Black spots/splotches on transparent skin.

[LilFX]

So I'm having an annoying transparency issue. It always happened when my character faded when the camera got too close. I could deal with it, but when I started encountering the ghost Prelates in Dawnguard, it was too much.

 

Basically, certain semi transparent objects (apparently skin) have these awful flickering black shapes all over them (they change shape and position every fraction of a second). The shapes are BLACK on regular skin, but the ghost was all I was able to get a screenshot of.

 

Screenshot is from an UNMODDED game, except SKSE (but I started the game from the vanilla exe) and ENB. Turning off ENB effect in-game doesn't fix it. Even my ini files were vanilla and it still happened. 

 

I've read recommendations to disable AA (which I did in the Skyrim Launcher, my ENB files, and my Nvidia settings) and turn on FXAA. That didn't help. I also heard 4K resolution can be a problem, so I changed it to 1080 (which is what the screenshot is), and obviously no change there either.

 

Any help would be appreciated. It's making my skin crawl.

 

Edit: I just uninstalled Skyrim, deleted the installation folder and the folder in Documents/My Games, then reinstalled and ran the game from the launcher. Loaded the test cell, spawned a Prelate, same issue. Surely it can't be a memory issue, I have 16gb of ram and 4gb of vram. I attached another screenshot, this one from the reinstalled, full vanilla game and settings.

 

[Andy14]

The black holes are the result of alpha blending the mesh. Therefore only the hair.
If a mesh becomes invisible when zoomed in close, it is a sure sign that some vertices have an inadequate skin.
When using ENB, AA must be switched off in the Lauchner, as ENB does this (and much better).

It's a shame that there is no screenshot of a "not-ghost". Because black triangles can also have other causes (skin and normals).

[LilFX]

3 hours ago, Andy14 said:

The black holes are the result of alpha blending the mesh. Therefore only the hair.
If a mesh becomes invisible when zoomed in close, it is a sure sign that some vertices have an inadequate skin.
When using ENB, AA must be switched off in the Lauchner, as ENB does this (and much better).

It's a shame that there is no screenshot of a "not-ghost". Because black triangles can also have other causes (skin and normals).

The hair is fine, it only happens on skin. I'll see if I can take a shot of a ghost without the blue shader. Again, this has happened with AA off in the game and my Nvidia application settings, and even with and without ENB. 

[LilFX]

5 hours ago, Andy14 said:

The black holes are the result of alpha blending the mesh. Therefore only the hair.
If a mesh becomes invisible when zoomed in close, it is a sure sign that some vertices have an inadequate skin.
When using ENB, AA must be switched off in the Lauchner, as ENB does this (and much better).

It's a shame that there is no screenshot of a "not-ghost". Because black triangles can also have other causes (skin and normals).

Here you go. 100% VANILLA game (uninstalled, deleted ENTIRE Skyrim folder in Steam and in Documents, reinstalled), AA disabled in game and Nvidia settings, ZERO mods.

[LilFX]

And here's ALSO vanilla, but with ENB. (Sorry for the huge difference in lighting. It always varies when I COC to Whiterun)

 

I really need help. Some instances are even worse (no screenshots of the worst as of yet), and they flicker so fast that they make me wanna scream lol

[LilFX]

Okay, so as an experiment, I went with a regular Nord PC, and used the 'setactoralpha' command (as I understand it, actor alpha is what makes ghosts transparent, and the issue only occurs on transparent skin).

 

I set the alpha to .8 to see if I could get a better shot of the problem, and boy did I ever (I appear to be getting NOT black shapes, but weird invisible patches that just look blackish on the ghosts). Again these are vanilla meshes and textures with antialiasing OFF. I don't understand why vanilla wouldn't be able to render transparent skin properly when the game is MEANT to be able to do so with ghosts:

 

Edit: Research SEEMS to indicate this is z-fighting. But everything I read about it only acknowledges the problem with mountains. I don't really care about mountains as much as having decent looking NPCs (including ghosts), yet my mountains look fine... 

[Andy14]

It looks like the mesh is double

[LilFX]

4 hours ago, Andy14 said:

It looks like the mesh is double

I don't know how that can be, though, unless Bethesda released it like that? 

 

Edit: Also, in my experimenting, I noticed when I'm far away from the NPC in question, it doesn't do this, but the PC does it no matter how far I try to get...