MonarchX;n10313662 said:
No, it doesn't, not at all. If you like the look - nothing wrong with that, but don't tell me it's natural, it looks nothing like vanilla skin tones for him. If someone has to design a special Geralt for this lighting mod, then this mod ultimately fails because it changes enough tones to look way off for someone to re-design the ENTIRE game and all graphics assets to fit within it. Lighting and other game graphics assets are developed hand-in-hand. They must match. Editing ENV files is like creating ReShade or ENB presets, it usually results in some places and objects looking amazing at the cost of making others look awful. Witcher 3 is not Skyrim or Fallout 4, games that are mostly about ENB + ReShade screenshots with sucky gameplay that takes you to plenty of areas with ruined lighting.
The best approach is to simply tweak vanilla lighting and not re-design or overhaul lighting, else be prepared to overhaul a ton of character skins, textures, FX, etc. There would no end to the amount of graphics assets that would look unnatural, more so than in vanilla.
I guess we agree to disagree.
This mod, to me, looks totally natural. It also looks to be similar to CDPR's own vision of how geralt should look in W3. I mean, look at the forum art of him at the top of the screen and then compare that to how geralt looks in the last SS lexar posted of toussaint dialogue. It is similar. Not only that, but it is pretty clear he isn't using vanilla geralt, but the E3 face shape mod that was posted here a while back that is on the nexus-- either that or it is his own version of that mod. But it is clearly not vanilla, so you're right: it doesn't really look like vanilla geralt, but it is hard to blame this mod specifically for that. If you interpret Geralt to be paler based on lore, then again there are mods for that. This mod/lighting combo looks close to E3 and his skin has a realistic coloring.
ENB presets are frequently made with other mods as a "requirement" to fully realize the ENB author's vision. Go onto Skyrim's nexus site and look at the top ENBs. Most of them require other mods as they were designed with that in mind, so that really isn't a new concept for modding. Reshade however is where problems occur, as it is basically a filter thrown over the entire scene. Advanced ENBs can tweak lighting on a per-area basis, so "ruined lighting" isn't really a problem.
Though I do agree that with lighting mods, less is more. Vanilla lighting was calibrated a specific way, and even though it has plenty of its own problems, we don't have the tools to fix the new problems that arise when every lighting setting is tweaked. Like for example, a big problem for me with STLM was that if you were looking toward the sun, foliage translucency was totally broken and leaves and bushes were super transparent with gigantic shadows right in the middle of them. So I look forward to this mod's release to see if it does anything special in the "lighting bug fixing": category. Someday I would like to see a lighting mod that is less of an overhaul, but closer to vanilla lighting (even though I prefer the E3 version
)