Texture Weirdness

[thunderclam]

So I'm at the "Creatures of Skyrim" part of SR and I've been testing a bit. I am not currently using an ENB and have noticed some cave textures acting weird. Because I've got all my AA turned off (as per the guide) until I activate ENB, I think textures doing weird **** when I move around is "normal" at this point.

 

Thus far fences and a few interior rock/cave/ice walls and floors have a weird twitchy effect. It's small and I initially mistook it for stutter (it's not). For example, if I look at a rock wall in Bleak Falls Barrow, standing still, everything looks nice and high res and beautiful. The second I move the camera a bit, the texture seems to shift like it's not quite loaded. It's not a flicker or a shimmer, exactly, but it's something.

 

What I want to know is whether or not this is happening because I am using no AA or if I should be down-sizing textures or what.

 

I'm running 8gb RAM, i5 2500k 4 core, and a Radeon 6950 (2gb) at present.

 

An additional note: exteriors work pretty wonderfully. The only thing screwy is the fences but I'm 99% sure that's the lack of anti-aliasing.

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https://imgur.com/a/aJqaq

 

That's weird, too. Which mod handles those little stones? It's a bit of a busy screen considering the snow, but you'll notice that the small cluttery rocks are weirdly whitened. They sort of glow in game too.

 

I thought I installed/DDSopted all the dang texture mods correctly...

[7hr08ik]

Put on your enb and find out. If you use enb manager it's literally just a single click to take it off and continue testing

 

Sent from my LT26i using Tapatalk 4 Beta

[thunderclam]

I'm following SR which means ENB is one of the last things you install. Since I've never used ENB before, and I'm being cautious here, I have been waiting on putting it on. I'm not too worried about the texture stuff until I see what happens with ENB but I figured if this was a common problem or something ENB couldn't fix, might as well catch it now.

 

Those shiny white stones are more of a cause for concern right now because I think it means I installed something incorrectly or optimized it incorrectly somehow.

[Aiyen]

Sounds like you got some parallax textures installed but are not using the ENB "fix parallax" feature. This would result in the same thing you say.

[thunderclam]

I don't know which mod I used from SR that could have come with parallax except Real Ice. Would Real Ice mess with the stones? I'm assuming that's what you're talking about, though you could be talking about the general texture stuff I mentioned.

[Aiyen]

Fences in riverwood for example.. .will always look like that unless the author of ENB fixes it (I know he is trying somehow now). The only other way to fix it would be using MSAA with a high sampling rate 8x or above. But then you cannot use ENB. So if that is not vital for you, then just do that.

 

The big thing now for texture packs is to start including parallax textures, and if you do not use ENB then they will look slightly off when viewed from odd angles. Some of them might have updated that sort of thing in there... just check for _p.dds textures in their texture folders to be sure.

 

Could also just be that you need to enable some sort of AA, or increase your screen resolution!

Flickering textures are normally more of an issue at lower resolution as well due to aliasing artifacts being more noticeable.

[thunderclam]

I will be using ENB eventually. Sounds like that will fix some of these issues so I guess I shouldn't worry about it during this phase of the build. As for my resolution, I use a 32" Samsung TV as a monitor so it's weird about resolutions. Not sure if I could safely increase it.

 

EDIT:

 

Further screwing around with a mix of SR and Legendary's character appearance mod recommendations yielded these results:

 

Weird hair clipping (using DCE Realistic Male Heads, More Realistic Hair, and Superior Lore Friendly Hair) https://i.imgur.com/rz4cF84h.jpg

 

Beards behaving oddly (I've seen this before in a previous install, no idea what causes it) https://i.imgur.com/Bt9swTTh.jpg

 

Neck seam (hard to see... using UNP, Mature Skin, was using All In One Face but dropped it because I don't like it, seams showed up there too though) https://i.imgur.com/WfTkHKXh.jpg

 

The neck seam may be difficult to see. It's not THAT bad but from screenshots and descriptions, it shouldn't be there at all. Not sure what I did wrong but the installation process for face textures, hair textures, and body mods is a bit strenuous and complicated so it may have been user error of some kind. Can't think what at present.

 

Thanks one and all for hearing my gripes and any help you may offer!

[Nearox]

Did you keep an original version of the extracted mods in MO and a seperate one that contains the DDSOpt textures (which you place under the original mod in your install order)? Then you should disable all the DDSOpt mods and run with originals, see if that solves the problem. Then test which one(s) is/are the culprit.

[thunderclam]

That's a good idea. I did keep unoptimized originals so I'll be testing those.

 

I think I had an issue with More Realistic Hair before and ended up having to delete it pretty aggressively. Right now, having it disabled makes hair look like it's a thin layer of crap on top of the head, especially any parts that are supposed to be thickened locks or whatever. I ran into this before but I can't remember how I fixed it or which mod I ended up using for hair. Dang.

 

Also, I should add that Wood Elf males are the only race with the clipping problem I showed. I suspect it's a flaw in DCE or something. It's pretty bad for almost all the vanilla wood elf hairs.

 

EDIT:

 

Well, changing to unoptimized textures didn't make a difference.

 

Here's an example of the hair problem, which is much worse for male characters:

 

https://i.imgur.com/wMLHnnt.jpg

 

You'll notice that up at the top of his forehead, the hair detaches from whatever the underlying structure is supposed to be. Currently I am on a mission to get rid of More Realistic Hair as it was the problem last time I ran into this issue. It seems like deactivating it doesn't do the trick. I would have thought that using MO means deactivating a mod keeps it from making changes to the game.

[Aiyen]

Neck seams you are never gonna get rid of entirely! Unless you only use the vanilla game and lighting and textures.

 

It is almost impossible to remove neck seams from every single scenario. You can heavily reduce them by either editing the lighting or textures.

 

Also about resolution. Using a 32" monitor would mean that the textures gets a bit more blurry since the native resolution for 32" monitor would be above 1440p. It might also cause certain aliasing effects to be more noticeable... I do not know, I only have a 27" and only ever had smaller to test from.

 

As for the hair and beard. Then that is most likely due to textures themselves. Hair clipping is unavoidable for the most part. Only using specially made meshes would remove it.

[thunderclam]

The thing is, I've seen this hair and beard stuff before, independent of any other mods that affect the same stuff let alone how they appear on the description pages on the Nexus. The beards in particular are a weird one because there is no other mod that should affect how they look.

 

As for hair clipping, I'm sorry but I don't follow you. Whatever's going on with the hair I posted for the Wood Elf example and the Nord example with the "detached" hair is mod-related absolutely. I'm just not sure what the heck I did wrong. Apparently disabling Superior Lore Friendly Hair and outright removing More Realistic Hair was not enough to make the hair textures vanilla again. I am still getting the clipping. Last time, I had to go into the data folder and delete textures/meshes that affected hair. I'm not sure how that's supposed to work assuming that MO is keeping the content of my mods separate from the Skyrim data folder.

 

In further testing:

 

Removing the Mature Skin Texture and Body seems to have settled the neck seams down by a fair margin. They are almost invisible now. Not sure what the deal is there but I think seams are either part of the package or I installed the textures and normals wrong somehow.

 

DCE has nothing to do with the Wood Elf clipping issue.

 

Seems like disabling DCE also fixed some seaming on the men. I haven't added a male body mod (pretty convoluted process there with some jargon I'm not familiar with) yet so I don't know if there's one that's seamless with DCE. I think I'll be going back to Geonox though DCE was night.

[Aiyen]

Okay more detailed info then.

 

Hair clipping: Mainly this is due to the hair meshes which clip with the head mesh. The only way this can be fixed is to make special meshes. Also to some extent then sometimes the textures can clip if their alpha levels are badly set, or messed up. If you are using Apachii hairs or the improved vanilla hair meshes, then this problem should be mostly fixed. Or at least not as noticeable.

 

Neck seams: Since the head and body and arm textures are separated into their own textures, then depending on the lighting and how the texture is made there will be a visible seam. Only in the case of vanilla lighting and textures will they not be there since they are tailored to not be there.

If you are good at using photoshop, gimp etc. you can manually edit the textures so they match the vanilla lighting. (Most of the time this is already done by the authors.)

However once you start using Climates of Tamriel, or RLO, or ELFX or any other lighting mod that alters the imagespace modifers the seams might come back again, since those settings go in and affect how lighting falls on the texture.

 

You can also delete meshes and or textures in MO. Just find the respective mod, and then pick "Open in explorer" and then you can delete the files you do not want or overwrite them with something else.

 

Hope that answers the issues a bit more. Otherwise let me know and I will try to explain it in another way!

Now onwards to the other post you made! Since that was also lacking on my part! :)

[thunderclam]

I do understand that neck seams and hair clipping happen. I've been modding Skyrim since 2 months after it was released. I am familiar with these issues and their causes. But something in my Skyrim Revisited install is causing these current problems (because I likely installed it incorrectly). Now, hair is messed up in general (detached, wood elf head clipping) even if I disable all of my hair-related and character appearance mods. Why is that?

 

Assuming Neovalen doesn't like to play with seams and clipping, I am trying to figure out what I did wrong here. I think if I was supposed to expect neck seams and clipping issues in SR, the guide would say so.

[Aiyen]

So if you install everything up until point 4.7 (People of Skyrim)

and start a new game then the hairs look all messed up ?

 

That would be really strange. Only mod that affects characters then would be race menu. But it should not do what you describe.

 

I did not have any issues with hairs during my install... granted that was months ago while the guide was still entirely up to date!

[thunderclam]

Uninstalling mods that I've added in 4.7 doesn't fix the mesh issue. Whatever happened to my male hair meshes, I can't figure out where to find anything to fix it. Apacahii has meshes for its own hairs but shouldn't affect vanilla.

 

I have no idea how to fix this, really. No idea what went wrong.

 

EDIT:

 

If things weren't complicated enough... it seems even launching the game in my vanilla profile replicated the wood elf head clipping and the weird hair detaching/glossiness.

 

I have been testing a few different hair retextures and none of them seem to make much of a difference. There seems to definitely be something wrong with my meshes but there isn't anything in my load order that should do anything to vanilla meshes. I am at a complete loss.

[thunderclam]

Can't edit so here's some more examples with various hair retexture mods (AOF, Yuril's hair mod, Superior Lore-Friendly, and More Realistic Hair). No matter which I use, I have the same weird detached hair pieces on CERTAIN hair styles (including some Apachii ones somehow) and a weird glossiness that I've tested with different light sources with no change.

 

I also figured out the MO Data folder so I looked into which mods change meshes and NONE should affect this. Moreover, I mentioned before that even my Vanilla profile suffers from these problems. I really hope someone knows what's up because the best answer I've gotten online has been that it's a "shader issue" caused by "certain GPUs and ENB". I know for a fact that the hairs weren't doing this before I started installing the SR character appearance mods and I had my AA turned off then with no ENB (just like now) so I don't see how it's that. I don't know the first thing about troubleshooting shader issues, either.

 

:(

 

https://i.imgur.com/mgFG0bKh.jpg

 

https://i.imgur.com/OGgwJH4h.jpg

 

https://i.imgur.com/4TJUeB8h.jpg

 

https://i.imgur.com/AOfyA96h.jpg