Check with More Informative Console which mesh it is using, then check in MO2 which mods alter that mesh/ texture. Tinker around a bit to find a mesh that does work.

Well, I thought I knew how to do this, but I guess I don't. I thought it would be as simple as looking up the REF ID on xEdit, but apparently not? It greatly confuses me why sometimes I can pull up a ref ID straight away, and other times ill put in a Ref ID and nothing happens. Am I looking in the wrong place for the wrong info?

Here is a cropped screenshot of the More Informative Console
Top left: https://ibb.co/28B5FwP
Bottom right: https://ibb.co/hyjCVn7

What should I be looking at when it comes to mesh?
Thanks again,

[ButchDiavolo]

I am glad that my post was helpful to you STEP is aimed at keeping Skyrim as close to vanilla as possible, while fixing things that need fixing. So unfortunately parallax is not part of it. But as we said before, we can add parallax mods and whatever you want on top of a STEP installation. STEP is the best basis to have. And the community is also helpful and awesome.

As for the torch and meshes/ textures in general: a lot/ most mesh/ texture mods don't have a plugin associated with them, so the game won't know where a particular mesh comes from (I learned this just the other day). The way those mods work is by using the same names and file structure as Skyrim itself. So they overwrite the original game assets. The mods that do have a plugin file, like SMIM, can use that plugin to tell the game where to use those assets and switch them to the SMIM version.

On a side note, this is why we don't use the plugins from ELFX and a few others. We want just the meshes and texture, but NOT the other changes it makes.

As a consequence of the above, if the winning torch mesh is added by a plugin-less mod, More Informative Console isn't useful in finding the plugin that changes that mesh, which you can see in the bottom right in MIC (in your case "Alternate Start"). It does however tell you the name of the mesh at the top left, in this case Torchpermanent01. With that information, we can track down which mods change this mesh. There are a number of ways to find out, but for me personally, the simplest way is to use the Data tab on the right side of MO2, above the loadorder list.

Click on the data tab, then at the bottom you can type in the mesh name, in this case Torchpermanent01.nif (nif files are the mesh files). It will then show you just the folder(s) this nif is in (meshes/clutter/common). The name of the mesh will be in red, indicating that more than one mod change this nif, with the winner shown under "mod name". Hovering your mouse over the name will give a pop-up/ toast with the names of the other mods that change it.

I will use my loadorder as an example, so in my case, the winner of this conflict is Ember XD. When I hover over it, it tells me "Particle patch for ENB" and SMIM also contain this nif. I know that both the other mods are not parallax enabled, but Embers XD is (if you picked the parallax meshes during install). So Embers XD should be the winner, which is why I don't have the missing texture problem in my game.

Now back to your situation. If you have another winner, you can solve the problem by simply moving Embers XD lower in the mod list on the left, ideally in the Parallax category.

This is a good example of how important the install order (left column) is when modding Skyrim. The install order defines the ultimate look and function in the game, which is why the STEP Modlist is in the order it is in and why you should put parallax mods below all others, but before the Post-Processing category.

Yeah, wall of text again, but I hope this helps you.

[Brambleshire]

On 12/8/2023 at 5:35 PM, ButchDiavolo said:

On a side note, this is why we don't use the plugins from ELFX and a few others. We want just the meshes and texture, but NOT the other changes it makes.

Why don't you use ELFX plugins exactly? This question has been nagging me since I first came across it in the guide. (i found old threads on here where you guys were discussing whether or not to use it, but due to my shallow knowledge, I couldnt understand what was actually being said)
 

On 12/8/2023 at 5:35 PM, ButchDiavolo said:

Click on the data tab, then at the bottom you can type in the mesh name, in this case Torchpermanent01.nif (nif files are the mesh files). It will then show you just the folder(s) this nif is in (meshes/clutter/common).

Thank you! This whole time I had no idea what the Data tab was for! That lead me to the "Parallax Mesh Patch Collection for Embers XD", and voila, disabling that patch fixed my torch sconce issue. However, I see that you used it in your guide, so what is causing it to give me trouble when I assume its working fine for you? I'm happy just not using that patch, but it would be nice to know. I haven't added any other lighting mods other than what is in STEP and what you outlined in your parallax post I referenced. 
(I also relocated Embers XD from the textures section where STEP puts it, to the Parallax section like you suggested, but it made no difference)

[Brambleshire]

On 12/8/2023 at 5:35 PM, ButchDiavolo said:

STEP is aimed at keeping Skyrim as close to vanilla as possible, while fixing things that need fixing. So unfortunately parallax is not part of it. But as we said before, we can add parallax mods and whatever you want on top of a STEP installation. STEP is the best basis to have. And the community is also helpful and awesome.

That's exactly why I came here. The guide is detailed enough and plain-English enough that even I can (barely) follow it. Additionally, the step guide got me through all the foundation stuff (i would never have been able to do all the tools stuff without having my hand held and even then it was difficult), I figured it would give me a more perfected and stable base to work off of, and finally I wanted to play a relatively vanilla skyrim anyways.  I also quickly discovered that it is a great way to learn about how everything works and what it does, and that everyone is very professional. (I made a donation!)  However, it was never my intention to play pure vanilla skyrim for a few reasons: I played the crap out of OG vanilla skyrim on my xbox a decade ago and I don't need to do that again, I just dropped big bucks on building my first PC and I want to put it to work, and there were some things in vanilla skyrim I definitely did not enjoy. (easily killing an identical looking dragon every 5 minutes, every bandit getting elven and glass equipment, not enough armor variety, etc) I want to play vanilla skyrim that looks amazing + a small number of gameplay "tweaks". So I'm asking you because it seems like something you are into as well. Am I committing a sin to STEP by trying to go about it this way? Or is this just a bad way to try it and I should be using a different approach without STEP?

Edited December 10, 2023 by Brambleshire

[ButchDiavolo]

3 hours ago, Brambleshire said:

Why don't you use ELFX plugins exactly? This question has been nagging me since I first came across it in the guide. (i found old threads on here where you guys were discussing whether or not to use it, but due to my shallow knowledge, I couldnt understand what was actually being said)

Mesh mods without a plug-in just replace the meshes (and/or textures). However, mesh mods WITH a plugin usually also change other setting, such a light settings and the like. This is especially true for ELFX. In the case of ELFX we just want to use the meshes from it, since we will add other light changing mods later. By hiding/ deleting the plug-ins files, those lighting and other changes aren't loaded into the game, so they can't cause conflicts.

The same goes for, for example, XMPSSE. This mod changes/ updates the body meshes and basic animations. However it also adds a lot of weapon animations. For STEP we only want the body meshes and basic animations. So by hiding/deleting the plug-in, we prevent all the other animations to be loaded in the game.

Maybe I should have started with what a plugin actually does. With a plugin, a mod author can make changes to the base game, that go beyond just switching out base game assets. They can add new quests, animations, light colors, NPC movements, NPC looks, etc. The plugin is then used to define those changes, so the game knows what to load and how to make the changes the mod author wants to appear in the game. Replacement mods, usually mesh/ texture mods don't need a plugin, because only the meshes/ textures have changed/ been updated, but no extra settings. So there is nothing else to load. I hope this explains it a bit better?

3 hours ago, Brambleshire said:

I haven't added any other lighting mods other than what is in STEP and what you outlined in your parallax post I referenced.

That Parallax post I made is from March. Since then a lot has changed, so it is a bit outdated. For example, you no longer need the Parallax Patch for Embers, since Embers XD now has it's own parallax meshes. (I have removed it from the post now). Sorry that mod was causing your problem. Since that is a Patch, it will always come after the mod(s) it is patching. Which is why moving Ember didn't fix the problem.

3 hours ago, Brambleshire said:

I want to play vanilla skyrim that looks amazing + a small number of gameplay "tweaks". So I'm asking you because it seems like something you are into as well. Am I committing a sin to STEP by trying to go about it this way? Or is this just a bad way to try it and I should be using a different approach without STEP?

I can only speak from my experiences of course and share a the knowledge I picked up during years of modding Skyrim. And some of that knowledge may be flawed, I am still learning things. But using STEP as a basis is pretty much essential for the reasons you also mentioned. There is a wealth of information about modding, stable mods,  conflict resolutions, etc. And once you have a stable basic STEP installation, you can add on to it as much as you like. So no, you are not committing a sin. Or if you are, then so am I.

The only "problem" with adding on to basic STEP, is that the added mods are not officially supported by the STEP Curators. So any questions about non-STEP mods, must be asked in the General Skyrim SE Discussion forum. Other modders may be able to help you there. But if you use mods that no-one else uses or even knows about, you are pretty much on your own and will have to figure it out yourself. For me that is a very small price to pay. With xEdit and other tools, you can come a long way fixing problems.

Another issue would be that the STEP Patches may not work/ conflict with the extended mod list. In that case you will have to decide if you are keeping the STEP solution or the solution in one of the added mod.

[Brambleshire]

Ah! got it. Yall just wanted to use other lighting mods instead of ELFX, and you didn't want the  animations, I assume because they stray too far from vanilla. Thank you for the clarification! That question has been killing me forever!

 

On 12/10/2023 at 2:58 AM, ButchDiavolo said:

Another issue would be that the STEP Patches may not work/ conflict with the extended mod list. In that case you will have to decide if you are keeping the STEP solution or the solution in one of the added mod.

Yep. I'm running into this now with Lanterns of Skyrim and Oakwood. I'm trying to remove both just cuz I'm not a big fan. Again I'm going through some of your old posts lol

(Edit: Lol. What I mean is, they aren't working properly because they are probably conflicting with other mods that are much much more important to me, and I thought it would be easier to just remove them)

Edited December 12, 2023 by Brambleshire