Skyrim SE - need help with Ice Cave textures

[godescalcus]

Hi guys, first and foremost, an apology. This may be more of an aesthetic issue than technical, but I'm at a loss and can't achieve the result I want...

 

I'm trying to make my ice caves look like they do in Gopher's ongoing SSE video series. If you want you can check his episode 33, the Yngvild run starts at about 23:26. I'm posting a sequence of images to show what I'm after and what I'm getting.

 

First picture is a screenshot of Gopher's video. Notice how the snow/ice floor is smooth and reflects the light coming from the entrance. I know some people find it "plastic" but to me it adds to the atmosphere of the place and definitely beats my best attempts with the most popular texture replacers.

Second picture is with my current setup, I followed Lexy's SSE guide for those of you who know it. I'm using Phoenix ENB performance preset.

Third picture is without ENB; I also installed the ELFX enhancer to darken the dungeon interiors a bit, because it's probably what Gopher has (either that or the hardcore version) and the ambient light seems to match (more or less).

 

I've tried different texture replacers, such as Noble and aMidianBorn, and also vanilla.

 

Could this be a GPU or even a game ini setting instead of a different texture? Texture filtering? AA? Sharpening?

 

I'm using Ultra settings in Bethini, too. I tried the improved snow shader (on and off). I never get rid of what seems, in the middle image, to be an excessive contrast between the brightest spots and the main texture.

 

I also never get any sort of refraction of light, maybe I need a different texture map with refraction? Is there a game setting to activate/regulate the amount of reflection/refraction, either in game, GPU or ENB?

 

Edit: In the middle image I seem to get SOME degree of refraction, in the sense that there are "more bright spots" in the same area where in Gopher's video you see a clear light refraction.

 

Thanks in advance for all your suggestions.

Edited June 4, 2018 by godescalcus

[baronaatista]

As far as I’m aware Gopher isn’t using any texture replacers at the moment? So it’s probably vanilla with ELFX, can’t remember if he’s using the enhancer or not.

 

One thing to remember is that video compression makes that image look darker to you / us than it does to him.

 

I’d imagine you could play around with some ENB settings, but you might wind up unbalancing bright areas, making them too dull.

 

Personally I love the way NAT handles just about everything... used to swear by Vivid Weathers but NAT has won me over in a big way. I doubt Lexy’s CR patch relies on VW? If it does it’s likely just a couple records. Maybe try NAT + PRT ENB. PRT is really easy to tweak for different looks, while remaining well-balanced, which is why I like it so much.

[TechAngel85]

I would also suggest Skyrim Realistic Overhaul, if it's not installed. It's textures are very vanilla friendly in their appearance. Install it early and let the majority of mods overwrite it.

 

Also, make sure you haven't disabled the shaders in the INIs. The gopher image looks very much like the default shaders are still enabled. Some mods, like Majestic Mountains, will suggest users to turn them off.

[godescalcus]

Personally I love the way NAT handles just about everything... used to swear by Vivid Weathers but NAT has won me over in a big way. I doubt Lexy’s CR patch relies on VW? If it does it’s likely just a couple records. Maybe try NAT + PRT ENB. PRT is really easy to tweak for different looks, while remaining well-balanced, which is why I like it so much.

I've tried different weather combinations with Lexy's guide. I've actually made a few different merges with Dolomite and combinations of Vivid with and without Wonders of Weather (I have an "issue" with that one... Despite people saying that it has improved a lot regarding the usage of scripts, I actually find the rain splashes distracting and too bright (they don't react to lighting the same way as other things, so in a pitch dark night they're like sparkes as far as the eye can see). They also don't occlude properly... So I made a merge without it and and renamed the esp to be exactly the same as Lexy's. Did the same with Obsidian weathers and could certainly do the same with NAT. That way I can compare them by just activating/deactivating in MO; if I take care to activate the new one before deactivating the previous, I don't even have to re-run loot or note down its place in the load order.

 

One thing I like about Vivid that all other weather mods fail to do in some extent, is how it achieves much better "white balance" in the picture in general. Skyrim has a native "greenish/blueish" tint that Vivid undoes (probably by warming up the colors in general). After getting used to Vivid weathers, all others just seem to have green filters on the camera. My sweet spot would be a less saturated Vivid, perhaps with less contrast (Vivid makes shaded areas too dark, even ENB adaptation won't improve much on that).

 

But I haven't tried NAT in a long time... Might give it a whirl.

[godescalcus]

I would also suggest Skyrim Realistic Overhaul, if it's not installed. It's textures are very vanilla friendly in their appearance. Install it early and let the majority of mods overwrite it.

 

Also, make sure you haven't disabled the shaders in the INIs. The gopher image looks very much like the default shaders are still enabled. Some mods, like Majestic Mountains, will suggest users to turn them off.

I did download that behemoth, just didn't install it yet ;) What kept me back was the fact that I'm trying really hard to not go crazy on textures that go over 2k. I'm actually running vanilla landscape textures. In Skyrim LE, I just use the optimized vanilla (unfortunately the version available for SSE is done with Ordenador, but I still use it, though not always) and then the "Bethesda Performance Textures" pack. No other texture pack is so consistent, unfortunately, though some textures are interesting when considered individually, they all fail to blend perfectly in the big picture. That's true, IMHO, of Noble, Vivid Landscapes, aMidianBorn landscapes, Skyland, luxor's or any others that I've tried. Maybe if you use low grass density values you can, to some extent, not see that they fail to blend, but I keep my grass at 60/70.

 

Blending is mostly why I still use Cabal's aMidianBorn caves and forts with SSE, although for some reason they don't look so strikingly beautiful as in legendary (shader issue?). They still look far more balanced and blended than any others.

 

About the ice caves' snow floor, I've tried enabling and disabling the improved snow shader in both bethini and directly in the ini, but haven't achieved any difference. Maybe I missed something?

 

The issue seems so persistent I'm now wondering if there might be something baked in the savegame that affects it. I don't know if those things happen only with hardcoded placement of objects or other aspects, too.

 

The more I look at gopher's image, the more it seems to me like he's using a plain specular map for that texture, maybe even plain diffuse and normal maps. His snow looks like a regular, reflective surface, and later in the video when you see his torch reflecting on the walls and floor, it's just more striking than what I'm getting overall... Some people may consider it unrealistic but I find it creates an interesting atmosphere...

Edited June 5, 2018 by godescalcus