Character becomes invisible randomly in 3rd person

[Breadisntgreen]

1 hour ago, T-lam said:

DD or ZAz scan could be a source, too.

Got this effect when gagged by a spider, but happens quite rarely.

 

Zaz might be the cause. too bad is required for a lot of mods

[anjenthedog]

Not to be disagreeable, but I have ZAZ and have for ~2 years, but I don't think I can recall ever experiencing the invisibility bug until I used CCA. (A few times where I fell through a floor or inadvertently slipped through wall, but not literally disappeared) so maybe it plays a contributory role, (ie an undocumented contention situation) but idk whether it IS the cause.

 

But if so, why would ZAZ? (serious question)

 

Is there some low-level "render player" command/other? (I mean aside from setting alpha to zero). Or could it be some weird occlusion based invisibility issue?

[Tlam99]

8 minutes ago, anjenthedog said:

But if so, why would ZAZ? (serious question)

 

the scanning. 

periodically disappearing in Bards Academy. 

This might be related, too.

For some reason I had deactivated some parts of ZAZ (needed rerun FNIS) and it was gone.

Strange thing, it never appeared again, this Bards College effect, just a lucky shot.

[anjenthedog]

Can you (or anyone in this thread) elaborate on "the scanning" or link me to something that describes the correlation in more detail? I'm not sure what that implies and would like to know more.  

 

Do you recall which parts of ZAZ you disabled? 

 

thanks

[Tlam99]

actually all this options to check for NPC, if wearing gag etc.

As far I understand, ZAZ scans for NPC's if tied up or wearing a gag.

[Breadisntgreen]

2 hours ago, anjenthedog said:

Not to be disagreeable, but I have ZAZ and have for ~2 years, but I don't think I can recall ever experiencing the invisibility bug until I used CCA. (A few times where I fell through a floor or inadvertently slipped through wall, but not literally disappeared) so maybe it plays a contributory role, (ie an undocumented contention situation) but idk whether it IS the cause.

 

But if so, why would ZAZ? (serious question)

 

Is there some low-level "render player" command/other? (I mean aside from setting alpha to zero). Or could it be some weird occlusion based invisibility issue?

I wont pretend to be all the knowledgeable able about it. I just know it happened to me a few times while wearing zaz gear. Perhaps its something else like TK doge animations messing with the SMP body.  I accidentally use tk doge all the time.

[anjenthedog]

Well, I apologize if my questions made it sound like I thought you know all the answers. (I don't). And If so, we probably wouldn't' have this issue since you'd have likely posted "THE" solution long ago...  

My wording was probably more inquisitorial than I intended... (stupid 35 years of being an engineer rearing it's flat-affect query-tactic head) Sorry about that. it's just my nature. nothing personal.

 

I'm just hoping for symptoms to help see through the fog. 

 

Ah well eventually we'll figure this out...hopefully.

 

best wishes

[anjenthedog]

More potentially useful (or for that matter potentially misleading) info

 

Last night I zoomed back from 1st person sneak mode in an interior space (a castle), and my player didn't  immediately disappear, as she normally does when I encounter the issue,  she progressively disappeared over ~8-10 seconds.

 

First her SMP skirt and skirt armor piece (latter lays over the former both smp) disappeared (stayed that way for ~5-6 seconds).

Then she lost her head&body, including all other clothing/armor/etc in a quick set of moves. bit too fast to spell out the order of it. blink blink blink blink (maybe a second or 2) and they were gone

At that point, she was simply an unequipped bow and arrows which did not disappear for ~10-15 seconds.

 

At that point, I pulled back into 1st person so I could finish my mission... But I thought it was kinda interesting how it happened in chunks. Maybe someone can digest something from that and it's not just red herring litter to confuse the problem. 

 

Again I use CCA, so grain of salt. 

[Tlam99]

This looks like smp spike, which blocks the other updates, speak, no more skin ajd other stuff will be updated.

Question is, if you zoom, does this effect smp ?

Like new dimensions needs smp updates ?

 

[anjenthedog]

zoom and smp don't seem to be connected/correlated, but I won't go so far as to say NO with certainty. As far as "seems", well, when I zoom in and out, it doesn't change the visibility of the player or player items. at least not until I'm breaching the skin of the player model) But I didn't test various zooms extensively so there *could be some zoom correlation I've just missed.

 

When I go to 1st person, I get the first person bits, my hands and forearms, looking down some cleavage, maybe a boot... routine crap,  but aside from that weird transitional disappearance act, zip, zilch, nada... just a player as transparent as a glass of air, except some magicka/buff shimmers will still show briefly  (Quaffing a potion produces the potion's shimmery thing, etc), quicklight still produces a pad of light on the ground where I am, and so forth. 

 

I'm growing more convinced that there must be some lower-level command/etc that is capable of rendering or hiding the player model, (beyond playing the alpha transparency card)  and which is, for whatever reason either not being triggered or being triggered and failing to autoreset, or even being triggered erroneously by an unhandled exception in some script that wasn't thoroughly shaken out before being shipped. I could be totally offbase, (because I'm blind to the handler/housekeeping code),  but that's what it "feels" like. 

 

for instance: 1st person to 3rd person: What happens here?

well, we know that the first person "appendage info" (arms hands, etc)  is removed (unrendered?, removed from video memory?)  from the player's screen

we also know the (normally) third-person body becomes visible (is rendered?)

 

Let's go the other way 3rd person to 1st person:

We know that the appendage info is placed onto the player screen

the third person view is rendered invisible (why deal with a code load you're not using) 

- here I'd think the 3rd person construct is literally removed from video memory, but I'm still guessing

 

What happens during a "doorway" cell change? (simplified for visuals only) 

1. fade to black
2. the player model is cleared
3. the old view is cleared
4. the screen is update to reflect the new environment in which the player will reside
5. the player model is (ostensibly, logically) re-rendered (in whichever form 1st or 3rd person it was at time of cell transit)
6. fade in

 

- note: I realize the actual order of events and how it's accomplished aren't exactly like this,  it's more for illustrative purposes than coding accuracy...

 

Anyway, there must be some render command behind the scenes, no?

(here for all you code gurus, it's your time to school me... because I'm all guesses at this point)

 

Open question to readers: Does the player reside on its own visual layer?

Bonus question: If so, are there layer commands associated with visual layers?

Bonus bonus question: If so, are there layer commands specifically associated with the player?

[LilFX]

Sorry for the necro, but I'm having this issue too, and it just started happening in a 70+ hour playthrough. Mine MIGHT be a bit different, but basically, if I turn my view close enough to a wall (or even what LOOKS like a wall but without collision, like tents that you can walk right through), my character suddenly vanishes (almost like she fades out when the camera gets too close like she's supposed to, but doesn't fade back IN when it gets far again). But unlike you guys, she doesn't come back if I move out of a certain spot. She just stays invisible until I save and reload my game.

 

It's weird because nothing has changed (not even her outfit), in the last three days or so of playing, but it just started yesterday. All mods, configurations, equipment, followers, all the same. No active effects I've never had before either. The thing I changed most recently (a week or so ago) was changing iMaxAllocatedMemoryBytes from 67108864 (as detailed here:

) to 1800000000 in my Skyrim.ini because it was said to fix my camera losing collision with interior walls (causing green foggy non gamespace to be visible). It DID fix it, when I loaded my game after making the change, walls caused the camera to zoom like it was supposed to instead of just clipping right through. But then a week or so after that, she started turning invisible. I tried changing it back to my original setting (which doesn't cause the camera clipping issue immediately, just eventually). I haven't played enough to see a change just yet.

 

To be honest, I never even HAD that iMaxAllocatedMemoryBytes in my ini until a couple months or so ago, and my game never had these issues with the camera clipping through walls, and my character disappearing. I added it because someone said that guide was a must for a stable game... I might remove the line completely and see what happens.

[anjenthedog]

hmmm... well... my iMaxAllocatedMemoryBytes value is far lower than either of the values you used

 

iMaxAllocatedMemoryBytes=153600

 

And afaik, it's been in my Skyrim.ini file for ~2 years, so.... idk if it's involved or not. 

 

please *do report back if you perform your line removal experiment. 

 

regards

Edited June 16, 2021 by anjenthedog

[LilFX]

2 minutes ago, anjenthedog said:

hmmm... well... my iMaxAllocatedMemoryBytes value is far lower than either of the values you used

 

iMaxAllocatedMemoryBytes=153600

 

And afaik, it's been in my Skyrim.ini file for ~2 years, so.... idk if it's involved or not. 

I'm not even sure what it does LOL. I knew I shouldn't have messed around with stuff when my game was already 95% stable just because someone said I was crazy for not having followed that guide...

 

Out of sheer curiosity, I changed my papyrus section back to what it was before that guide (the guide said those settings were optional anyway), and I'll see if my issues revert to non-existent like before I added it.

[anjenthedog]

according to a few articles I've read, it has to do with allocating VRAM, although that's about as much as I know. 

 

If you like, perform a "wide net" search, ie,  google, bing, duckduckgo, etc) on the term "iMaxAllocatedMemoryBytes" and read up. maybe you'll get more out of it than I did.

[LilFX]

6 minutes ago, anjenthedog said:

according to a few articles I've read, it has to do with allocating VRAM, although that's about as much as I know. 

 

If you like, perform a "wide net" search, ie,  google, bing, duckduckgo, etc) on the term "iMaxAllocatedMemoryBytes" and read up. maybe you'll get more out of it than I did.

Thanks, I'll look more into it.

[LilFX]

Well, slight update, she finally disappeared again (mid battle), even with that line removed from my ini. Then a Defeat scene started and she became visible for that, and as soon as it ended, she was invisible again. Saved and loaded my save and she was back. So strange...

[Tlam99]

For me it appears only after long play time and lots of fast travel.

If a follower is busy and does the quick travel delayed, then it happens, he is invisible for 

a while. Butcas mentioned above, only after long play time.

Quite a point for it is VRam.

 

[Vyxenne]

On 6/18/2021 at 2:45 AM, T-lam said:

For me it appears only after long play time and lots of fast travel. If a follower is busy and does the quick travel delayed, then it happens, he is invisible for a while. Butcas mentioned above, only after long play time. Quite a point for it is VRam.

 

I am running an RTX2060 Super with 8GB of VRAM, but I still get an invisible character glitch from time to time- how much VRAM do you think is enough? How can I somehow unload/clean out/flush my VRAM? Is there an ini setting in Skyrim.ini or SkyrimPrefs.ini that will reduce the VRAM load?

[Tlam99]

Found a solution for me.

Only one skin, reduced most clothes armor to 2k, skin 4k, checked everything if bc7 compressed.

Btw, a pubes mod had 8k pubes, what is .....

Reduced to 2k gained me alot vram. Things like this is, if you look at a pube with 8k monitor

and the zoom filles the whole monitor. 

8k is for my opinion nonsense, 4k close to it. On 2k monitor you won't see a difference if 2k or 4k clothes

even when zooming in by 2x. The gradient makes it even nicer.

Since I cleaned this up, no more disappearing chars.

[Tlam99]

Found another npc, where I forgot to point to deault head nif and still used the nif of the mod.

Guess what, he became invisible for 10 sec.

Even using default skin in this nif caused this glitch.

 

[moosss]

On 10/6/2020 at 3:53 PM, Excurios said:

Greetings everyone,

 

As the title says, my character becomes randomly invisible while in 3rd person. It only happens indoors (more precisely in dungeon, since I don't have this problem in house for instance).

I have difficulty to pinpoint where the problem might come from because it's totally random : it is not even tied to a specific spot, in fact, if it does happen, saving then reloading a save makes my character reappear again. The problem is also not related with camera mods such as 3PCO or Enhanced Camera, since I get this problem even with vanilla camera.

 

As far as I can tell, I suspect physics mods (KS Hairdos SMP, CBBE 3BBB, ...) to be part of the problem, since NPCs aren't affected by this problem (I did not put or apply any physics mods on NPCs). If it's a SMP issue, I would understand that it is a drawback of it.

 

I'll appreciate any feedback, if you're using physics mods please tell me if you have the same problem.

 

Thanks in advance for your help.

Edit : Link to a video I've made

 

so super late and out of no where reply. But I was having this exact same problem where some random light sources would cause me to disappear or go invisible.

 

If you are using Dint999 Hair pack 1.5 SMP.  using those hairs through the racemenu was causing this problem for me I switched to the wig mode by reinstalling the mod i no longer disappear and everything works. 

I hope you had already fixed this if not I hope this helps.

[Violence6884]

I'll probably have to post in other threads discussing the same thing, to try and gather as much info as I can... In my case this happened only once, and without any of the mods or prior issues mentioned here so far, in fact without any LL mods yet so ZAZ is not the culprit. I don't think it's related to hair(Don't have Dint's), or VRAM(I'm also on a 2080 Ti with more than enough RAM and VRAM, I9 too) or a bad installation since mine's a fresh SE one... Relatively minimal too, I'm in the process of setting it up still.

 

Don't know if any of this helps.

[Nargacuga]

I was having a similar issue just now, and it might not be the exact same as the one you guys have, but I thought I'd leave this here anyway.

In my case, the issue was in certain interiors and only in certain spots, the player character would flicker in and out of existence while in 3rd person.
I narrowed it down to the Dripping When Aroused's Dripping Arousal effect. As soon as I disabled the effect in the MCM, the character no longer flickered.

[brussh]

I have the same problem. I ask one of my followers to heal me and I'm back to normal. for a short while then its back again. thats about as much as I can contribute solution wise.

[Amagon]

XP32 itself may be the culprit, I am going to try and use the XP32 Maximum Skeleton Special Extended - Fixed Scripts see if that helps, or hunt for a older version under 4.72. I think from Jan 2020 4.72 to Jan 2021 4.80 that whatever changes are hitting up against encounter cells or Blood/water effects.