Weird Glare in Fallout NV

[Gawdzila]

Can anyone tell me what might be causing this weird glare issue? It happens in both 0.137 and 0.150 for me. Whenever I have bloom turned on I get this blinding glare (and with Adaptation on it also turns the screen black) from very specific parts of very certain textures. In this case, it appears to be specifically tied to an area on the right side of this backpack:



It happens infrequently, and the few times it has happened have been related to items added by mods. I assumed it was related to specularity, and it is my understanding that alpha channels are used for specularity, so I looked at the textures of one of the offending items with photoshop (a piece of furniture in this case). The alpha channel didn't seem unusually bright, but even so I darkened it significantly. This didn't help, though, even when I turned it almost completely black. Deleting the alpha channel entirely fixed (or at least covered up) the problem, but I could still see no reason why it didn't happen with the thousand other items that still had intact alpha channels.

Also, I can say with reasonable certainty that it is tied specifically to direct lighting (as opposed to ambient). With the aforementioned piece of furniture the issue would not arise until I turned on the light switches in the room, even though the room was not dark before I turned the lights on. I've tried turning the bloom waaaaaay down and turning lens effects off (setting their intensity to 0.00), but the problem persists. I suspect that it would only be masking the symptoms and not fixing the underlying problem in any case. Anyone have a clue what might be the cause?

[mindflux]

The reason is in the modded object meshes (.nif files) that have crazy amounts of lighting effects dialed in, most likely specularity.

[Gawdzila]

Thanks for the quick reply I didn't realize the model/nif files had such an influence on the lighting, I figured it was controlled by the textures. But that makes sense and explains a lot. Maybe it's time to learn how to use Nifskope. Sigh. Never touched that program before, hopefully this is an easy fix to ease myself in, lol.

[mindflux]

Should be simple enough, just check under BSLightingShaderProperty for any crazy values, especially for Specular Strength and Lighting Effect 1/2. Compare to vanilla meshes if need to.

[Gawdzila]

Thanks for the tips! However, I didn't find either of the properties you mentioned under "BSShaderPPLightingProperty". I did see a Shader Flag called "SF_Specular" but I thought that I ought not mess with it. Under "NiMaterialProperty" I did find "Specular Color", "Glossiness", and also "Emit Multi", for which one of the blocks was set to 1 instead of 0 as all the others were. I changed all of those things, but they didn't seem to have any effect. HOWEVER, I did find something odd when I looked closer at the item. I turned the bloom down as far as possible to narrow down which part of the item was causing the problem, and when I zoomed in I noticed that part of the mesh -- right in the "trouble spot" on the end of that leather strap next to the little metal button -- seemed to be all black:



I looked at the backpack texture and the part that had the leather texture on it had a couple black gaps, but filling those in didn't actually cause that part to get filled in in the game, and the "background" of the texture (the part that doesn't obviously contain bits that are applied to the model) isn't black, so it seems like it might be that part of the model is being left totally untextured. Could this cause such a problem? How would one fix it?

[mindflux]

Hmm, it's hard to see from the dark image, but it looks like that bit is missing a UV map and the 'background color' you refer to is actually vertex coloring.

Nifskope is really no good for editing UV maps, but something as simple as fixing that gap should be doable. So, click right mouse button on the mesh near the problem spot (in the main object view), select Texture and then Edit UV. It looks a bit confusing at first, but what you're basically seeing is how the texture is mapped onto the polygons of the mesh. You can edit the mapping by clicking on a vertex and dragging- you can see the updated mapping in the main view. Try finding the vertices of the problem area, selecting them (click and drag) and mapping them correctly.

[zeppomarks]

Were you able to fix this? I've run into the same issue and I don't know how to fix it.

[Asmodae]

I know this is an old-ish topic, but I've found and fixed the problem with Willow and the leather backpack mod. You can check it out here at the New Vegas nexus. Since I can't post links yet (still newbish) just look for mod 50998, or Google for "leather backpack ENB fix".

Thanks and I hope it helps folks that have this problem.

- Asmodae