(ENB version: 0.254)

First of all, I can never thank Boris enough for his amazing efforts. ENB is one of the most amazing things to happen to PC gaming (ever), and the layer of enjoyment and control it adds to the Skyrim environment is insane. I recently donated because I hope to see development go on forever!

Anyway, I wanted to get everyone's (and maybe Boris?) thoughts on something I'm experiencing with SSAO during my experiments building a new ENB preset. I don't consider it a "bug" as much as something arising from my probably unintended usage, and am more curious than anything.

I've been slowly building an ENB preset from scratch, so I can learn every function, and fine-tune it to exactly what I want (this has been a very fun and rewarding experience.) I spent a lot of time fine-tuning SSAO, and found that I get the best results I'm looking for when the sampling range is set very low, I mean low, down to 0.12. This gives every edge a fine shadow; objects on the ground have a "real" shadow and don't look like they are hovering like they normally do, architecture has fine shadows along each edge, and characters have very nice shading along their jawline, etc. It's beautiful and looks very realistic.

However, I noticed that in some interiors that use a specific type of ambient light, at lower FOVs skin on characters turns bronze/black (which becomes evident when using a mod like Face to Face Conversations). This happens at any distance from the character to the NPC, if the FOV is lowered. The lower you go, the darker they get. A lot of interiors are fine, so it only happens with a specific type of ambient light.

Again, I know it probably is not normally intended to use a sampling range that low, I am just more curious why some lights do it, and some do not. It's ambient light, as the effect happens the same regardless of the character position in relation to point lights. It does not happen outdoors. Here are some example screenshots:

1-(No skin darkening) Dark Brotherhood Sanctuary + ELFX - low FOV does not adversely effect SSAO, it does not change and looks great (fov 25)
http://i.imgur.com/48t00Tc.jpg

2-Markarth Arnleif and Sons Trading Company + ELFX
--Starting at FOV 60 everything is normal: http://i.imgur.com/AlOYn4a.jpg
--Lowering FOV turns skin bronze/black, the lower the FOV the darker it gets (this is 30): http://i.imgur.com/SuNT593.jpg

3-Just a very minor (probably crappy) example of why I love using such a low / tight sampling range -- objects look like they are really touching a surface!
http://i.imgur.com/SkpeMR1.jpg

Something about the ambient light types between these interiors is different, and makes SSAO act differently, and I'm just curious what it is.

Thanks for reading!

I can't say anything, unless see this face problem by myself and debug it. The one idea is that face model is configured to some unhandled shader and normals are incorrectly transformed. Or somehow mod can't detect field of view (no enbhelper.dll installed?). Or light in that place is something rediculous (ssao applied to ambient lighting by decreasing it amount, not to image and not to direct/point lights).

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i5-4690k, 16Gb RAM, GTX 1060 6Gb, X-Fi Titanium, Win7 x128
I am INFP, not the brutal, godamnit.

Thanks for the reply! I'm very interested in the technical details, so it's interesting to hear your thoughts. Because I'm curious I'm going to look at the specific lights being used in those interiors, and in vanilla vs. ELFX (it happens with both, if I recall). (EDIT: I double checked and I do have enbhelper.dll installed)

Sorry, i can't add anything to what i said previously. All you can do is to try older versions of the mod (but not too old) and uninstall other mods to find out which cause the issue, if any.

_________________
i5-4690k, 16Gb RAM, GTX 1060 6Gb, X-Fi Titanium, Win7 x128
I am INFP, not the brutal, godamnit.