Shadow Problem

[Grey Cloud]

This started happening for no apparent reason. 

I'm guessing shaders somewhere, somehow so I've done a rebuild/re-run of CS shaders, PG patcher, TexGen and DynDOLOD. Uninstalled Reshade (and not reinstalled it.)

 

 

 


 

 

 

Edited January 29 by Grey Cloud

[traison]

51 minutes ago, Grey Cloud said:

I'm guessing shaders somewhere, somehow so I've done a rebuild/re-run...

 

Considering how easy it is to turn off CS, you shouldn't need to guess.

 

If we assume it's not CS, and it's not changing color or moving around, then:

1. Go get More Informative Console.
2. Start the game.
3. Go stand on some dark ground.
4. Open the console.
5. Press Tab.
6. Use MIC to find the ground textures currently used.
7. Open these textures in a tool that can display dds textures and make sure none of them are actually that dark.
8. If one if them is suspiciously dark, use your mod manager to query which mod is providing that texture.

Edited January 29 by traison

[Grey Cloud]

Problem persists without CS. I haven't got Reshade installed either.

Re-ran PG Patcher, TexGen and DynDolod none of which made any difference.

Followed your 8-step guide from the above post.

Some places the mod named was DynDOLOD.

Some places it wouldn't give anything.

Some places were saying [ACTI] Activator

On closer inspection of that actual ground some places places had running water on them. This was in the Eldergleam Sanctuary(?) so it may have been a one-off due to something in there.

 

 

The mottled ground where the pointer is and the dark area to the right of it have the running water. Water1024 appears only in Skyrim.esm.


 

 

 

One of the textures in MIC was dynamic1pxcubemap_black.dds which looked promising. A search and it appears in 4 places:

PG Patcher (the actual mod) \assets folder

PG Patcher Output textures\cubemaps

Illustrious Whiterun Complex Parallax mod 

Fantasia Landscapes textures\cubemaps.

 

The PG Patcher one is not in the fight - neither wins nor loses. The PG Output file wins against Fantasia and Illustrious.

All four cubemaps are pure black and the same size and whatnot (at least according to the MO2 plugin I just installed - (Nexus inf DDSPreview-163260)).

 

That's about as far as I've got and I'm too tired to do anything more tonight.

 

Forgot to mention that snow/ice in dungeons/caves is blindingly bright but dims down somewhat if I get close.

Edited January 31 by Grey Cloud

[traison]

47 minutes ago, Grey Cloud said:

Some places the mod named was DynDOLOD.

Some places it wouldn't give anything.

Some places were saying [ACTI] Activator

 

Missed this bit:

On 1/29/2026 at 5:16 PM, traison said:

• Open the console.
• Press Tab.

 

Pressing tab once switches MIC from showing info about the currently selected object to showing info about the cell you're in. Inspect the ground textures used in the cell you're standing in, rather than random objects around the world.

[Grey Cloud]

Either I'm missing something or not doing something right but I'm not getting any closer to identifying the cause of the problem.

Went back to Eldergleam.

Tried with:

Grass mod off

Fantasia Landscapes Parallax off

Fantasia Landscapes and Parallax off

VRAMr off

Problably something else which I can't remember

 

Nothing made any difference.

MIC gave this:

Different files with the grass mod active, just Skyrim.esm without it.

 

Looked at the grass .dds files and they look fine. I've used the grass mod since I built this SE Skyrim and never had a problem with it.

[traison]

There's a video in your PMs.

 

Edit: and yes I realize doing this in the CK could be a lot faster, but there's a couple of issues with that:

1. The CK can only ever really load only one plugin. If you got 15 plugins changing different land textures and cells near where the problem is, that's not going to be any faster than doing it by hand in xEdit.
2. The CK is really crash-happy when you got things like pgpatcher and dyndolod enabled, and these may be key players in this issue.

Edited January 31 by traison

[Grey Cloud]

"The power is mine. All mine I tell you".

 

 

[traison]

Hehe, well done.

[Grey Cloud]

3 hours ago, traison said:

Hehe, well done.

Thanks to your help.

 

I've just re-run BENDr and it got me back to square one so I removed the entire textures\landscape folder from the BENDr Output which cured the problem again. I'll run around Skyrim to see what's what and if all is okay I might start adding back the textures gradually. I'll probably put the landscape folder back then do each affected mod, e.g. Fantasia, my grass mod, etc, one at a time.

BendR adds raycasting if you didn't know. It still adds raycasting if you did know. 😐

 

This was a good example of how my usual approach sometimes fails. I always assume human error with me being the erring human. Because I am constantly swapping and changing mods during this 'test' run I assumed that my LO had got out of synch with the files in the various output folders (six of them). I've not ruled that out entirely but BENDr is currently in the frame.

Edited January 31 by Grey Cloud

[Grey Cloud]

@traison

I noticed that some my parallax (guessing) had gone funny.

 

 

The table



 

The wall to the left of the door


 

 

 

I turned off VRAMr, BENDr and ParallaxR one at a time in that order and it turned out to be ParallaxR.

 

 

 

 

 

So unless I find a reason to use these mods I'll play without them. I also kept an eye on my FPS while I was turning them on and off - didn't notice any great difference and if anything a gain of about 4 or 5. Running around in the inn was ~ 68-80 with and 68-85 without.

 

Not sure what is happening with the outfit the Hydra girl is wearing. Maybe just that outfit. I'm guessing the neck gap is because of vanilla/HPH and the same with the bald head hair.

Edited February 1 by Grey Cloud

[traison]

I'm fairly certain converting a normalmap into parallax (or bump) map involves some guesswork. The table probably just got the wrong depth value. The price of auto-generated texture data I guess. When I built mine with pgpatcher I had to disable all clothing items because things like mage robe creases looked like they were 1 meter deep. Certain rocks look funny too if you really pay attention to them, but those are easier to ignore amonst all the mountains and bushes.