Hey everyone, I'm having a real bad time on my Skyrim all because of my shadows, they are really bad. I've googled shadow problems on Skyrim for a few days now trying to find out what's wrong and how to fix my problems but everything I've found so far where people have had similar issues to me have fixed using certain techiques such as changing the shadow quality to medium and editing things in the SkyrimPref.ini file and I have tried them but sadly they did not provide the fix for me.

I can't really portray my issues via screenshots because they look so much worse when you're running the game in real time and not as bad if it's just a still image. Here is my main issues with the shadows I'm having:

Awful quality pixelated shadows on player characters, the shadows on static objects such as buildings are fine, they're not as smooth as they probably should be but definitely not bad enough to totally break your focus in the game to have fun and endulge yourself in the game world. But the shadows around me and NPCs are so fuzzy around the outlines and they stutter every few seconds and just go a bit sketchy as if the game is fast forwading.

Also the shadows such as underneath the character's neck and on their face are blocky and pixelated and like the shadows being casted on the ground by the player, they sometimes sketch out and go fast forward mode on you.

I also noticed that outside Whiterun, I know the mountains flicker and that's a totally different problem that can't be helped at the moment, but on the ground near the path leading down from the main gate, there are two textures colliding with eachother and if you look at this corner of the path and move, you can see them overlapping eachother and it keeps stuttering and just makes the game world look ugly. These things really break me from my game world and just ruin the mood for me.

Things were perfectly fine on Skyrim and I was running it in Ultra perfectly fine but I think maybe a recent patch may have bugged something out for my graphic card or something because I swear the shadows were perfectly fine before.

I am currently using an Asus Geforce 560 ti graphic card which hasn't given me any troubles with The Witcher 2 on high settings, the shadows on that game were perfectly fine, it's just Skyrim it seems. I'm wondering if anyone could perhaps give me some tweaks they think may help make my shadows look normal. If I can just fix the blocky pixelated shadows that are on the character himself such as on their armour, that should be fine because I like to walk around and enjoy the game world in third person but the awful shadows sketching out on my armour are jusst so eye catching it makes it hard to get really into the game for me and I really need to fix this soon.

Also I forgot to add another really annoying problem, buildings are getting shadow effects on them that look as if the sun is reflecting light through blinds on a window and the gaps between the blinds are showing up on the buildings and also sketching out and going all fast forward mode on me that just make looking at buildings really awful and just breaks your game mood really.

I'm running all of the latest drivers, I even installed the Geforce beta driver to see if that helped but it didn't, I'm going to switch back to the 296.10 driver soon since that is the most stable latest driver out now for my card.

I'm going to go to bed now since it's very late and I hope someone has an answer to why I'm getting these really bad shadow issues with my Skyrim so I can finally get back into the game.

Also I am not using any mods and I have reinstalled the game 3 times now also disabling Steam Sync so no old files or whatever would be mixed in when I reinstall it etc.

Thank you for reading!

Everyone's got their own opinion regarding shadows settings but these really worked for me: http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=283 (I used the low shadow draw distance/high sharpness settings)

Shadows wont render at long distances with these settings but to be honest I never really notice (anyone theres alternatives for longer draw shadows). Like the modder says, shadow quality in skyrim is very much tied to draw distance. Generally speaking, you get better quality shadows the shorter draw distance you have, and vice versa. Of course there's various other settings that affect it too.

These instructions are for running your shadow quality on High (theres settings for Ultra in a link on the page). Ive tried them all and these were the best for me, both in terms of performance/quality tradeoff. Its really important what you set these things at as it can have an enormous impact on FPS - losing up to 30 FPS in some cases. I have a fairly high-end rig and depending on my shadow settings my FPS can go from a solid 60 to 25 if set incorrectly. Take note also of adding sun update additions in the Skyrim ini. I added this under the Display header:

fSunShadowUpdateTime=0.000
fSunUpdateThreshold=100.000

This will not be for everyone - it basically stops shadows from being affected by the sun position completely so at different time of day the shadows wont be were they should be. But I much prefer the shadows this way. You can slow down the Sun Update time to a crawl which is better than vanilla settings but I still dont like the occasional movement it has.

Im pretty sure everytime Skyrim updates on Steam your SkyrimPrefs.ini gets messed about - same if you go between ENB or vanilla. So an update could kill all your modfications. Always keep a copy to overwrite the file after an update. So its 1.5 thats necessarily causing the problem but simply that your prefs have changed.


Cheers

Thanks for the help, your link helped me pretty much fix the shadows on the ground bearable now and they don't sketch out and go crazy and they're not pixelated however for some reason the shadows on my character are still bad, these screenshots don't really show you how bad it really is for some reason but basically the shadows under my neck and armpits are jaggered and they keep on moving even if I'm not doing anything and just standing there. They're such a bother when I want to enjoy looking at my character or when I'm looking at other NPCs out in the sun because the shadows on their face are just that much eyecatching because of her jaggered they are and how they keep moving.

Does anyone know of a possible cause for this and maybe a fix?

Thanks again for your help

http://i1173.photobucket.com/albums/r589/kappa92/2012-05-06_00005.jpg &http://i1173.photobucket.com/albums/r589/kappa92/2012-05-06_00006.jpg

I had the problem with shadows too and found this mod to completely remove shadows http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=16464 I get a nice FPS boost too.

You could check if you have set:
iShadowMapResolution=4096 (= max possible setting, do NOT increase it further)

I would always start by maxing that out, and then reducing it by factors of two if necessary for FPS. To be honest, I am not certain what the relationship is between this parameter and the similarly named "secondary" and "primary" parameters, but according to my experience, this is the key setting, and I am happy to have those other two at default.

I may be totally and utterly mistaken, but in my understanding, that setting is a kind of "master quality parameter", which influences the total amount of pixels/resources used in the "shadow space" over the extent where shadows are drawn. The size of each "shadow pixel" in the actual game world is determined by how they have to be stretched to meet the extent/coverage requirement set by fShadowDistance. The shadow pixels, if large and jagged (due to high fShadowDistance or low iShadowMapResolution) may be blurred by increasing iBlurDeferredShadowMask (up to 7 i think), but since that blurring seems to happen "at the screen level", and not "where the shadows fall", a high value will completely blur out any distant shadows, counteracting the desired affect of having a large fShadowDistance. I am not aware of other settings having an equally significant impact (and I am happy to keep them at default), but that may just be a defect on my side. Experiment.

And by the way, here are the standard presets:

			  Low  Medium    High   UltraiBlurDeferredShadowMask	    0	    1	    3	    3fShadowDistance		 2000    2500    4000    8000iShadowMapResolution	  512    1024    2048    4096fShadowBiasScale	  0.5	  0.3	 0.25    0.15iShadowMaskQuarter*	    3	    3	    4	    4*Fixed at 4 regardless after latest patch

As an example, it is quite easy to locally get very nice (although unrealistically sharp) shadows which even behave well when constantly updated, like the ones on my character here:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/75269066/ScreenShot.jpg

The essential settings used for the screenshot were:
-iBlurDeferredShadowMask=1
-fShadowDistance=1000.0000
-iShadowMapResolution=4096
The key ingredient is a very low fShadowDistance, which compresses all shadow pixels, and makes the shadows crisp. But as a side effect, you can see that the more distant buildings are outside of the shadow creation range.

To summarise: My simple and less than fancy recipe for shadow optimisation is as follows:
- Have Skyrim create a new fresh set of ini files with default settings.
- Set iShadowMapResolution to the largest value your setup can stand FPS-wise (512/1024/2048/4096 being permissable values)
- Set iBlurDeferredShadowMask initially (for the duration of the following step) to 0
- Adjust fShadowDistance to find a compromise between shadow detail (visible shadow pixel size) and extent of shadow coverage
- If you prefer to have your shadows blurred as they are in real life, or if you opted for a relatively noticeable shadow pixel size at short range in the previous step, try moderately increasing iBlurDeferredShadowMask in increments of 1 or 2 to blur the shadows, but be mindful of what it does to shadows at long range, as they may be blurred to oblivion.
- Set any other shadow parameters as you may desire, or experiment with them.

Personally, I am happy playing with:
-iBlurDeferredShadowMask=3
-fShadowDistance=5000.0000
-iShadowMapResolution=4096
Those are essentially "Ultra" with a reduced fShadowDistance. Relative to "High", the "Ultra" setting of iShadowMapResolution is thus used mostly to reduce pixel size rather than to increase shadow distance as the Bethesda presets would have it.

*Deleted my post - didnt make sense *

I can't say I disagree, because I have never tried a setting that high.

What I can say is, that I have meticulously observed the shadows cast around the central tree in Whiterun from a fixed save position using a variety of ini settings, always progressing one value increment at a time, and comparing otherwise identical screenshots. With iBlurDeferredShadowMask the effect was very pronounced (to the detriment of all distant shadows) and maxed out at 7 (or so, if I remember correctly). At 32? I don't know, that is far beyond my range of experimentation. Could there be a truncation to least significant bits with that setting at high values? Anyway, I am not certain, but I would assume that the number might the amount of blurring passes done by the engine, in which case a very high number would also seem "out of place".


I agree. Besides, shadows in real life are seldom crisp, simply because the Sun is not a point source of light, but effectively a disk. My own shadow on level ground should be blurred by 2-3 cm, and a tree branch at the elevation of 10 m would have to be several cm thick to leave any noticeable shadow at all. Unfortunately, the blurring of shadows in Skyrim is the same for all objects irrespective of their shadow casting geometry.

P.S.
@Atardecer - Sorry, didn't notice your deletion in time. Unless you strongly oppose, I think I'll let this stand anyway as there may be some relevant points in it.

P.P.S.
And by the way, if somebody can definatively say what fShadowBiasScale precisely does, I would appreciate the info. I never got around to anolyzing it, as it did not seem to have as pronounced and clear an effect as the other parameters did.

Inki, hehe yeah sorry there were just a couple of things I wasnt sure I got right as I couldnt remember if increasing iBlurDeferredShadowMask actually made shadows softer or it was the other way around. As it stands I agree with my sentiment, even if I got the detail back to front. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable than I can make that clear.

I agree - I quite like soft shadows in game. While it might not look as snappy to some, I think its far more realistic. One other thing I should point out to the OP: once you do get your shadow settings how you want them make sure you mark your SkyrimPrefs as Read Only. Why? Because - and this is really annoying - anytime you access options in the skyrim launcher,even if you dont change anything, the prefs will revert back to the original vanilla settings. So if your'e trying out ENB mods or other mods for example, and you think they have an uneccessary performance impact and switch, its likely because you lost your shadow settings. Just keep a backup and overwrite if that happens. Took me awhile to figure that one out

@Atardecer: After re-reading your posts, I went and adjusted slightly my recipe in post #6, because I could see where the previous version might appear to suggest a preference for overly sharp shadows. (Although it will likely soon fade away into the bowels of this forum anyway, as threads tend to do.)

How to make shadows look good is really just about one thing: shadow distance.
All images and .ini tweaks you see that has good looking shadows has low fshadowdistance.
The result though is also constant shadow pop-ups just a few meter in front of you, and that the medium distant visuals will look much more bland, and well... bad.

So it's really up to what you want most:
- sharp, great-looking shadows at very short distance and thus suffer constant shadow pop-ups very close to you, and at the same time have bland and worse-looking medium distant visuals.
- blocky shadows at very long distance. They don't look great if you look up close, and especially not on characters, but the distant visuals (especially tree shadows) look beautiful and very nice.

I wish someone could just disable shadows on characters to be honest. They do no good at all. You rarely see them, and when you actually see them, they're big blocky pixels flickering. Very unnice.

I agree. But it is also worth while to make sure that one has the highest iShadowMapResolution value compatible with one's system capabilities. Some people seem to miss that under the plethora of other settings.

Right. If I remember correctly, both Morrowind and Oblivion had a setting to determine the maximum number of NPC's allowed to cast shadows at any one time, which allowed those few shadows to be relatively decently done.

If your shadows were fine before, and messed up when you updated, try removing your .ini files and letting the game regenerate them, then make the same changes you made before. There are a ton of changes and tweaks regarding shadows, but three are much more important than others:

Shadow Distance: Lower the better for quality, I personally using something like 3200 to 3500 (can't recall right now). I set it to the same as indoors. Above 4000 will have a big negative effect (Ultra default is 8000).
Shadow Resolution: You want it on 4096 or shadows will look bad. Unfortunately you need a strong system for this, it is an FPS killer.
ENB: I've found a decent ENB setting really helps as things look a little more blurred and soft (depends on the preset though). HD6 cinematicENB or any based on it will be good for softness.

Hope this helps! There are many other litte shadow tweaks but they won't really help unless you do 1 or 2 at least of the above!