Hair Issues Continued

[thunderclam]

I've been reporting hair and beard issues on STEP forums for over a week now with very little help or attention. I've posted about this elsewhere as well. Either no one knows what causes this or no one else has ever had this issue. If the latter, I figure it's probably a good idea to further document my troubles. So far I've shown vanilla hair and beards. Here are some examples from apachiiskyhair, a hair mod we are probably all familiar with.

 

Needless to say at this point, I am DESPERATE to fix this problem.

 

Because the mod uses somewhat different, more exaggerated layering and texture style, it's easier to see (with some styles) what I've been trying to show. Something, either a mesh issue or a texture issue, is causing there to be a "missing" or transparent effect on hair styles which leads to a sort of hollow or see through effect. In the vanilla hairs, this is readily apparent with patches of hair that don't connect properly to the underlying hair texture, making it look as if they are floating slightly away from the rest of the hair. Apachiiskyhair affords me the opportunity to show some dramatic variations of the EXACT SAME PROBLEM.

 

Please note, this is not a problem associated with this mod. The problem persists. Even without this mod. Even with, as far as I know, an entire vanilla reinstall of Skyrim. I am not sure how I initially caused this issue. I have heard from the author of Beards that it is a "shader problem" which seems to cause a layering issue with beards as well.

 

I've been collecting examples in an imgur album: https://imgur.com/a/aJqaq

 

The last few, the apachii hairs, are as follows:

 

https://i.imgur.com/ucdB1Dh.png

 

https://i.imgur.com/Q99BekJ.png

 

https://i.imgur.com/3AtiMAb.png (my favorite of all modded male hairstyles, btw... now completely unusable)

 

https://i.imgur.com/kaY1Iac.png

 

And a good example of the issue from another vanilla hair example: https://i.imgur.com/XdCZ2CY.png

 

Here are some with the SR recommended retextures from More Realistic Hairs and Superior Lore-Friendly Hair 2k (Rough):

 

https://i.imgur.com/hRVhCdx.png

 

https://i.imgur.com/Rg6ydHt.png

 

https://i.imgur.com/8b7Efpg.png (this one shows a weird shadow effect where shadows from the background extend to the head of a character being created at the Helgen vanilla creation point)

 

https://i.imgur.com/GNkNKpJ.png

 

https://i.imgur.com/GTomN2i.png

 

https://i.imgur.com/OV6rPzA.png

 

https://i.imgur.com/Q1cUQIe.png

 

As always, thanks for any help from the community. I've gotten very little response on this issue which leads me to believe that no one knows what's going on. I really hope someone will help me get to the bottom of it as weeks of searching have only revealed the same old hair problems due to improper installations, mod incompatibilities, etc. I haven't seen anything out there for problems like these. I do think that my issues with beards and hair are almost certainly related. I think it is also possible that my issues with transparency aliasing and texture shimmering (only textures with transparency) may ALSO be related but this seems unlikely due to Nearox corroborating the latter issues but not reporting issues with hair (he has the same GPU as I do).

[thunderclam]

Okay so a couple of things:

 

1. A friend installed ApachiiSkyHair and now has the same problem as me. I do not know why I still have it in vanilla. Now he does too. How could ApachiiSkyHair corrupt a vanilla reinstall after you've deleted every trace of it from your system?

 

2. Of course I followed the STEP uninstall guide.

 

3. Other games work fine. Even graphically demanding games like Planetside 2. Because I turned my AA settings on my CC off in the general system setting, it has some weird AA just like Skyrim did. This suggests to me that it's either my CCC settings or the card or the drivers.

 

4. It possibly being the drivers is a distinct possibility but I'm scared to reinstall the drivers as the last time I tried that, CCC did not want to reinstall the display driver. Luckily, a computer reboot cleared that up but I had more issues so I tried the latest BETA. AMD apparently doesn't make it easy for you to uninstall all their crap. Also, CCC comes with a pile of extra utilities and **** that I don't understand and am therefore afraid to not install.

 

5. I am not getting any of the usual reported problems that signal the death of a graphics card and checking on how its running doesn't yield any strange results. At this time, I do not believe my hardware is failing.

 

6. I did try reinstalling DirectX before I deleted Skyrim itself. I am not sure if DirectX is the issue. It would not surprise me but nor would it explain why I'm having AA issues in other games, would it?

 

A year ago, I would have been the first person in line to sing the praises of the PC as a gaming platform. This experience has reminded me that it's not always beautiful graphics and better performance. Companies we rely on for 3rd party software to allow us to do x, y, and z often seem to place obstacles in our path that no amount of ingenuity or community experience can always overcome. Nobody has any answers on this. Just the usual obvious stuff that I've tried and tried again. Being unable to problems in vanilla was just the last straw for me after 4 weeks of troubleshooting and testing just to be able to play the game modded again (never used to be this bad at all and I've always modded). I get a lot of platitudes around the forums and places I've sought answers for this, stuff like "that's what you get when you mod a game" or whatever. Part of the reason this is such a dealbreaker for me is because a lot of the crap I thought was mods was really just something wrong or different about my initial setup. And I have no idea what or where to start.

 

The only thing to do is reinstall the video drivers, as has been suggested. One more thing to burn time learning to do, then doing it, and hoping it works out. I get why that's necessary. I've just been doing so much of it for so long now that I'm really tired.

[Garfink]

1) it can't, so it must still be in your system(s) if it is truly the cause of your issues.

2) Well, I recommend renaming the Skyrim installation directory and just try reinstalling Skyrim again. Forget the guide for this test.

3) I don't have problems with ANY game with my old 580 GTX card or my new Titan card, if you have AA problems in other games, sounds like your card/driver combo has issues in general. I remember I had a SLI card in the past and that had issues galore.

4) Really? I've never had problems, uninstall and if necessary install a generic VGA driver first.

5) Who knows, you could run a stress test on the card though, there are software and guides online. I do it when I overclock to test for stability.

6) Sounds like its worth a try.

 

I have found in the past if your game has an issue, you are stuffed till they fix it. I bought Far Cry 2 and I had to wait like a year till they found the problem and so I could finally load the darn game, great game btw. Well, I haven't ruled out PS4 or Xbox as a suitable platform, but not until they allow you to mod, upgrade your hardware and use a mouse and keyboard.

[thunderclam]

The only thing my friend has in common with my setup is that we're both using AMD cards. I have a 6950 and he has a 6970. He's pretty confident that nothing changed except that he installed ApachiiSkyHair and that now his vanilla game has the same hair issues I do. I have looked at some older screenshots where I was using AOF and there WAS some scrappy texture lines and so on in there, not TOO different from my issue. Now, though, if I install AOF or any other hair retexture things get ridiculous.

 

My next order of business is to reinstall my GPU drivers following a guide I found for complete AMD driver removal (apparently AMD doesn't make it easy but this is the internet so there are ways).

 

I don't know what you mean about renaming my Skyrim directory but that may also be worth a try. I assume that the jist is to install a completely different instantiation of the game? I'm not sure how to do that/what it will accomplish. I guess it would prove whether or not there's something lingering from before.

[Aiyen]

Try to do what I suggested and load the mesh in nifskope to see how it looks outside of the game. That way you only have the mesh and its texture, and not the game and its lighting etc. If it looks okay in there both with and without texture applied, then it will start to get really really odd. (What you see there is what you should expect ingame... except for a few transparency issues that depend on lighting.)

 

For fun I tired it out, and the ones I checked looks normal in there so I guess its a useful test. Also you have better view angles since you are not camera locked as you are in char. generation.

[thunderclam]

I do not have the patience to do that right now. Besides, if transparency lighting stuff shows up in nifskope then it might look the same. I mean, transparency and lighting may very well be the actual problem.

[thunderclam]

Update:

 

I have reinstalled again. This time with my drivers rolled back to CCC 12.10. I still have the same flickering, AA, shadow, and hair issues. Wood Elf is still missing his patch of hair.

 

What the bad words? How can this be the vanilla install of Skyrim for me? It just doesn't make sense. Is Steam cacheing files or something? How can I delete this whole thing off my computer, reinstall it, and get these same errors?

[moonbeam]

I'm having more or less the exact same problem. I just finished building a new computer last week after coming from a laptop and this issue has followed me to my new computer. The only thing at this point that could be affecting my game is that (even though I started new games completely vanilla), my save games followed me with Steam cloud. I have since disabled the steam cloud, deleted all my saves and totally removed any traces of the game from my computer. Now in the process of re installing skyrim, I will update when its done with photos if the problem persists.

Im also about positive this is not a driver or faulty hardware issue either as this computer plays other games flawlessly.

specs: GIGABYTE GA-Z87X-UD5H

i7 4770k

evga gtx 770 sc 4g

[moonbeam]

I re downloaded and the problem is still there, any suggestions?

 

https://imgur.com/HX8rt4N

 

https://imgur.com/yDjdcQw

 

https://imgur.com/v8whhLA

[phazer11]

First. I would try redownloading all of your hair mods to make sure all the meshes are there and not corrupt or something.

[moonbeam]

I have no hair mods installed in fact no mods at all accept Alternate start Live another life, simply to avoid the opening cutscene to test this glitch on new characters. With this being a completely new install of the game I have no idea what else I can do.

[phazer11]

Odd... well at the least try enabling all the Unofficial Patches (or at the minimum the High Resolution Patch). I'd also try installing the hair mods (there are what three?) in STEP Core.

[moonbeam]

Got it I'll grab the patches and the high resolution pack, as well as the lore friendly hair and beards. if the problems continue I"ll update with more detailed info as best i can.

[01Zed]

The problem is with the new ENB patch. Disable the speed hack and your hair should be fine.

It also causes a lot of random CTD, so might help you out. My hair was flying like a kite behind characters lol. Here are before and after shots. Peace

[Harpalus]

Created an account to try to troubleshoot this issue. It's driving me crazy. I installed Skyrim after a long hiatus, worked my way through the STEP project after finally giving it a try. (Not sure why I put things off this long, I've decided that I love STEP.)

 

Screenshot:

 

https://i.imgur.com/Ynzp5Nn.jpg

 

I also have an AMD card, and I updated the drivers recently.

 

Things I have tried:

 

I first blamed EEO, and ripped it out of the mod list entirely, to no avail, making backups along the way. Then went Xvision, then custom skeletons and supporting mods. Finally I tried:

 

Taking away EVERY non-Bethesda .esp with the sole exception of Alternate Start, largely just to keep myself from going insane watching the damn starting sequence. I also renamed and moved the textures folder, the meshes folder, the SKSE folder....the problem persists with an (almost) completely vanilla install.

 

I removed ENB completely, as I did see that fix floating around. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with this problem, as every ENB related file has been deleted.

 

I went to Steam and reinstalled the game, as I'd cleaned the official files with TESEDIT as per STEP.

 

I removed my ini files.

 

I removed my custom game profile in AMD CCC.

 

At this point I've given up. It's really frustrating for me, as I install everything very carefully and manually, and I've spent a good portion of the last two days testing Requiem, Frostfall, RND, removing mods, etc, only to run into this glitch that is apparently beyond my ability to solve.

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks! I take solice in the fact that I still have my mod setup backed up.

 

EDIT:

 

So now I'm beyond frustrated. I'd tear my hair out if I wasn't bald. I just used a driver cleaner tool from Guru3d to uninstall my current AMD driver in Windows 8.1 Safe Mode, cleaned the registry, restarted, bypassed the (apparently shitty?) auto-detect tool AMD provides and installed the newest drivers specific to my video card then launched Skyrim, expecting to come back and report success. Unfortunately, the issue persists. It's beyond me at this stage what the problem is. AMD cards can't be this shitty, but I believe that I've run out of places to check for problems. I've come back to blaming Skyrim again, but everything seems to be vanilla.

Edited June 14, 2014 by Harpalus

[DoubleYou]

This does sound and look bad. I would try doing the following:

1. Delete everything in the meshes folder in data if it exists.

2. Verify game cache in Steam

3. Go into AMD CCC, hit Preferences, and select "Restore Factory Defaults"

4. Verify that there are no rogue dll files in the skyrim directory (d3d9.dll, etc.)

5. Download DirectX from here and install it (even if you did previously)

 

If none of that works, post dxdiag information (Winkey+R, dxdiag, enter, Save All Information) so we know your system so we know what hardware we're working with.