Need help making comparison shots between mods

[keithinhanoi]

Recently two mods were released that are overhauls of Solitude, JK's Solitude, and Dawn of Solitude, and I thought it would be helpful for myself and other to take some comparison screenshots of certain areas of the city to show the difference between "vanilla" Solitude, and the changes that these two mods make.

 

However, I discovered that if I make a "clean vanilla' save so that I can replicate the same camera view for each mod, when enable one of the two mods, and then run Skyrim and load that save game, some vanilla objects that the mods are set to move to a different location are "stuck" in their vanilla spot.

 

This makes sense to me for any havocable objects, because those repositioned objects are saved into the game save file, but I'm also seeing other objects that aren't havocable - like barrels.

 

For example, here's a shot with Dawn of Solitude active after I loaded a "clean vanilla" save file:

 

 

As you can see some items that were originally on a market stall table have fallen to the ground when I loaded the save with Dawn of Solitude, because that "vanilla placed" stall is disabled by the mod, but the other objects are cached in my save file.

 

I know the normal way to clear out any cached objects in a cell is to go into a different, preferably interior, cell, and use the console command pcb, which stands for purge cell buffers.

 

The problem is if I do that, then I have lost the correct camera angle and location which I need to make the same exact "view" for all three screenshots of each scene.

 

So my question is this: How can I purge the cell buffer while in that cell, or alternatively, can I find out the camera angle / position of my current view and then manually set it so I can purge the cell buffers and the return to the scene to take the screenshot?

[TechAngel85]

This is a good question. I've seen Hodilton's recent videos of the Dawn of... series and I am quite impressed with them. These mods seem like they might fit into Extended as they do change some things but in a vanilla-friendly manner. None of the changes look "out of place" and appear as if they could have been a part of the vanilla game from the start. Therefore, I would be very much interested in seeing this comparison done.

 

If I were you, I'd hit up Hodilton and ask him how he did it. I've spoken with him before. He's a very nice guy and was more than willing to answer my noob questions about video rendering. I'm sure he'd be willing to tell you how he was am to do this for his videos.

 

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/hodilton

Nexus: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/users/2388835/?

[keithinhanoi]

That's funny, he was one of the first people I though to ask, but then I thought, "Nah, he doesn't know me at all so I shouldn't bother him."

 

I'll give it a try - thanks, Tech!