Skyrim - Vivid Vividian ENB Colours

[Pheyne]

Hello,

I've spend quite some time modding my Skyrim, trying to make everything perfect and I feel like I am slowly getting there.
However I've now encountered a problem I need a little help with. My game now contains more than 200 mods. Most of it is the S.T.E.P.: Extended, where I have done everything how it should be done (mostly thanks to your brilliant guides and tips), with some optional minor tweaks here and there.
Anyway, I got the game to the point where I felt it was almost complete. The DynDOLOD was sucesfully installed and activated and the only thing I was missing was an ENB. I've spend quite some time researching, browsing through all ENB's possible until I have picked my all time favorites.

Those were the ProjectENB and Vivid Vividian ENB. In the end, I have diceded to stick with the latter. Mainy because of the Weather and Lightning pack (https://wiki.step-project.com/Pack:Weather_and_Lighting) which nicely follows up on the S.T.E.P.: Extended and contains this ENB. I've also read that ProjectENB has some problems with Windows 10 and is perhaps a little bit more performance heavy.
 

I followed the Weather and Lightning pack from the S.T.E.P. guide and installed almost everything the pack contains. I've been planning on using those mods myself and here they were all together and even with some tips. I did not install everything from it though (I left out mods such as Falskarr, Wyrmstooth, WAO, Pure Weather...).

My goal was to have Climates of Tamriel, ELFX and the ENB, which were all part of this. Now I am finished but some mistake must have happened along the installation process. My main reason why I opted for this ENB with ELFX was how realistic everything was. No oversaturated exteriors, beautiful dark interiors and dungeons... That is not the result however. My game looks ridiculously bright, oversaturated, with too many reds and yellows.
I really doubt this is the correct default look. I would need hours of fiddling with all the ENB settings ingame to make it look anywhere near like in the videos.
I took some screenshots to illustrate the problem, sorry for the quality but you should get the point. They are taken with the same mods installed, only difference being the ENB turned on and off. That means mods like CoT, ELFX, ELE are all there..

 

https://imgur.com/kriYX7R
https://imgur.com/XwQumzp

https://imgur.com/CceG79u

https://imgur.com/lKj4Ync

 

Looking at these screenshots the colours are a little desaturated. For example the desk in the last picture is actually almost fully red. Here it still look brown-ish.
Another thing I would like to know is, what is the main cause of long loading times that just started happening. It is nothing unbearable, but before the last few steps of installing CoT, ELFX, ENB etc.. it was much much better, almost instant. Is it just the ENB? Even so it is a little strange considering my performance ingame remains pretty much the same and I stay at 60fps most of the time.

Thank you and have a nice day.

Edited January 11, 2016 by Pheyne

[Shadriss]

I'm not seeing anything out of the ordinary. Vivid is quite saturated... it's part of it's design. I have two recommendations then:

 

1) Forget ELFX and use RS instead - Vivid works a bit better with it. That said, if the colors are too saturated for your liking...

 

2) Swap to Vividian Vanilla and see if that works better for you.

[Aiyen]

Looks about right to me. 

 

If you want other colors, you kinda need textures that have a different base color. ENB only takes what you have and build upon that. Either that or manually adjust the overall color balance. I know that is "fairly" simple to do with the built in controls in vividian. 

 

As for the loading times then that is fairly normal. It should however go away as you play since then everything should be commited to memory. ENB effects does take up more memory to use so that would most likely be the reason. 

 

Not sure why projectENB would have any windows 10 issues... That would most likely only be because is is based on older ENB binaries (at least it was the last time I checked) and those might conflict. 

 

As for how bright it looks... then that entirely depends on the weather in question and the time of day. Also where you look. I would suggest they you try to travel around a bit using either the console or fast travel to get a better overall feel of the entire thing. Also you can try to increase the time speed so you get to see more variation. 

 

Hope that helps a little bit. 

[TechAngel85]

Also, make sure you're not using the ELFX Enhancer. It don't think it's compatible with Vividian. It's not compatible with a lot of mods actually.

[Pheyne]

Not using the Enhancer and as for the ProjectENB not working properly on W10.. I think it has something to do with SweetFX not being fully compatible with it. Might be just for some people though.

 

I'm not seeing anything out of the ordinary. Vivid is quite saturated... it's part of it's design. I have two recommendations then:

 

1) Forget ELFX and use RS instead - Vivid works a bit better with it. That said, if the colors are too saturated for your liking...

 

2) Swap to Vividian Vanilla and see if that works better for you.

RS? I like ELFX the most because of how it handles the shadows and lights in interiors and dungeons. Nothing else I've seen was on the same level. I'll probably mess around with the setting and see what I can do. It's just that when I compare the result with the videos showcasing the ENB, it looks like a different ENB entirely.

And just one more thing.. What is the reason my CoT and Lanterns of Tamriel mods got put into the "bold font" mods at the begining of the plugins in MO along with official and unofficial patches? What if I needet to move one of the plugins somewhere lower in the list?

Edited January 11, 2016 by Pheyne

[TechAngel85]

The only other thing I can think of off the top of my head is to make sure everything is patches correctly in xEdit. Vividian come with patches for most of the mods it supports, so make sure you're using the right ones and check in xEdit to make sure nothing is overwriting them.

[hishutup]

eh, I need to update that pack...

I am going to change some stuff like switching to RLO instead of whats currently included in the pack and step.

I'm also going to remove PW and replace it with NLA or I may migrate to cater to an enb like VandB or TAZ. 

I have various "wants" when it comes to a style and I havnt found anything that satisfies it 100%.

[Pheyne]

I would reconcider the whole RLO thing   ELFX is far ahead in my opinion, for me it's just the combination with the different ENB's that is, as you say, not 100% satisfying.
I am probably gonna try it with the ProjectENB and see for myself.
In the meantime, I know it's not really ENB related but, since I have installed the S.T.E.P.:Extended I've been experiencing some weird texture flickering. And it is triggering me more and more. It looks something like this, just a little more subtle:

I've looked everywhere but haven't found anything specific. Any ideas what might be causing this or how to get rid off it? Even though it's not so noticable ingame, I would still like to see it go, if possible. These loading screen models are probably the most obvious examples. And anybody can help with my last question about the plugins being sorted automatically from my previsou post?

Thanks Edited January 11, 2016 by Pheyne

[TechAngel85]

The bold font are masters and they cannot be moved. If you need settings from these masters loaded later in the load order, you would normally use a plugin (ESP) with the settings within it and place that where it needs to be.

 

The shimming is specular (shininess from lighting like the shimmering of light off water) which is found the the texture's alpha channel. This can be somewhat controlled via the settings in enbseries.ini (or using the in-game GUI; Shift+F12). Sometimes it's bad enough though that the texture itself needs to be altered to have less specular.

[Pheyne]

So it is an ENBoost thing? Any specific settings that can help it?

By the way, here is a quick video of Vivid ENB.. Is it really supposed to look like this? Those are all default settings and I mean.. the exteriors are honestly prettier without it. Skip the loading scree, I thought the flickering could be noticable, but it is not with this quality.
Is there something else in my mod list that makes it look so bad? It's almost as if I downloaded some different ENB than the one I've spent half an hour watching videos of it.

Edited January 11, 2016 by Pheyne

[TechAngel85]

Yep, that's it. As Aiyen mentioned, it will also look different depending on your weather. If you don't like the vivid version, try the vanilla version. I use the vanilla when I do use it. Right now I am using ELEP, though.

[hishutup]

I would reconcider the whole RLO thing   ELFX is far ahead in my opinion, for me it's just the combination with the different ENB's that is, as you say, not 100% satisfying.

I am probably gonna try it with the ProjectENB and see for myself.

I was talking with umi about that and I basically have one reason, compatibility.

ELFX kind of requires the special meshes in order to avoid the whole "texture flickering" thing however, I would like to use various parallax mods which will replace those meshes and then causing the "flickering".

RLO is fine, its go the dark interiors of ELFX and the orange glow of fire like ELE.

 

If it was my choice I'd go with shadows but not every mod can have the same effect 

[Pheyne]

Hmm, so you are gonna give up ELE completely as RLO is not compatible? ELE is definitely nice in how much ENB options it gives you to edit. Is there something simillar in RLO? Never really used it much. But yes, I wasn't being serious about RLO... I agree that in some aspects it can be even better than ELFX. Might not be my overall favourite but it definitely can compete.
As for the flickering.. Am I correct to assume it has a lot to do with Lod Bias? If it is the case forcing it higher than 0 should make it better, shouldn't it? If you want to use an ENB you need to set it to 0, but then again ENB's implement their own multisampling so that should do that instead, right?

Edited January 12, 2016 by Pheyne

[Pheyne]

I have one more question regarding ENBs. When I download one, it usually comes with enblocal and enbseries INI files. I use those but when I start the game and check them later, it modifies them (adds lines that weren't there before). I just want to make sure that those are the default values that were intentionally left out by the ENB creators because it loads them automatically and not something I should try to prevent from happening by setting those files to read only or something like that. Also, the dxgi.dll file that comes with the ENB.. is there any difference between using this one and the one from the system32 folder?
Thanks.

Edited January 12, 2016 by Pheyne

[Greg]

Which ENB preset includes dxgi.dll? I double checked and this isn't included with the enbseries I downloaded from enbdev.com, so I assume it's in an ENB preset you downloaded? I'm just curious to see if this might be a mistaken inclusion (assuming it's the same as the one in System32) or a shim of some sort.

 

If you're referring to d3d9.dll, the one included in enbseries is a shim (or a wrapper) that Skyrim thinks is the real d3d9.dll, but it works a lot of magic under the covers to provide the enhanced graphics capabilities.

[Pheyne]

No, I am not referring to that but you are right, there is no dxgi.dll file in the ENB preset. After launching the game with ProjectENB I got an error "The procedure entry point CreateDXGIFactory2 could not be located in the dynamic link library C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\d3d11.dII". The "createDXGIFactory2" is not located in d3d11.dll but in dxgi.dll file which was already in Skyrim folder (I thought it came with ENB). The same file, only 64-bit version, can be found in Windows - system32, I replaced it and everything works as intended. My question was whether or not I was doing something that could cause issues.

Edited January 13, 2016 by Pheyne