vfxninjaeditor

Following that exact ordering gives me these errors in MO: https://grab.by/GY4C

Correct me if I am wrong, is this right? https://grab.by/GY3e Once again, sorry. It is very late and being tired isn't helping me here.

Hey, It's been a long time since I have been on the forums. I decided to start playing again and use the new STEP. I am really unfamiliar with everything now. Haha. Could someone help me out? Somehow I have become very confused at the particular order the unmanaged archives are supposed to go in. I keep reading the instructions you wrote up but I can't wrap my brain around it. Sorry, it's stupid question but once you point it out I should be good. Here is a screen of my current order: https://grab.by/GY0y

He said it looked better that SRO+Parallax. He didn't say he was using it with SRO.

SparrowPrince, you are not odd for wanting this. I too have thought about it. A mod that adds horse/cow/goat manure would be great for aesthetics. I go hiking were I live and see horse poop all along the trail. A farm is going to have it and use it wisely (fertilizer). It would be a fantastic mod. lol.

He needs to keep the dirt because Bethesda carved out sections in the landscape specifically for the roads (it's probably not like this 100% of the time). Skyrim has the most stupid designs for roads ever. They could have simple made semi 3D road stones and placed them anywhere with out carving out specific areas in the landscape for roads.

Hey! Right back atcha! I should really frequent these forums more often. I don't have much time to mod anymore.I agree, a 4K texture on an object that is to small to see the detail would be wasteful. I was generally speaking about large objects and landscape related meshes. There are a lot of those in Skyrim, enough that would cripple any 4GB card right now.

That's what I was just thinking. I don't think there is such a cap.

I think you have your definition of triangles mixed up. Video game poly count = triangles. Every mesh in Skyrim is made up of triangles. Read this: https://wccftech.com/ryse-polygon-count-comparision-aaa-titles-crysis-star-citizen/"Our games are made of Triangles and a Triangle also happens to be the smallest Polygon."

A bunch of 4K textures won't hurt your performance at all, if you have the VRAM to handle them. In the future when 8GB GPU's are readily available we could easily play Skyrim with all 4K textures no problem. That's what people don't understand, which is kinda funny. Running out of VRAM in a scene is what causes the performance drop, not using the 4K textures explicitly. So, that's why the STEP project advocates nothing over 1K for wilderness scenes. I can easily do 2K textures for wilderness scenes. I also use 4K rocks. My VRAM never gets higher than 4GB (which is my limit). EDIT: May I also make a note on poly count: Skyrim is unique in that the higher the triangle count, the slower the game gets. I know other game probably have this issue, but in next gen gaming this is not a problem. I am working with Druid Gameworks and we have an upwards limit of 35,000 triangles for certain objects. That's the low end for many next gen games. Killzone: ShadowFall used 40,000 on there npcs on PS4 for instance. Skyrim just has the worst engine ever, and it's not optimized for things like this.

I just updated the comparison images. Whatever was going on in the original images was some weird lighting issue (probably ENB). I honestly didn't edit them that way. lol.

It is doing the same thing is vanilla. It's lighting, that's all. The right side is correct. I doubt that is a seam on the rock texture. That texture is fully seamless. It's probably mesh placement issue where the two stone wall meshes are pushed to close together. Why do we care though?

Comparison: Vanilla Original Green Original Vanilla Color Scheme 2014 EDITION Something to note. I noticed how awful the vanilla ivy mesh is. Most of it is flat except for a few exceptions where one or two leaves lift off the surface. This looks really bad with a ton of leaves like in my first iteration of the mod. That why I had so many users complain about depth looking worse than vanilla. While true, vanilla fakes that depth by having baked shadows in the texture. The only reason they do this is because it also has the same pitfall my original version had. To many leaves for the 2D mesh. I don't do baked lighting. I avoid it at all costs. Bad habit to fall into. My new version has a lot of leaves still, but I opened up more holes in the texture allowing details such as the actual vines to show through. It helps make it look less flat. Plus, if you are using ENB, shadows and AO make depth look even better. All that aside, I think it looks good.

oh, yes. Never said the color couldn't be altered easily. ;) I just don't want to do any more work, if you get my drift. lol. 10 hours is too long and that was just the masking. I assure you, with ENB off, the texture doesn't look much different. It's also sharp. I am going to say it's the normal map that is giving it a softer appearance. I wanted the leaves to have a bigger fall off in the large detail. Since the ivy meshes are flat 2D you need something to give the textures a slightly more 3D look. The normal map does that. If I did my regular method for normals (ground and rock method) the texture would me much sharper because the normal would be making all the small details in the ivy (leaf veins) harsher. Kinda unrealistic if you ask me. (Take a look at the full res image. You can see the normal map detail in the morning light. The highlights it's creating on the vine and ivy. Hopefully this will let you see what I was trying to do) Comparison coming btw.

Hey guys! I have updated! Complete overhaul. Like I said in the sticky, this is based off real photographs I took. The first version was as well, but I was basically pasting one ivy leaf over and over with different shades of green. This one uses an entire ivy branch (actually 3 of them. I used various pieces). It took me about 10 hours of tedious work masking all the pieces out...it was nuts. Masking small details like that hurts your eyes. Anyways, I made sure to remember feedback. This has much more detail to it. The normal map is way better. I am hoping you all approve. Even if you don't, there isn't much else I can do seeing as it's based off a real ivy plant. p.s. Please don't mention anything about coloring. ;) lol. I know it's not vanilla color. It doesn't necessarily have to be. It's the color of the ivy in my yard. Slightly dead/yellowish because we just got out of winter, which really should be the same with the ivy in Skyrim because of how cold it is.