TES Skyrim SE 0.401

[ENBSeries]

a burn-in image look appeared

Someone reported this earlier, but i doubt it's caused by mod itself, rather driver bug or some other software, including geforce experience. I can't support it anyway, same as any other tool which hooks in to the graphics, nobody knows what exactly they do and if not clean up something or bypass some calls, bugs occurs.

[skysan4298]

I found the cause. It was my poor attempt porting the oldrim enbbloom.fx to SE.
The oldrim enbbloom.fx had the BloomParameters setting and the TempParameters setting. Were these settings not available in the Skyrim SSE shader?

//x=BloomRadius1, y=BloomRadius2, w=BloomBlueShiftAmount, z=BloomContrast
float4 BloomParameters;

[ENBSeries]

I dont remember, just check my default bloom file and if such parameters do not exist there in SE version, then yes, that's the reason.

[fadingsignal]

For anyone curious, I solved my location-based weather config problems. I was using a fake weather ID (literally "345678") which worked for some time in older versions of ENBHelper/ENB but not recent versions. It requires a real weather ID. Using one of the "FX" weathers used for day/night bulbs did the trick. Thanks to Guzio/RudyENB for testing and sending me his files which sparked the idea.

Cheers

[Kitsune]

Hey Boris,
I messed with sun and volumetric rays a bit recently and came up with a external shader that renders both ray types simultaniously. It was originally just built to test how much performance could be saved with this method, but it turned out to look pretty neat. Its still mostly a proof of concept right now, mainly because of screen space limitations.
I know that you don't want to provide any transformation matrices because of potential bugs from things like transparent objects caused by external prepass shaders, so continuing to develop those rays is probably not worth it.
Would it be possible to add a similar looking ray type to your own volumetric ray shader instead? Or different types similar to what you've done with the sun rays previously?

I also noticed that the volumetric rays converge weirdly at the antisolar point. If those should be anticrepuscular rays they shouldn't affect the fog there. Letting the rays fade over distance would be better looking (especially when considering that anticrep. rays aren't a particularly common phenomenon).

Here are a few shots comparing the two effects and showing the antisolar convergence weirdness, so you know what I mean. I tried to recreate the prepass rays as closely as possible with the current volumetric rays.

One last thing: Could something like a density/opacity parameter be added to the cloud shadows? Those shadows could be made sharper that way without the need to ruin clouds by turning them almost completely opaque to get the same effect.

[ENBSeries]

Rays from the clouds are using raytracing, so adding any math in to cycle means very noticable performance influence. Same when mixing in single computation those flat sun rays with volumetric ones. Of course compute as single effect is better, but there is no crossing data between them to have better performance when computed at once, volumetric rays have different scale and only can be well mixed at big enough distances. They have not equal projection, for volumetric rays sun is at infinite distance with parallel rays, but for 2d rays sun is point light. It must be totally new type of effect to make this work really better and worth to implement. But people rarely use volumentric rays, so why to bother?

About shadows, they can't look sharper, because texture is blurred to reduce visibility of pixels, it's low resolution for performance purposes. Making artificial sharpness simply bring up bugs. Just to tweak opacity and transparency of course possible, but when people as me such things, i am always confused, why to ask me things which are steps back from realism?

[Kitsune]

Wasn't aware that you computed them that way, that explains their behaviour at the antisolar point tho. Yeah, it would've been nice but a completely new effect is probably not worth it.

Yes, the transparency tweak is what I wanted.
I know what you mean, I just don't think its unrealistic in this case. Making them look good in the sky doesn't mean that they're going to look good for other effects as well. And they are provided by weather mods that aren't specifically built to support all ENB effects. Having a bit more control over some aspects of the ENB is certainly going to help. Its still up to preset authors if they want to take advantage of them or if they don't need it in the end.

Speaking of cloud shadows, should they look like this? I thought they are supposed to only decrease direct lighting. I took another screenshot where I reduce the direct lighting intensity manually for comparisson.

[ENBSeries]

I dont know what to look at in the screenshot. Yes, they need to decrease amount of direct lighting, in old skyrim shadow applied per object, in se version it's applied as post pass overlay which try to restore sun light from albedo and ambient color (with some errors cause math can't be fully reverted). Anyway, i can do that parameter, but it add problem if will do procedural clouds support, for sun rays, cloud shadows and depth based effects (like dof) they need to be rendered differently, which increase complexity of shaders instead of just one. So, it would be much easier to keep clouds mask original, but modify it before apply to everything. If clouds are too much transparent, scaling up such mask will look not okay cause of precision error, so i can't make too big scale up. And "sharp" shadows what actually means? I would like to see examples to understand.

[fadingsignal]

Speaking of cloud shadows, should they look like this?

Yeah, I leave Cloud Shadows off or very low because it seems to turn the character much darker than the surroundings. It looks like it overrides environment map reflections, so metal surfaces turn very dark, showing only their diffuse. (I have no idea how it works or what it's actually doing, just explaining what it looks like visually.)

Here's some shots, left is cloud shadows OFF, right is cloud shadows ON.

[Kitsune]

Pretty much exactly what fadingsignal said. Plus the armor in my screenshot had semi-transparent, slightly glowing elements on it that are rendered wrong with cloud shadows. Waterfalls can turn almost black as well when enabling them and SSS looks a bit too dark imo when compared to manually decreasing direct lighting. Seems like the albedo reconstructed direct lighting alone doesn't handle emissive objects particularly well, but I have no idea if thats even fixable with the current technique.

You could just disable the transparency tweak for procedural clouds if you decide to add them later (or completely remove it).
Here are a few screenshots of the waterfall stuff and the "sharper" shadows.