TechAngel85

To be honest, I've never tested the high-poly version of SMIM. I'll put that on my list of things to do.

I hear game developers everywhere screaming. ;) I love Brumbek and Hein, but the rocks being smoothed just isn't what I would call improved. I bet a lot of future games will just use tesslelation up close, but for now I made this: The rock I made there took about 10 seconds and has about the same poly count as some of the smaller vanilla rocks. After one smooth there are definite diminishing returns. I think Bethesda did a good job on the meshes, but the person(s) who did the UVs did a really poor job. To my knowledge, all no strecthing does is scale the UVs and doesn't technically improve them (I did this with my wet rocks). That would require re-uving them. I don't think SMIM does this either, but I could be wrong. No sure about RS either because I haven't had a look, but are the UVs re-done/moved tech? SMIM edits the UV maps as well on some of the things he fixes. My only conclusion is that you must have grabbed them from the full/high resolution options. I use the half-sized textures/meshes due to my 1GB VRAM. I hadn't even thought of that possibility. Thanks for clearing that up though! I think we're all on the same page now about your mod. We're going to have to take a look at each mod with and without the No Stretching mod and SMIM to make sure the texture mapping isn't being messed up by these mods and it's being mapped as the authors intended.

:) I actually just finished comparing the conflicting meshes in NifSkope and I have to tip my hat to Hein84! He worked hard on his mod. Most use the NS/SMIM meshes as they are the same (at least in polygon count and structure); however, where they didn't work for Hein84 he went nuts on the meshes and improved them a great deal to fit his mod. I count 6 meshes from SMIM that were improved upon and of those the polygon count quadrupled in most cases! Poly Count SMIM | RS 269 | 1307 233 | 1159 172 | 765 348 | 1323 384 | 1641 1539 | 4511 EDIT: You're right, Z. When comparing Vanilla vs Vanilla Fix, Vanilla is much better.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that you haven't actually compared these meshes besides in-game? I've been comparing in NifSkope and the meshes (mountains is as far as I've gotten) from NS and SMIM are matching up to be exact matches besides a few cases where RS is actually higher detail (more polygons) or the author has taken his own artistic direction. In fact here is a compare from RS vs SMIM on one mesh you're recommending that we use SMIM over the other mods: mountaincliffsm01.nif RS on the left (Number Vertices=2264), SMIM on the right (Number Vertices=1123) The polygon count is higher on the RS mesh making it a higher detailed mesh. This is the same thing the SMIM author does...increases polygons on the meshes to make higher quality meshes. EDIT: Original post updated with compare link: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/zok1r3pt3xd8l1x/qJTTSQHer1

This logic is incorrect. Where the meshes do not change rather likely means that No Stretching did not apply in the first place ;) Definitely not proof that the NS meshes were used where 2 & 3 match. See my comment following about SMIM.Logic is sound and I purposefully didn't include SMIM to put to rest that No Stretching meshes aren't being used when the author himself states they are. You're essentially saying Hein84 is lying by saying they're not. :confused:Therefore, I checked it out myself, and in fact, they are. Both screen shots and NifSkope investigations prove this. I'll circle the ares in Photoshop if need be. There are areas in vanilla that are changed by NS. Uninstall NS and just use Rocking Stones, and these areas (meshes) remained the same as if NS was install. This is proof that RS is using the NS meshes. Further investigation using NifSkope (just to overkill it) proved most the meshes identical to NS. Tech, your pages aren't even loading, so I am guessing that it will be quite awhile. Also, you forgot SMIM. Several of the rock textures we are looking at are affected by SMIM, and SMIM overwrites No Stretching in our load order ... you will need NS + SMIM for an analogous compare in order to reproduce the effects I am referring to ;) Also, I did use the No Stretching and SMIM meshes in my vanilla compares in the OP, and only RS&M replaces the meshes, so RS&M has changed some things that I think the mesh replacements fixed quite nicely, and some of these changes are clearly more close to the original vanilla state These are the Meshes that RS&M uses, that I propose should be overwritten by SMIM: ... that is quite a lot of material, although I am not certain which portions of our screens they correspond to. EDIT: Tech, please remove the PNG from the post and simply provide a link to your gallery as I have done in the OP. These are too unwieldy for a forum post. TIA Check again, I fixed the links. I don't know how to create a gallery in Dropbox. Every time I try to create an album is says there are no pictures found (but they're clearly there in the folder). I'll take some compares with SMIM installed as well to see if anything changes. Just checked. None of my compares are effected by SMIM meshes so they should remain valid compares. I'll have to find areas that SMIM affects and grab some new compares in those areas.

I also just checked out all the meshes for mountains in Nifskope. They're all exactly the same from Rocking Stones as No Stretching with a few exceptions. A couple are actually higher detailed meshes than in No Stretching and a couple (2) have artistic changes; however, still aren't vanilla.

Okay, I was able to put together a little analysis before bed. Here it is... These are the original HQ PNGs so they may take a second to load: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/zok1r3pt3xd8l1x/qJTTSQHer1 First Compare Set As you can clearly see here, the meshes didn't change from the second to the third compare. This means Rocking Stones, in fact, has incorporated the No Stretching meshes. NS was not installed in the RS shot. Second Compare Set In the third compare here where No Stretching isn't install, you can see in certain areas the meshes are the same as in the second where No Stretching is installed. More proof that Rocking Stones uses the No Stretching meshes. However, you notice it's all not the same this time. It's also different from the Vanilla meshes, only leaving that some of these meshes are custom to Rocking Stones. In the forth compare, with No Stretching overwriting these custom meshes, a close investigation (at least in my opinion) reveals that the No Stretching meshes in this shot look worse than the custom meshes included in Rocking Stones. Third/Fourth Compare Set Here are the vertical places that have been brought into question as being stated that it's stretching. All three meshes look different to me. None of this appears to be stretching to me either. Looks rather intended, in fact. You be the judge. After trying to find "stretched" textures with Rocking Stone for a good hour, I couldn't. I continually found more of the above, where the No Stretching meshes are being used and where they aren't, then there was what appeared to be a custom texture. I found no vanilla meshes that I could see either (at least from my investigation) even when using Z's saves.

Again, where in the proposed load order are you loading these textures? Btw, you have at least one one in that load order you shouldn't. Nord armor fix was incorporated into USKP a long time ago. EDIT: I've just set up a profile in MO for the proposed Core load order. I'll just place the mods at the location of AOF in the load order.

Only meshes are used from this mod unless you have SRO. If you do, then also use "HQLODs - Textures Skyrim Realistic" optional file.

New update.

Please use the saves I created. Mine are clean saves based on a clean character, and my saves represent 7 locations in different regions of Skyrim, capturing the various landscapes. This way we have a direct compare. Savegames are linked in the OP What mod are active in your "vanilla" clean saves? Whenever I've ever used your "vanilla" saves that you've uploaded, I also end up getting the "missing content" warning before loading them from my vanilla profile. My vanilla profile in only the vanilla game files with the addition of the Unofficial Patches. Anything more and it wouldn't be a vanilla game. I do use Immersive HUD because it makes taking screenshots a lot easier, but if I upload a save I always clean it from having iHUD present so it's pure vanilla. I am testing against the proposed core background ... see the MT restricted thread for details I went ahead and further examined the other install options for RS&M, and it looks like all meshes are the same as the ones I had used in the original compare (at least with respect to stretching if not parallax). OK, here is the problem (and I hope that someone else at least acknowledges that this is indeed a problem o_O ) Left image is RS&M Classic Gray with its own meshes ... wow, look at that stretched and unwieldy textures! Right image is same but with No Stretching & SMIM meshes ... FIXED! I'll say it again: Unless we overwrite the RS&M meshes with those from No Stretching and SMIM, the mountain textures are a backslide to the unfixed vanilla meshes. This is a problem. Anyone disagree with my assessment? In all honesty, I don't see any stretching. I even looked at them in full size outside of the gallery and still could see any. I see some vertical meshes and have been flipped to horizontal meshes in the "fixed" version; however, whether vertical of horizontal they still appear to be the same quality just with a different orientation. The other changes between the two versions also don't appear to be stretching to me. Just different meshes. Perhaps it's the screens or the distance, but I honestly don't see anything that I would call stretching. I will test in my own setup to confirm or debunk. Where in the Core load order are you placing Rocking Stones?

I did and thanks for your reply. I'll post it here for everyone to see.

Clearly this mod will be approved. Only for Extended though. I will take care of the maintenance in the morning. Too...indisposed (wine...White Zinfandel & Pink Moscato) at the moment. EDIT: If we like the salmon better from the other mod, then we can add in detailed instructions to remove certain textures from this mod as we do with other mods.

From the author's page: I contacted the author for commit.

Or...we can put the load order to where No Stretching overwrites the messed up meshes in Rocking Stones (if that is possible). EDIT: Will contact the author tho.

but ... I'm pretty sure that it uses the broken vanilla source meshes. That is a deal breaker, IMO.Vanilla is just okay for me... Superior is too smoothed out in most places making it the second farthest from vanilla, IMO, and it's too light for me. BB being the farthest from vanilla. Alternative is okay too. Brown Mountains...eh. If you look at the first compare from Vanilla to Rocking Stones, you see a good bit of change in the meshes so I'm not seeing the vanilla mesh you're talking about. Rocking Stones seems to blend in the best with the rest of the environment, IMO, so it'll remain my top choice for now.

From these compares, so far Rocking Stones & Mountains is my top pick.

I'll check back when compares are completely uploaded because some scenes don't have all the covered mods yet.

Link in OP is either not correct or the mod has been pulled from Nexus.

There are only a couple things that wouldn't be considered completely pure replacements. Check out the wiki page and look at the book with images, the map and the blood on the note. (Link is in OP)

This mod is being approved. Mod page created. The question is, Core or Extended?

Okay, I was able to get a better quality upload to YouTube without their processing completely messing it up: [video=youtube] I recommend you watching in HD. Lets pick the top two mods which I can guess which two they'll be. Once those two are picked I'll do another video with just those two mods; more in-depth and better compares.

Here's the link to download the video. The quality isn't as good as the original capture for some reason and YouTube completely messed it up. So, I've provided a download from my dropbox. It's a 538MB, MPEG2 file. https://www.dropbox.com/s/nim4iqrbbfhn5kq/Water%20Mod%20Comp%202.mpg EDIT: The clips are only 6 secs each so when we narrow it down to our top two contenders, I'll do a better comparison of just those two mods with longer and side-by-side compares. EDIT2: I'm attempting a couple different encodings, including uploading directly to YouTude from Adobe Premiere. Will post the YouTube link if any are successful as maintaining the quality.

Would need texture compares.

The only work RLO has on dungeons is a very quick edit that was tossed together. It was no special customization whatsoever for dungeons at the moment. It's no where near complete and it's stated so on the Nexus page.