Flickering shadows on character (NSFW) - solved

[JoshAstray]

Whenever my character is in sunlight, there's these shadow lines on the character's body that flicker a lot, and there's even flickering on the face too. Does anyone know what the cause of that might be? If the time changes to a later part of the day or I'm indoors, everything's fine.
 

 

Spoiler

 

The body is UNP HDT, built using BodySlide, with Fair Skin Complexion.
For outdoor lighting, I'm using ELE (though I don't actually use ENB).
For settings, antialiasing and anisotropic filtering are both set at 8 samples, shadow detail is high.
I also use FXAA post process injector, preset 3.

If there's any more info you need, please let me know. Thanks.

[Malo]

ELE doesn't affect outdoors so that shouldn't be an issue. Start disabling any lighting mods or post processing utilities one by one to see which is the culprit?

[xwhiteninjax]

maybe there is another factor to look at... if your char is using a spell, cloak-shield or similiar effect (even invisible) there might be the effect of "swirl" to it... try the following mod (no esp, only change in textures)  https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/77848 , even if it is not the cause, this should be done since it will avoid flickering of npc, using cloaks of shielding

[Grey Cloud]

2 minutes ago, xwhiteninjax said:

maybe there is another factor to look at... if your char is using a spell, cloak-shield or similiar effect (even invisible) there might be the effect of "swirl" to it... try the following mod (no esp, only change in textures)  https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/77848 , even if it is not the cause, this should be done since it will avoid flickering of npc, using cloaks of shielding

Sorry but that is absolutely nothing to do with the issue here.

[JoshAstray]

31 minutes ago, Malo said:

ELE doesn't affect outdoors so that shouldn't be an issue. Start disabling any lighting mods or post processing utilities one by one to see which is the culprit?

Forgot to mention Relighting Skyrim, but I did as you suggested and it doesn't look like it's working. Could previously installed body/lighting/weather mods that were removed in MO have any lingering impact on the save? I'm not too far in so I could always just start over.
 

3 minutes ago, xwhiteninjax said:

maybe there is another factor to look at... if your char is using a spell, cloak-shield or similiar effect (even invisible) there might be the effect of "swirl" to it... try the following mod (no esp, only change in textures)  https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/77848 , even if it is not the cause, this should be done since it will avoid flickering of npc, using cloaks of shielding

Thank you for the suggestion. I will be using a lot of spells so I imagine this will come in handy either way.

[Grey Cloud]

34 minutes ago, Malo said:

ELE doesn't affect outdoors so that shouldn't be an issue. Start disabling any lighting mods or post processing utilities one by one to see which is the culprit?

And/or read the S.T.E.P. guide about setting up your Skyrim graphics and lighting.

[Malo]

30 minutes ago, JoshAstray said:

Forgot to mention Relighting Skyrim, but I did as you suggested and it doesn't look like it's working. Could previously installed body/lighting/weather mods that were removed in MO have any lingering impact on the save? I'm not too far in so I could always just start over.

Did you remove the post process injector as well? Running Reshade? Are you sure you don't have any leftover ENB stuff in your skyrim folder?

[JoshAstray]

3 hours ago, Malo said:

Did you remove the post process injector as well? Running Reshade? Are you sure you don't have any leftover ENB stuff in your skyrim folder?

Yup. Since none of that worked, I started suspecting it might've been due to shadow settings in the .ini files. After a bit of digging into that, I found a solution.

First up, the flickering happened every 5 or 6 seconds or so, so I focused on that and found a topic over at Nexus that suggested adding these two lines into the [Display] section of skyrim.ini

fSunShadowUpdateTime=0

fSunUpdateThreshold=10.0

That definitely solved the constant flickering, but I didn't realize those ugly striped shadows were a separate issue because they were still there. Adjusting the iShadowMapResolution settings (to 3072) in skyrimprefs.ini seemed to do the trick for that, thanks to a Youtube video that suggested it.

[xwhiteninjax]

just another (simple) reason might be a driver-problem... playing skyrim over (real) hours tends to fill up caches (maybe ram, maybe dram from graphiccards)... so if at a "flickering point" you do a save... quit and reload and all is good... it is a problem with the engine of skyrim, the programming and shows you, that you have to play with more individual saves... so you could do F5, F9  and go on.. or use hardsaves