Reflective armor / ENB / cube maps issue

[Gudulba]

I have this cool looking Daedric armor, which when being indoor really looks like shiny metal. But when being outdoor, it looks like the armor reflects the sky color (at least that's what it looks like) and I think it does look awful (see screenshots in spoiler section). This wasn't always the case and it may have changed after I updated to newer ENB versions or installed ENB dynamic cube maps textures or whatever...

 

When looking at the non-reflective blackish Corset mesh and the reflective Gauntlet mesh in NifSkope, the differences are Shader Type values for Default vs Environment Map and a additional Environment Mapping entry for the reflective Gauntlet.

 

Is there a way to keep the metallic shiny look without the armor reflecting the sky color?

Spoiler

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited May 8, 2025 by Gudulba

[traison]

I liked this effect actually, so I was kinda bummed when I discovered that the newest version of parallaxgen (now pgpatcher) got rid of it. There's nothing in the changelog of any relevant fix, at least that I can see. I'm not sure if the reflective armors was a bug, or if the newest version is now bugged where it makes everything matte.

 

In other words, rebuild meshes with PGPatcher 0.8.12.

[Grey Cloud]

9 hours ago, traison said:

I liked this effect actually, so I was kinda bummed when I discovered that the newest version of parallaxgen (now pgpatcher) got rid of it. There's nothing in the changelog of any relevant fix, at least that I can see. I'm not sure if the reflective armors was a bug, or if the newest version is now bugged where it makes everything matte.

 

In other words, rebuild meshes with PGPatcher 0.8.12.

That may explain where my shiny bits went. I'm fairly certain that I've already rebuilt with PGP 8.12 but I'm currently redoing all my parallax related stuff and will be re-running PGP later today probably.

 

Later that very same day . . .

 

Finished all that parallax jive and even redid my shader cache but nothing seems to have changed on the shiny front.

 



 

An image of Cuddles to cheer up everyone.



 

Just noticed that that is the lowest interior FPS I've seen for a long time.

Edited May 8, 2025 by Grey Cloud

[Gudulba]

Hmm, I have never used PGPatcher. But I installed it yesterday and let it run. It generated about 1.3 GB of files. But none of them were overwriting any of the Daedric armor files and the behaviour was still the same. So I guess my issue has nothing to do with parallax?

 

So the question remains: is there a way to keep the metallic shiny look (which looks perfectly fine when being indoor) without the armor reflecting the sky (at least that's what I think it is; it is not a missing texture thing) when being outdoor?

Edited May 9, 2025 by Gudulba

[traison]

The thing that makes armors shiny (afaik) with pgpatcher is the dynamic1pxcubemap_black.dds file when its assigned to texture index 5 of a mesh. My understanding is that this texture is special in some way, and it tells ENB/CS to generate a dynamic cubemap or something along these lines.

 

22 hours ago, Grey Cloud said:

Finished all that parallax jive and even redid my shader cache but nothing seems to have changed on the shiny front.

 

One mistake that's easy to make with MO2 is that even if the parallaxgen output is last in the loadorder, things like bodyslide generated armors may be in the overwrite folder. You need to keep the overwrite folder empty basically.

 

Another thing is armor built by bodyslide, as for some reason pgpatcher doesn't seem to patch these meshes. Every time you build from BS, it's going to remove parallax/complex material/pbr from the armors.

 

35 minutes ago, Gudulba said:

is there a way to keep the indoor metallic shiny look without the armor reflecting the sky

 

I'm using CS myself so I can only suggest what I'd look for myself:

1. Does ENB have options for any of these: Complex Materials or Physically Based Rendering (PBR). Try playing with them to see if anything changes.
2. Edit the mesh in NifSkope, and remove texture index 5 from all BsTriShapes that shouldn't be shiny. Replace it with a cubemap file from another armor which is not shiny, if you still want some of it.
3. The ENB shader files (*.fx) kinda look like they might be HLSL files. If you can locate the one responsible for rendering the shine, perhaps there's a hidden option you can edit, or something you can disable in the code to get rid of the effect entirely?

Edited May 9, 2025 by traison

[Gudulba]

Thank you both for your input!

I have tracked this behaviour back to ENB Dynamic Cubemap. As a workaround to get rid of those outdoor reflections, I have hidden the "ore_ebony_e.dds", which is the texture file #5 that is referenced in the affected armor meshes.

Spoiler