Made Skryim Vanilla, Weird Issues persist!

[thunderclam]

I've posted some examples of the following texture/mesh issue with Skyrim as I've been investigating ways to fix it. I've come up short with "try a fresh reinstall" as the last resort. Well, I've now tried it and the issue remains:

 

https://i.imgur.com/rz4cF84h.jpg

 

Note: The problem only afflicts Wood Elf males. A new issue has also cropped up:

 

https://i.imgur.com/3Aaqp7Eh.jpg

 

This affects all female characters.

 

Because this is not a mod, and I am running vanilla, I do not understand what in heck is causing these graphical issues. I am currently testing GPU and game graphics settings to try and find a solution. If anyone has seen this before, please help. I've looked all over the place for answers and haven't found anything that sticks.

[Aiyen]

The female one looks like a shadow issue that vanilla just have with its skin textures.

 

As for the hair, then yeh it is strange, but if it is in a purely vanilla install, then its a bug that should most likely have been fixed by the unofficial patch.. afaik they also do meshes.

[thunderclam]

I will try running with the Unofficial patch and no other mods but Aiyen, I experienced this issue both with an SR install and Vanilla. The SR install included the unoffical patches so I don't see how that could be.

 

So far, screwing with my AA settings in GPU has changed the severity of the problem. It also seems that I may have DDSOPT'd the vanilla textures with some error or something because using the optimized textures also seems to make it worse. Using ENB also doesn't fix anything.

[thunderclam]

So further testing.

 

USKP makes no difference, nor does trying different textures such as the high res DLC. I'm pretty sure it's anti-aliasing with my Radeon 6950 and the driver version I'm using.

[Aiyen]

Well if it is somehow driver version related then that would explain why I cannot reproduce the issue at all. I use Nvidia 314.07

Since I have not seen any reason to update in a while now.

I can only semi reproduce a few of the hairs, but then it depends on view angle, and its only due to how the mesh was made.

 

The female issue I never really noticed if it is even there.

[thunderclam]

The hair may be an angle thing. I may have gotten so used to looking closely for issues that I'm seeing vanilla's limitations as some kind of glitch. Except, I don't think so. I remember having this "chunks of hair don't quite attach to head" issue before, caused by a hair mod. Back then, I did not use mod organizer and deleted the hair meshes in the data folder which fixed it. Now, there don't seem to be any installed hair meshes. Just the vanilla stuff.

 

Now I run vanilla, and I have this problem as well as the wood elf missing face chunk problem which was an issue with Skyrim v1 (and yes, I made sure I'm running 1.9.32).

 

In my latest bout of testing I was this close to deciding to just roll with a build anyway. That's after trying unsuccessfully to roll back my video drivers, use RadeonPro, SweetFX, etc. I use an AMD card so I'm not surprised you can't reproduce the issue on an Nvidia. Added to this, by the way, I noticed that one or two of the male facial hairs DON'T ATTACH TO THE FACE and the edges float off a bit, with transparent space just like with the hair but far more pronounced. Again, you can see it from certain angles. This goes alongside the weird poke-through effect I have with beards (when the Beards mod is installed especially). It looks like the vanilla hair and beards of my Skyrim characters are simply not properly attached to the faces.

 

I am beyond frustrated AND I just lost my job to downsizing so now I just feel like deleting everything even associated with Skyrim. I've been trying to get this working for 3 weeks now and everything I've tried, every problem I've solved, and I am still fighting anti-aliasing problems I never used to have, this hair/beard wood elf issue, and flickering/shimmering shadows.

 

I've googled til my eyes want to fall out of my head to no avail. Sorry to dump all this on you and STEP, Aiyen, but I am the definition of wits' end.

[thunderclam]

So it's all in one place, here is my imgur album collecting documentation of these issues. Pay special attention to pictures showing the glitches I've mentioned here:

 

https://imgur.com/a/aJqaq

[Nearox]

I really cannot come up with anything else on your issue, but if you haven't already, try run skyrim with either of the following:

 

- Transparency AA turned off in the Skyrimprefs.ini and in CCC

- Transparency AA turned on in the Skyrimprefs.ini and in CCC

- Transparency AA turned on in the SKyrimprefs.ini and turn on SSAA in CCC.

 

Use 2x AA for the last 2.

[thunderclam]

I've experimented with transparency AA in Skyrimprefs.ini and ended up with disappeared textures and the like. Did not try it w/ 2x AA though.

 

I do not see Transparency AA as a setting in CCC under game profiles.

 

Also, do I set 2x AA in the launcher or in CCC or both?

 

By the way, I'm getting the black lines but ONLY on brazier fires (for example, the ones outside of Whiterun) with 4x AA on (which is supposed to fix the issue). Gahhhhh!

[Nearox]

Ah sorry Transparency AA is called Adaptive AA in CCC. Use either enhanced or override option, it doesn't really matter. And you must set it in both skyrimprefs and in CCC for it to work (this is only necessary when using transaprency AA).

 

You can use this tool by the way for easily changing settings in SKyrim. Run the exectuable through M.O. so that the INI's of your profile will be changed.

 

https://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/814/?

 

Just some things to note about AA:

 

- Regular AA (multisampling, or MSAA) doesn't do anything with regards to transparency textures that you can find on foilage/trees/plants/bushes/braziers/lanterns etc.

- Adaptive Anti-Aliasing will do the same as MSAA + it will affect transaprency textures. Sometimes it can misread a texture (let's say a big tree) which will appear as beging something like 50% transparent. This only occurs to me on a very rare occasion.

- SSAA is the superior AA which is also the most 'pure' as in that it applies AA to 100% of your screen. It is also more costly, however.

 

Make sure transaprencyAA is turned on in Skyrim and that it is at 2x AA. Then try it twice. Once with AdaptiveAA and once with SSAA.

 

This way you can test if using this type of AA will solve the issue you have :)

 

In any case, using transaprency AA will make the game look much smoother and reduces a lot of the shimmering textures you see.

[thunderclam]

None of those settings seems to have made any difference whatsoever.

[Nearox]

Did enabling the settings drop your fps?

[thunderclam]

Didn't test far enough to make sure of that, but didn't seem like it. I will check again. Also, I turned off AA and Anisotropic settings in the launcher when I did my testing if that makes any difference.

[Nearox]

Enabling AAAA or SSAA (the latter in particular) should have a noticeable effect on fps. I asked becayse maybe it was not on.

 

As I said before, you must have AA (and in fact also anistotropic) enabled in BOTH Skyriprefs.ini and CCC (use override to be sure), otherwise it won't work. Make sure transparency is enabled too in Skyrimprefs.ini.

[thunderclam]

I did all of the above. Nothing. In fact, Supersampling may have made it worse, even. Going to a place like Riften with all its wooden planks, roofs, and windows is a nightmare of shimmering/vibrating textures. Going to Markarth is more soothing since, for whatever reason, the rocks and so on don't have as dramatic a problem.

 

Really, the only thing this fixed was the black lines around the fire (I suspect going down to 2 samples is what did that). Using Transparency AA and so on also caused this problem to come back, where before it only happens when I use Beards:

 

https://i.imgur.com/5AwCial.png

[Aiyen]

Try with new meshes for the vanilla hairs. There is one that alters them.