Since going ENB-Heavy with Skyrim, I encountered some issues — especially with custom meshes, but some vanilla meshes as well — that were pretty game breaking. Semi-transparent wolves, Khajit with eyes bulgings out of their heads and invisible fur…

Then I started to notice the issue with my custom meshes. The custom items would be semi-transparent sort of looking like this:



As you can see, her bodice and pauldron are ghostly and transluscent.

After struggling for a while with no luck from any searches, I somehow managed to fix it.

If you notice your custom meshes/textures doing this, here’s how I managed to fix it. Open the mesh in Nifskope, and check the following:

1. Select the NiTriShape, drill down in the Blocklist to the right, and select “NiTriShapeData”.
2. Under “Block Details”, ensure “Has Vertex Colors” is set to “No”.
3. Under the same NiTriShape, select “BSLightingShaderProperty”
4. Under “Shader Flags 1”, ensure “SLSF1_Specular” is selected. Under “Shader Flags 2”, ensure “SLSF2_Vertex_Colors” is not selected.
5. Open the Normal Map in Photoshop or GIMP (to ensure you have the correct normal map, copy the texture path you find in “BSShaderTextureSet”, which is drilled down from “BSLightingShaderProperty”.
6. In your image editing software, navigate to where the individual “Channels” are located. Ensure there is an Alpha channel. If there isn’t, create a channel named “Alpha”. You will want this channel to be as dark as possible. Make sure it’s filled black.
7. If you want to add specular detail, you can copy and paste the normal map in to the Alpha channel, or modify it as you please. Remember: the Alpha channel should be as dark as possible. Non-reflective objects should be as close to black, where as higher reflectivity/specularity should be closer to white.
8. Save as DDS, don’t forget to generate mip maps!
9. BONUS: If Skyrim/Creation Kit preview does not load the normal map, go back to Nifskope -> NiTriShape -> NiTriShapeData, and look for “BS Num UV Sets”. This should be set to “4097”.
10. Save your .nif

So for those of you running in to the semi-transparent issues with Skyrim ENB, the above should hopefully give you some answers.

Update: After unpacking and experimenting, it seems this fix DOES apply to the vanilla meshes as well. I’ve successfully fixed the wolves and Khajiit problems.

Before:


After: