"halo" or "glow" around people & animals at a distance

[Glanzer]

Recently I've noticed a slight "halo" or "glow" around the silhouette of people and animals when viewing them at moderate distances against dark backgrounds.  It's not enough to ruin the game but it is noticeable enough to distract from the immersion.  I would describe it as a soft thin fuzzy white line around animals or peoples, sort of like they've been badly pasted into the game.  But when I approach them it goes away and things are fine.  Is this normal and maybe I've never noticed it before?  Unfortunately it would be hard to tie it to a specific mod because I've spent the last week reloading all my mods for another playthrough.  I'm using the following texture/lighting/environment mods which may affect this problem:

• A full install of the Texture Pack Combiner using the performance/lowres textures.  I use SkyTPC and I let SkyTPC do a default DDSOpt on the TPC after it built it.
• NPC Clothing
• Hunterborn & Hunting in Skyrim
• CoT
• Realistic Lighting Overhaul
• Project ENB - Realistic for CoT

In addition I'm wondering if it could be some ini tweak I've done.  But I really don't do much ini tweaking, just the bare essentials as set forth in STEP and in Neovalen's SR guide.

 

*edit* hmmmm I wonder if bloom might be causing this. I haven't tweaked any of the ENB bloom settings. I'll try turning off bloom tonight in my ENB to see if that solves it.

 

*edit #2* I finally found the following post that may give me some leads, I'll report back after I do some testing: https://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/498228-annoying-auraglow-around-characters-and-objects/

[EssArrBee]

Moved from answers thread.

 

@Glanzer Please don't make threads in the Answers subforum, that is for S&P threads that already have been solved.

[Glanzer]

OOPS.  sorry!  I was wondering how they got all their questions answered so quickly.

[Aiyen]

It is an ENB/game engine thing, most likely to do with the interaction between the SSAO filter and the SSS from hairs. At least that is where I mainly notice it.

Also skylighting enabled is going to amplify it when people are faced up against shadows.

 

Also the ingame post processing values also affect it, so its generally a pain to fix entirely for every single location in the game.

[Glanzer]

I tried turning off ENB (SHFT-F12 in Project ENB) and it made no difference. After some experimentation I found that it has to do with shadow blurring. By setting iBlurDeferredShadowMask from 5 to 0 in the SkyrimPrefs.ini file the glow/aura goes away. But that makes the shadows look really pixelated. So I compromised by setting it to 3.

[Glanzer]

I'm still struggling with the best setup for shadows. To be honest the shadows look really blocky and blotchy. I've tried high and ultra settings as well as the distance settings and the blur and mask settings, but haven't found a good mix yet. I wish I could get rid of the silhouette auras, and have acceptable looking shadows, and keep shadows at the default 8000 distance. sigh. I'd love to hear from any of you that have achieved that. I'm guessing that the aura thing is something you see too? Or maybe it's only present under certain circumstances? I'm using the latest approved nVidia driver.

[Aiyen]

ENB handles shadows when on, but bugs in the vanilla engine are still going to be there. It fixes a few glaring issues like stripping etc. But the glow is an engine thing as I have understood it.

 

The resolution of the shadows have nothing to do if your blur settings are low, so it is a compromise thing. There are a few other things that can be done, but it requires that you switch ENB, and even then it is still not going to be removed entirely.

In general then the issue is only really apparent if you have an actor up against a really dark background, or looking at it from a specific angle etc.

 

It is sort of like the fact that you have transparent hands when in 1st person when using SSAO and moving close to other objects. You can reduce the effect but it is always going to be there due to engine limitations.

[Glanzer]

Thanks for the feedback Aiyen, I appreciate it!

 

I was finally able to make a good compromise by using Skyrim Configurator (SC) to apply some of the standard out-of-the-box values to my .ini files instead of trying to tweak things myself. When I looked at my shadow settings in SC they were set to "custom" which told me that I had a mix of possibly med/high/ultra settings and that might be bad. So I simply chose "Very High" (as opposed to High or Ultra), and saved the settings. This resulted in almost NO aura at all around characters (YIPPEE!) and acceptable shadows. I hope this helps someone else. I compared my .ini files before and after... In case you're curious, here are the values that were actually changed:

 

skyrim.ini:

iShadowMapResolutionPrimary=2048 --> changed to 4096

 

skyrimprefs.ini:

iBlurDeferredShadowMask=3 --> changed to 1

fInteriorShadowDistance=3000.0000 --> changed to 4000 (with no decimals, curious...)

fShadowDistance=8000.0000 --> changed to 6000 (again, no decimals)

iShadowMapResolutionSecondary=1024 --> changed to 4096

iShadowMapResolutionPrimary=2048 --> changed to 4096

iMaxAnisotropy=2 --> changed to 1

iShadowMapResolution=2048 --> changed to 4096

fShadowBiasScale=0.1500 --> changed to 0.35

iShadowMaskQuarter=4 --> changed to 8

iShadowFilter=3 --> changed to 4

[deathneko11]

glad you got it fixed.

 

Moving to Answered.