ENB for SR:LE going forward

[DanielCoffey]

The Therion ENB for the 0.250 DLL has appeared on the Nexus... https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/50697

 

At a first glance it looks like a possible alternative to Unreal Cinema although you may need to modify the DOF and Film Grain. It appears to have slightly muted colours with some sepia

[Astakos]

Nice find Daniel!

 

From the description on Nexus, I get the feeling that it won't be that compatible with COT though...!

I will test it tonight for sure!

[Neovalen]

The Therion ENB for the 0.250 DLL has appeared on the Nexus... https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/50697

 

At a first glance it looks like a possible alternative to Unreal Cinema although you may need to modify the DOF and Film Grain. It appears to have slightly muted colours with some sepia

 

Will check it out. :)

 

Sent from my XT907 using Tapatalk

[Faylon]

RealVision has been updated to ENB 0.250 as well. I know you have used this in the past, you may want to check it again, even though it has no nightvision.

[Smile44]

Yes it does you just have to make the small change in the enbeffects.fx file.

 

:)

[Allsunday]

Is CoT compatibility 100% necessary? Because Unbleak (Bleak is not for everyone) has everything you want. One of my priorities when modding lighting in Skyrim is realistic dark nights/dungeons that make me depend on my torch/lantern (like it should be) and Bleak is the first one that really satisfied me.

 

EDIT: you can always use it with EDWS + more rain + more snow, or make your own combination.

[z929669]

I have been testing many ENBs lately (and I have a good deal of XP myself with config settings from versions out around a year ago ... polishing is a TON of work).

 

I am exceedingly impressed by RealVision ENB (Option B - CoT/ELFX). It is very evolved, polished and consistent and ready to run right out of the box with almost no tweaking necessary IMO. It works really well with all of the ENB-supporting mods by JaWz, Aiyen and ?Prod80? (and others).

 

EDIT: Per the OP, I will try to address ...

 

1. Dark Dungeons and Interiors. Torches are an absolute must unless there is a Skylight or a well lit room.

Good interior lighting, definitely darker, but this is a very simple tweak if not dark enough (ambient lighting interior intensity/curve)

2. Dark nights that require torches and/or lanterns but not overly dark since there is moonlight.

Definitely dark enough, but the CoT Weather Patch can be used to further customize ... Particle patch also helps)

3. DoF must be subtle/background, I don't like feeling like I'm looking through a spyglass at something. For me this is one thing Unreal got 100% right.

Default DoF is subtle, but this is highly subjective. I demand 'subtle' too but will not do without DoF

4. Parallax must be enabled.

I think it is, but not sure, since I don't use it ... yet.

5. CoT + Weather Patch / ELFX compatible (non-enhancer).

thumbs up

6. I generally prefer muted colors and not over vibrant fantasy. So cinematic or photo realistic.

Colors are a bit intense and could be muted a bit. Desaturation variables need just a bit of tweaking ideally

7. Must be actively updated to the latest binaries (with ENBoost).

thumbs up AFAIK

8. Performance must be minimum 30 fps (for me). I realize that this is very rig dependent.

Yep, should be for you since I generally get 30+ (see specs below)

9. No SSAO bugging (transparent first person or glowing first person)... I never EVER saw this effect in Unreal.

Not to my knowledge (but I am not sure what to look for ... nothing strange in my case, and I play 1st person)

10. Word walls, night vision, and fade outs must work properly. (no inverted colors, etc)

can't comment

11. I'm sure more will come up over time....

 

I have the same preferences for ENB as you do, apparently. (I hate letterbox though ... I want to see all I can). I will be making slight adjustments to this one if I continue using it, so I may just create a patch to align RV to our preferences (again, only very subtle changes needed, IMO). the bigest problem for weather-affected ENBs I have tried is that interiors are a mess, especially with regard to various weathers ... I chalk it up to too many configs to manage and tweak perfectly. Each and every relevant weather INI must be exhaustively tweaked just so (and the color filter system does not help simplify!!)

[Allsunday]

RealVision option B is my second choice. Nights might need some tweaking tho. If Neovalen wants torches/lanterns to be really useful, those nights need to be darker. I tweaked it to my taste but I'm sure you can make a better job, z (I suck).

[Aiyen]

The main problem with making an ENB dark inside and during the night is that most people tend to have crap monitors that are not properly calibarated, and/or placed in positions where there is too much back light. This will make it almost impossible to really enjoy the ambience of dark locations properly, and it just gets frustrating after a while.

 

To make matters worse then in order to do a really good job at making nights brighter or darker, then you need to edit the enbeffect.fx values not just the enbseries.ini ones. If you are building on a bright set of base values then it is not possible to get consistent looking dark ones. However most presets still do not have proper GUI implementations, and this makes it really time consuming to do it, which is why most people just do not bother and move on.

 

Also I find it amusing that people say they go for "realistic nights" and requiring a torch. You are in a world with two moons up most of the time, and depending on which texture you use for galaxy then have other rather bright light sources. The only time it would be really dark is during a storm or overcast weather... never during a clear or cloudy one. It is like people have never been out on a clear full moon night in real life ;)

 

But oh well enough off topic out of me for now!

I would still suggest grim and sombre ENB as the muted color candidate atm. It is quite impressive imo.

[statmonster]

Good point about the night Ayien. Moonlight is ighly varaible depending on phase of the moon and cloud cover, but generally good enough to distinguish movement in the open at night, but usually insufficient for close up detailed work (reading for example) and it is easy to hide (stationary) in the shadows. Torches help with illuminating shadows.

[Allsunday]

The main problem with making an ENB dark inside and during the night is that most people tend to have crap monitors that are not properly calibarated, and/or placed in positions where there is too much back light. This will make it almost impossible to really enjoy the ambience of dark locations properly, and it just gets frustrating after a while.

 

To make matters worse then in order to do a really good job at making nights brighter or darker, then you need to edit the enbeffect.fx values not just the enbseries.ini ones. If you are building on a bright set of base values then it is not possible to get consistent looking dark ones. However most presets still do not have proper GUI implementations, and this makes it really time consuming to do it, which is why most people just do not bother and move on.

 

Also I find it amusing that people say they go for "realistic nights" and requiring a torch. You are in a world with two moons up most of the time, and depending on which texture you use for galaxy then have other rather bright light sources. The only time it would be really dark is during a storm or overcast weather... never during a clear or cloudy one. It is like people have never been out on a clear full moon night in real life ;)

 

But oh well enough off topic out of me for now!

I would still suggest grim and sombre ENB as the muted color candidate atm. It is quite impressive imo.

That is with a FULL moon and no clouds, perfect weather. Add some clouds (not big ones, just enough to mist up the moon a little bit) and you can't see **** if you don't have a light source (aka torch, lamps, etc). This is in real life, of course. I live in Argentina (south) and when I'm out in the country and there're no big cities nearby this is what happens. We don't have street electricity and street lamps in Skyrim afaik.

[TehKaoZ]

Our planet has one moon. Nirn has two moons of whom may be bigger and/or closer in orbit than ours. Nights will likely be far brighter than you would experience on earth (not even accounting for a nebula or what not, which is also something we don't see in our skies). I think that "realism" has to account for the lore aspects of the game and not just what we see in RL. I tend to agree with Aiyen on this point.

[Allsunday]

That's a good point, of course it is. It sounded like I was completely disagreeing but I was not. I still think most of the time (with most ENBs presets) I can see more than I should tho.

 

Now, if we're talking about dungeon... yeah, that should be pitch dark if you want to be completely realist. I don't want to play like that so all I aim for is REALLY dark dungeons.

[kryptopyr]

Also I find it amusing that people say they go for "realistic nights" and requiring a torch. You are in a world with two moons up most of the time, and depending on which texture you use for galaxy then have other rather bright light sources. The only time it would be really dark is during a storm or overcast weather... never during a clear or cloudy one. It is like people have never been out on a clear full moon night in real life

I'm in complete agreement here. I've actually managed to read just by the light of a full moon on a clear night. Even on a moonless night, there are times when Venus is shining brightly enough to cast shadows. Nirn's moons are simply massive compared to our single moon. Take a look at our moon when it's near the horizon, look at how small it actually is, then compare that to the size of even the smallest of skyrim's moons. Personally, I think that the vanilla nights are almost too dark to be realistic given the size and number of the moons, not to mention the stars and galaxies. Unless the weather is really bad, there's going to be plenty of ambient light. I've spent some time hiking at night, and it's a pretty rare evening when I need a torch (flashlight) to avoid running into a tree or rock.

 

As far as dungeons... yeah, realistically, you wouldn't be able to see your hand in front of your face without a light source. But any dungeon that is inhabited by living humans, I would expect to be fairly well lit. I don't think bandits would choose to live in darkness (falmer or draugrs on the other hand...). I see this issue as related more to the limitations of the game engine, which makes it impractical to place a realistic number of light sources to make a dungeon appear properly inhabited.

[Faylon]

I honestly really, really like Unreal Cinema (exactly as it is set up in the SR:LE guide, but without the grain effect). However, I seem to drop below 30 fps whenever I'm running around in a forest. For example when I'm standing outside the entrance of Embershard Mines and looking towards the river and the trees at the other side of the river, my fps seems to drop to about ~25 fps. To be honest I'd expect it to be more with the rig that I have (and taking 2k textures and 1k normals for other mods).

 

This fps drops seems to happen at a few more locations, especially when there's a big number of trees nearby (Elsewhere it's 35 fps or up). So I have decided to swap out Unreal Cinema for RealVision B Full. This roughly raised my fps by 10. However, it doesn't seem to be as good looking as Unreal Cinema since Realvision tends to have a little over saturated colors, but just a tiny bit though.

 

Besides these two I also absolutely love Opethfeldt ENB, especially in Gopher's showcase it looked really good and atmospheric. However, it is not CoT and ELFX compatible, which on its own isn't such a huge deal since it enhances the weather beautifully. I just don't quite like the fact that I have only about 40 different types of weather, instead of 400+ different types from CoT. Furthermore it seems to disable stuff like nightvision. The DOF effect is very subtle and it even has eye adaptation which is absolutely great.

 

Either way, I'm really curious what direction this choice is going to have. I hope we could get an update soon. :)

 

In the end, with all the discussions about realism, I think it's actually just the atmosphere that we're really after. Of course nights wouldn't be too dark if you look at it realistically. However, I believe most people rather have a somewhat more darker night just to make it a really bit more atmospheric and maybe even creep,. giving you a reason to use a torch or take a night sleep.