Damaged Textures

[Moricano]

I'm tired of restarting a new game. About 2 years ago my Skyrim LE never gave me any problems. All the mods I have here, it's the one I've always used. There was never any conflict or bug. But about 4 months ago I decided to play Skyrim again. I installed all mods in the right order. But last night when I was playing everything was perfect on my Char. Today when I opened the game my character was all a different color, I put her naked and looked, putz only her neck, feet, and hands were in her color the rest of her body was all dark. I gave a showracemenu command and chose one of the other custom characters I had here, and none of the textures were the same either. I don't know what could be causing this.

 

[Heroine HoneyCrotch]

Only player character?

[stingray1995]

That almost looks like a memory shortage; what size are those textures?  4K? 8K?  Custom race, you say?  Something's going on there.

[Grey Cloud]

Lack of mipmaps maybe?

[Tlam99]

4 hours ago, stingray1995 said:

memory shortage; what

Memory, mipmaps would even eat up more.

I had this with too many different skins on my followers. Since using one default, it never happened again.

 

[Grey Cloud]

43 minutes ago, T-lam said:

Memory, mipmaps would even eat up more.

I've never seen a lack of VRAM cause the torso to go black but not the arms. I have seen lack of mipmaps cause different degrees of problems from jet black, brown, covered in triangles and others.

 

43 minutes ago, T-lam said:

I had this with too many different skins on my followers. Since using one default, it never happened again.

If the followers are all drawing their textures from their own texture folder then that would be the problem - x number of texture sets being loaded into RAM. I have 260 followers in my game and they all draw their textures from the same location - 1 set of textures gets loaded into RAM. My PC gets hers from another location, Elder race get theirs from yet another and the female NPCs get theirs from the default location. Four sets of 2K textures for thousands of females (25K NPCs in my game).

[Grey Cloud]

16 minutes ago, stingray1995 said:

I could be wrong about this, but aren't most downloaded skin textures already mipmapped?

The popular, household names mods generally are but with followers you never know what you will get.

 

18 minutes ago, stingray1995 said:

mipmaps will increase the file size, but there are performance benefits, apparently(?).

Can absolutely tan your CPU and grind things to a halt. CPU has to constantly do computations on the fly rather than just read the info from the file.

[Tlam99]

If one has high res environment, high res clothing, high res different skins, mipmaps

what brings the vram to the limit, this part black can happen. It's a dynamic process

with light rays different angels etc. Mipmaps are precalculated images, smaller images of the same thing

to make the process of calculating the different distance faster. Have those already loaded in vram saves time and

shifts cpu use to vram use.

Vram shortage can split a bush into half, produce random black triangles. The gpu has it's own algorytmus calculating

things efficient. Drivers are in the range of 800mb. It's not just let's load this body skin and calculate reflections.

The body is taken apart in triangles.  forearms use a different biped, so already here is a split. Normals mask is a split.

Tattoo , rings whatever, wetfunction. Vram filled, straight cut on any place in the image, in the gpu separated optimized to calculate image.

No filled vram with values brings the same image as vram filled with 0. Black

[Grey Cloud]

5 hours ago, stingray1995 said:

If there's a reason for me to do a reinstall of all my textures "unmipmapped," then I need a link to the reason why.

There's no need to reinstall anything. Just run Ordenador on your texture folder choosing only the 'mipmaps' option. Might take half an hour or so depending on hardware and folder size.

 

Easy enough to search for info on what mipmaps are or do.

[Tlam99]

A link short explaining the different maps.

This will also show why all texture maps should have a mipmap.

There are some exceptions, e.g. a skin has just a 4x4 block or complete black s map.

 

https://help.poliigon.com/en/articles/1712652-what-are-the-different-texture-maps-for

 

 

[Tlam99]

10 minutes ago, stingray1995 said:

This is the conflicting statement I'm

It depends on your setup. Heavy scripted, lots of physics, mipmaps relieve the cpu to have more resources to handle those.

If you have not a good graphics card with little vram, bc7 compress and no mipmaps.

See it as an option to shift the use of resources you have got.

For myself, I reduce size to 2k, bc7 compress (at least large textures) and use the part released vram for mipmaps 

If you look into some mods, you will find really stupid stuff. Pubes with 8k, stains with 8k, tattoos with 8k.

Went quite rough through some mods and gained just on hard drive 12gb. Loading anims became much faster among other

improvements.

[stingray1995]

28 minutes ago, T-lam said:

Pubes with 8k

 

And dollars to donuts, this is the sort of thing that most people, even ten years later, still allow going unadulterated into their game. They rely on the mod makers' better judgment, apparently.  Pubic hair in 8192 would bring any game to its knees, let alone Skyrim's.

 

Gotta be careful with those "lite"/ upheld "2K" versions, too; they like to sneak their 4K textures past, regardless.

[Grey Cloud]

2 hours ago, stingray1995 said:

This is the conflicting statement I'm getting here; where's this claim coming from/where'd you hear it?

What is it conflicting with? I got the info originally from Geniomaestro after he identified a problem I was having. I then did some digging on the web and came up with info from credible sources which confirmed what Genio had said.

[A couple of years ago. This was when I first decided to see how many followers my Skyrim could handle] I could have 26-28 followers in tow with no discernable impact on performance. 28-30 the game was still playable but you could feel it starting to struggle. 31+ followers and the decline in performance started rushing to unplayable. Not a problem just an experiment.

Some time later I upgraded my PC and rebuilt Skyrim from scratch. I installed about 24 followers. Fired up the game and its moving through treacle. Double- triple- check everything but no change. Drop the number of followers down but no great difference. Tried every thing I could think of and a few I couldn't think of. Eventually posted here which is where Genio came in.

I ran Ordenador on my texture folder and it turned out the skin textures of some of the followers didn't have mipmaps. On my original machine the 28-30 followers were all using Fair Skin Complexion which comes with mipmaps. When I did the rebuild I was thinking about a change of texture and had installed about 6 or so different texture mods to have a look at them. About half of them didn't have mipmaps. After Ordenador added them the problem went away.

The mipmap contains info (e.g.) about how much detail is shown at various distances. With no mipmap the CPU has to compute on the fly. So if you (and 28 followers) are standing still you wont really notice anything amiss. If you are moving down the road it will be slow and laggy. If you suddenly turn left then it grinds to a halt as the CPU drops the calcs it was doing and starts on a new set. It's not a memory issue as such - the struggle is the CPU doing the calcs so it can get the info to the GPU.

 

If it's not broke then don't fix it. With my current machine I've had 72 followers in tow and the game was quite playable. All my textures have mipmaps and all are 2k. I have a couple of things in my game which use 4k but I never bother reducing the size.

[Grey Cloud]

5 hours ago, stingray1995 said:

"Not having mipmaps will tan a CPU."

"Can" not "will".

 

As for the file size increase, that is easy enough to see with Ordenador.