PipBoyShadows is a small mod that just adds a shadow flag to the Pip-Boy light and various HeadLamps, including the Power Armor light.
At start that was just a test, but I found it interesting enough to share it, but beware, because the result is not always good, specially for the pipboy light, especially in third person view. There are some artifacts in shadows and some weird effects because the character himself produces shadows. The HeadLamps shadows look much better, however. Obviously, bethesda has probably chosen to not activate the effect because of that and for consistancy,
So, this mod is delivered “As is”: it’s your call to define if you want to handle quirky shadows, or not.
- The pipBoy casts omnidirectional shadows that are sometimes a bit glitchy, mostly on 3rd person view, while the spot light shadows casted by HeadLamps are far more clean. This is why I made 2 esps: one that include every headlamps + the pipboy and one that just modifies Headlamps. If you dont want to see weird shadows sometimes just take the one without the Pipboy.
- The shadows are generated by the game engine itself. The plugin only enables the flag for the relevant lights. At this point, I’am afraid that nothing can be done to improve the quality of the shadows. Maybe there are some hidden properties to tweak but they are hard to find without a proper documentation.
- Since the mod adds extra shadows, this may have an impact on your system performances, specially if you are in a zone where there are some other lights that also cast shadows. The pipboy light specifically, since it’s an omnidirectional light, is probably more consuming than the headlamps. It may depend of your spec. On my side, I am running the game on a nvidia gtx960, with a high setting for shadows (I prefer this one rather that the ultra one, which is too sharp for my taste) and I didn’t see any significant drop rate.
- If you want to see NPC casting shadows too, you need to set “bAllowShadowcasterNPCLights = 1” in your mygames\fallout4\Fallout4Prefs.ini file.
1) install
- Download the file and extract PipBoyShadows.esp into Fallout4\Data folder.
- Go to your Local Appdata Folder and find the Fallout4 folder. (usually something like c:\users\username\appdata\local\fallout4\)
- Add: ‘PipBoyShadows.esp’ (without the quote) in the plugins.txt file under the line Fallout4.esm
- Make plugins.txt file readonly (right-click on the file -> property -> readonly) otherwise the launcher will reset the change.
- Run the game, enjoy
2) uninstall
- Simply remove the esp from the fallout4\data\ folder
- And revert back the change in the file plugins.txt
Download:
PipBoyShadows-281-0-4.zip (136 downloads)
Credit: McGuffin
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