Skyrim Comparison Screenshots

[Greg]

Given that I just encroached into the area of taking some very amatuerish screenshots for the Dragon Priests mod, I thought I would create this thread to try to learn best practices for getting good quality screenshots for comparison purposes. Taking screenshots of static objects is relatively trivial, but getting good screenshots of NPCs and creatures has been... challenging to say the least. This is my general technique, so feel free to critique all my blundering mistakes:

1. Find an appropriate location that's relative clear of obstacles (bushes, trees, etc.) clear of any other NPCs that thinks this is supposed to be a combat shot.
2. Wait until around noon or so to hopefully get good lighting and weather
3. tcai to disable combat AI
4. tai to disable overall AI
5. Spawn an NPC or creature and hope (pray?) it spawns in an acceptable location. This is tricky because the NPCs always seem to spawn behind me and to my right.
6. Is there a mod or tool that helps placing NPCs other than monkeying with setpos x and setpos y?
7. Once everything seems acceptable, hard save.
8. Shift+F12 to disable ENB, tm to disable menus, and take a screenshot with FRAPS. This is a pure vanilla shot.
9. Exit the game, enable the current STEP textures in Mod Organizer.
10. Load the previous save, hope (pray?) the NPC hasn't moved or disappeared.
11. Shift+F12 to disable ENB, tm to disable menus, and take a screenshot with FRAPS.
12. Exit the game, disable the current STEP textures, enable the testing textures.
13. Load the previous save, hope (pray?) the NPC hasn't moved or disappeared.
14. Shift+F12 to disable ENB, tm to disable menus, and take a screenshot with FRAPS.

What I tried initially to hopefully save some time is to spawn Hevnoraak, hard save, disable Hevnoraak, spawn Krosis, hard save, etc. for all dragon priests. I was thinking this would give me 13 hard saves (one for each dragon priest) so I could reload each save to get all 13 screenshots, exit, enable aMidianBorn Creatures, then reload the saves to get all 13 screenshots.

 

Unfortunately this didn't work so well because when I reloaded I found that about half of the saves didn't have a dragon priest anywhere in the scene. Some I eventually found floating in the clouds so I wonder if the others had disappeared underground.