TES Reloaded
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TES ReloadedForum

TES Reloaded is one of the biggest project of the modding community.
It is a plugin for Oblivion, Skyrim and Fallout New Vegas.

HAVE FUN!
AlenetThe Author

Timeslip


Oblivion Graphics Extender (OBGE) v1.0

Scanti


Oblivion Graphics Extender (OBGE) v2.0

ShadeMe


Oblivion Graphics Extender (OBGE) v2.0

Ethatron


Oblivion Graphics Extender (OBGE) v3.0

Alenet
Alenet
Administrator
Posts : 232
Join date : 2020-08-23
Age : 45
Location : Tuscany, Italy

Skyrim shadows Empty Skyrim shadows

Mon 31 Aug 2020, 19:44
Skyrim uses a good method for the shadows. It is fast and allows a set of parameters. The main problem is that shadows are a bit "blocked style" and not soft. SR modifies the way in which they are rendered to obtain a better result. Many ways can be applied to draw the shadows, SR modifies "little" things to not touch so much the main rendering (for performance and stability).
Here a little explanation about relevant settings and how the engine works.

- fShadowDistance: Skyrim has more than one camera, one of these is the one to draw the shadow map. The shadowmap is taken from a high view; fShadowDistance is the distance of the camera from the ground (not from the player). Higher values, the camera is higher from the terrain (in the sun direction), then the frustum is larger and a higher area is covered. Shader value is fShadowDistance*fShadowDistance so 64.000.000 units. The default value is too high in my opinion, values between 5000 and 7000 are more reasonable. If you reduce this value, the shadows are more detailed but the distance is lower.

- iShadowMapResolution: this is the value for the shadow map. The value is used to create theshadowmap surface and it is X = iShadowMapResolution, Y = iShadowMapResolution * 2. The upper part is used to draw the distant shadows, lower part is used for near shadows. I strongly recommended to not use a iShadowResolution over 4096 because there is no difference in quality (the quality depends also on the shadowmap resolution but not so much) and it is difficult for the game to manage a texture (example) of 8196x16392 (insane).

- iBlurDeferredShadowMask: it is a "simple" blur of the shadows, values are from 1 to 7 (values over 7 are reset to 7). The game picks up the corresponding shader from the shader package (from EFFECT31 to EFFECT37): 1 has one blur pass, 7 has 7 blur passes. Blurring the shadow can help a bit to avoid the block effect but higher values mean lower details too.

- fInteriorShadowDistance: interiors have multipoints lighing. It is the distance from the player to manage the point lights. If the point light is inside the range, it is taken to print the shadowmap.

All the SkryimPrefs are not touched by SR and they work in vanilla like in SKGE.

SR addons:
- NearQuality: it is mainly a multiplier and it raises the near shadow quality, but higher values reduce also the range of the near shadows. Setting it to 1, reproduces the vanilla method. If you raise this value too high (the value should be set between 2 and 5), you can see the deadlift between the near shadows and distant ones. For example a high NearQuality value and a high fShadowDistance value, creates a high deadlift (example if you set NearQuality to 5 and fShadowDistance to 8000 or over).

- MultiPointsLighting: enables the multipoints lighting in exteriors like for interiors.
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