Ray Tracing and Eyelash mesh haloing

[Bluegunk]

Got one or two followers that have poor transparency on the eyelash mesh (exacerbated by the fact they're just part of the eye.

 

Normally it would not be a problem, but I use a Ray Tracing mod.  As I tweak the Ray Tracing to where I want it for the game, these bad meshes show up. But only on a very few people.

Yumi (follower) is one.

 

Here's a pic of the sort of problem:

 

 

The more observant among you will know this pic comes from the Cumulative Fix for Eye Meshes which I have in the game.

 

Since few NPCs show the problem, I'd assume it's down to settings in the NIF file?  I've tried a few with no luck.

 

The alternative might be the Eye dds, which of course has the eye lash on it.  But I've no clue on DDS alterations. I do have Paintnet.

 

If anyone knows of good NIF tweaks, please do let me know!

 

Edited July 28, 2025 by Bluegunk

[traison]

1 hour ago, Bluegunk said:

Since few NPCs show the problem, I'd assume it's down to settings in the NIF file?

 

Something baked into the facegen data yes.

 

1 hour ago, Bluegunk said:

The alternative might be the Eye dds, which of course has the eye lash on it.  But I've no clue on DDS alterations.

 

Maybe. Perhaps the texture is not truly transparent, like ARGB 1 255 255 255. This will appear transparent, until something comes around and exacerbates the colors. Changing eye textures won't fix issues already in facegen data though.

 

1 hour ago, Bluegunk said:

If anyone knows of good NIF tweaks, please do let me know!

 

Since you have a working example, it seems the simples approach would be to have both open side-by-side in NifSkope and just go through everything. You're most likely looking for some kind of specularity, gloss, color or texture. I imagine the problem is in a BSLightingShaderProperty or BSShaderTextureSet node.

[Bluegunk]

Hi Traison

 

Thanks for some very nice, sound advice!  I'll go through what you recommend and see what turns up!

[traison]

If you're having trouble with it, upload one broken and one working facegen mesh here and I'll have a look at it.

[Bluegunk]

Thank you! I did a side-by-side comparison and could find nothing amiss.  I decided (in the end) it's easier to adjust the ray tracing.

 

I'm in the middle of setting up some PC kit so I'll post a couple of NIFs for you later.

[Bluegunk]

Right, having failed miserably to get 2 computers to talk together, here are two NIFS.  The 0800 one is the one with the supposedly "dodgy" meshes.

 

Head NIFs.zip

 

Thank you for your kind offer!

Edited July 30, 2025 by Bluegunk

[traison]

BSLightingShaderProperty differences:

• The Shader Type is different. While Eye Envmap is probably what it should be, change it to Environment Map.
• Shader Flags 1 is different.
• Shader Flags 2 is different.
• The emissive color is different.
• The cubemap scale might be different.

BSShaderTextureSet differences:

• Texture index 3 (glow/detail) is missing.
• Texture index 7 (backlight/specular) is populated.

I would start by changing the Shader Type, despite it probably being correct as it is now. If this fixes it, you will probably have to find a fix for the RT mod as altering the eyeballs of every single NPC and every single eye mod seems impractical.

[Bluegunk]

23 hours ago, traison said:

If this fixes it, you will probably have to find a fix for the RT mod as altering the eyeballs of every single NPC and every single eye mod seems impractical.

Thank you very much for your suggestions! I'll give these a go.