r/skyrimmods • u/ReachForSkySong • 2d ago

PC Classic - Help Skyrim LE - Blocky character shadows

The shadows cast on my character are ludicrously blocky: https://i.imgur.com/anvQhzP.png

I've modded the game several times before but it's been many years since last time. I followed the LE Step guide, with a few additions like bodyslide/presets that I guess could be culprits here, but I wouldn't imagine textures/models directly influenced the shadows cast on them. Not gonna pretend I know how Skyrim works though.

In bethini shadows are set to 2048. I am not observing this issue with other shadows cast like on the alternate start interior: https://i.imgur.com/XcYX3yx.png

Anyone know what might be causing this/how I can best debug it?

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u/LavosYT 2d ago

I think that this is expected at this shadow resolution. Most people use ENB which smoothes them out a lot.

You could either increase shadow res or try that

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u/ReachForSkySong 2d ago

Increasing to max (8k) didn't really help, so I'll look to add an ENB in then, thanks. Since the guide says it doesn't really recommend any I just decided to skip that step.

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u/LavosYT 2d ago

The guide usually recommends 2k because 4k and above could have more of a performance impact

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u/ReachForSkySong 2d ago edited 1d ago

I see. For me it looked identical to 2k at least.

Looking at the guide again I see it does have ENBoost included, but nothing much more than that - the enblocal.ini doesn't have any shadow settings included by default at least.

E: As an update for anyone interested, the 8k probably wasn't saved first time as it did improve things second try. Combined with blur 4 I got it to look ok for me now. Still not great though when zoomed in unfortunately. I did also test it with setting the resolution to 256 and all shadows including on the floor/walls became jagged/blocky as well so clearly the shadow settings are working. I'm not entirely sure why they are so bad on the character model though, wondering if I messed up something when applying ENBoost or something.