ENB creates blocky shadows

[Bazinga]

So after I finally bought a new graphics card and after Microsoft unlocked those additional gigabytes of VRAM I'm in the middle of throwing everything I can at Skyrim.

Because why the heck not, I get constant 55-60 fps on Ultra+ (some additional ini tweaks plus that beyond awesome Verdant grass mod) now.

So I also decided to try another ENB preset. I used Project ENB with Climates of Tamriel before, now I have Vividian + Vivid Clouds and Fog and Climates of Tamriel active and running.

 

Which looks great so far and I still don't notice any real performance impact.

One thing was bothering me though, the shadows are a bit broken. A picture tells more than a thousand words so here are a few illustrating what's happening:

This is what I get with EnableDetailedShadow=true in the enbseries.ini

 

And this is what it looks like with EnableDetailedShadow=false

 

So at first I thought that I have to keep that setting turned off.

But no, turns out that the right way to do this is setting EnableDetailedShadow=false in the ini file and then activating it ingame through the ENB menu. Because then the same shadows look like this:

 

 

What I can't figure out atm is why it matters if I switch on those detailed ENB shadows in the ini or ingame. It's a bit cumbersome to always do it ingame of course.

I am using the d3d9.dll and enbhost.exe from the most recent ENBseries version (0.318) together with Vividian, and atm I suspect a version incompatibility.

Reverting back to v0.292 doesn't fix the issue though and I don't want to use something even more outdated.

 

So if anyone can tell me why this happens and if it is maybe related to Vividian ENB only then I'd appreciate it. Otherwise the purpose of this thread/post is to make you aware of this issue (you don't even notice it most of the time with clothes on, that's why I used nude pics) and to give you that workaround I mentioned up there.

[27X]

In prefs:

 

1. set your shadows to 4096

2. set your shadowbias to 1 even if all the other settings are on ultra

3. set your quartering and filter  and Mode to 3

4. reduce your interior shadow distance anywhere between 4000 and 3000

 

In enb:

 

frankly shadows are controlled by three different sections so blockiness could be derived from any of those three areas:

 

[ssao_ssil]

the ambient pointlight section of [environment]

and of course [shadows] where blurring matters.

 

if you've set everything "correctly" shadows should be sharp without dithering or blockiness:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Bazinga]

Thanks, but those settings didn't have an effect on the blocky shadows.

I already had most of these Skyrimprefs.ini settings and the rest (point 2 and 3) didn't help. Neither did toggling on or off stuff for SSAO_SIL and the shadow settings in the ENB (I only switched stuff on and off in the ENB menu ingame though).

Ambient point light only seems to influence color saturation (there's a setting that turns everything into different shades of grey if set to 0 instead of 1) and brightness.

 

So the shape of these shadow blocks stays exactly the same with any of these changes.

The only thing that really seems to matter is that EnableDetailedShadow setting.