xLODGen - Terrain LOD beta 130 for FNV, FO3, FO4, FO4VR, TES5, SSE, TES5VR, ENDERAL, ENDERALSE

[HunterZ]

So the vanilla world map has visible snow on some of the mountains, and xLODGen's generated world map does not. I don't care if it's accurate or not - vanilla looks subjectively better to me. My understanding is that this is because Bethesda pulled some kind of trick when generating the vanilla LOD32 textures, to make up for the fact that dynamic snow is not applied on the world map?

 

Has anyone replicated the vanilla trickery? If it involves brightening snow textures prior to LOD32 generation, does anyone have a decent set of textures available?

 

It also looks like maybe the entire vanilla world map is brighter, so maybe I'll try cranking the gamma way up on LOD32 and see what happens.

 

Vanilla world map (note snow on mountain):

 

xLODGen world map (note lack of snow on mountain):

 

xLODGen in-game (note snow on mountain):

Edited August 28, 2020 by HunterZ

[sheson]

  On 8/28/2020 at 7:13 AM, HunterZ said:

So the vanilla world map has visible snow on some of the mountains, and xLODGen's generated world map does not. I don't care if it's accurate or not - vanilla looks subjectively better to me. My understanding is that this is because Bethesda pulled some kind of trick when generating the vanilla LOD32 textures, to make up for the fact that dynamic snow is not applied on the world map?

 

Has anyone replicated the vanilla trickery? If it involves brightening snow textures prior to LOD32 generation, does anyone have a decent set of textures available?

 

It also looks like maybe the entire vanilla world map is brighter, so maybe I'll try cranking the gamma way up on LOD32 and see what happens.

 

Vanilla world map (note snow on mountain):

 

 

xLODGen world map (note lack of snow on mountain):

 

 

xLODGen in-game (note snow on mountain):

 

Just to be clear, LOD level 32 terrain textures are also used normally for the very far distant LOD in the game and not only on the map. Of course it is possible to use high settings that it is pushed beyond the max render distance of about a 100 cells.

 

Comparing vanilla tamriel.16.0.0.dds with tamriel.32.0.0.dds for example does not show any differences in brightness or snow.

 

The map view also uses the noise.dss applied to terrain LOD textures, but also has these INI settings to further mess it up.

 

fMapMenuOverlaySnowScale=0.0000

fMapMenuOverlayScale=0.0000

fMapMenuOverlayNormalSnowStrength=0.4000

fMapMenuOverlayNormalStrength=1.1000

sWorldMapOverlayNormalSnowTexture=Data\Textures\Terrain\WorldMapOverlaySnow_n.dds

sWorldMapOverlayNormalTexture=Data\Textures\Terrain\WorldMapOverlay_n.dds

 

Since there is no specific indication what is "snow" in a texture, there must be some kind of brightness threshold that determines when it uses the sWorldMapOverlayNormalSnowTexture.

 

The object LOD covered in snow uses the material object snow LOD shader. I am pretty sure the sWorldMapOverlayNormalTexture is also applied to object LOD. Though I am not sure if either map overlay texture is applied when object LOD has a snow shader. Never cared enough to check in detail.

Edited August 28, 2020 by sheson

[DoubleYou]

The default values of fMapMenuOverlayScale and fMapMenuOverlaySnowScale are very small. You can see how they adjust the snow and terrain on the map menu here: https://wiki.step-project.com/Guide:Skyrim_INI/MapMenu

[HunterZ]

These sound like starting points, not answers. Does this mean that nobody has cracked the snow thing and shared what they did? Does everyone either play with reduced snow on the world map, or use someone else's pre-generated LOD32s that might not match installed landscape mods? Yikes!

 

Is there a way to get xLODGen to only generate LOD32 textures and skip LOD4/8/16 so that I can save time playing with this?

[sheson]

  On 8/28/2020 at 4:47 PM, HunterZ said:

These sound like starting points, not answers. Does this mean that nobody has cracked the snow thing and shared what they did? Does everyone either play with reduced snow on the world map, or use someone else's pre-generated LOD32s that might not match installed landscape mods? Yikes!

 

Is there a way to get xLODGen to only generate LOD32 textures and skip LOD4/8/16 so that I can save time playing with this?

It is just darker than you are used to.

 

As mentioned in the first post:

 

I did some testing in the different games, but finding the best combinations of options and settings requires lots of testing and are a matter of personal opinion and which game is used, the load order, mods, even different worldspaces probably.

That means, I am only able to give generic guidelines and hints to sent you off to find and test for yourself and share your results. My main interested is that generations works correctly and without problems for now.

 

There are no single "correct" settings that apply for all games, load orders and personal preferences. Lots of people use the map textures with roads painted onto them, which replace vanilla/generated LOD textures anyways.

 

The last section in the Terrain-LOD-Readme.txt explains how to use Specific Chunk. Check it and change the drop down to LOD level 32. If you also set W to 0 and S to -32 it will only generate the texture that covers the throat of the world.

 

You can generate "wrong" LOD 32 textures only by changing the brightness/contrast/gamma for LOD level 32 only.

Edited August 28, 2020 by sheson

[HunterZ]

Regarding snow on the world map: sheson's brightness threshold theory appears to be correct!

 

I tried generating Tamriel LOD32 data with brightness=128, contrast=0, gamma=1.0, and the result is that the entire map is a snowy wasteland:

 

Repeatedly dividing the brightness by 2 each iteration and regenerating got me a closer-to-vanilla result at brightness=16, contrast=0, gamma=1.0:

 

Brightness=0, contrast=0, Gamma=2.0 looks possibly even better:

 

Finally, here is brightness=0, contrast=128, gamma=1.0, which I think may look best of all (details seem to pop, and colors look pretty similar to vanilla):

 

I was curious whether these changes might show up in-game, so I regenerated with -255 brightness for LOD4/8/16 so that everything would be black except for the nearby full-detail cells and LOD32. It was hard to tell due to mountains being primarily made up of rock objects, but LOD32 seems to only get used in-game for super-distant stuff like land beyond the borders of Skyrim. Personally I think this makes it pretty safe to optimize LOD32 settings for the world map use case and not worry about in-game effects.

 

Edit: In case anyone is interested in some of the intermediate tests, you can find more screenshots here: https://imgur.com/gallery/JPMuJAr

Edited August 29, 2020 by HunterZ

[z929669]

Way to go on the testing! (your more images link does not render anything for me for some reason ... I access that site often, so pretty sure it's the link)

 

Very interesting ... I have a feeling that contrast=64 and gamma=1.2 may look even better while keeping non-snow colorful and relatively darker still without affecting snow too much.

 

I love your idea for -255 brightness ... it's very instructive for verifying terrain position and transitions.

 

For LOD32 in game, try using console:

~cow tamriel 13 -13

That will put you at the top of the map to test.

 

Also, you may get even better results by increasing the following just a tad bit in the game INI (according to our DY's work on these settings under SLE):

fMapMenuOverlaySnowScale=0.00001

fMapMenuOverlayScale=0.00001

[HunterZ]

I edited the link to see if it would help. Tested it in a private browser window to ensure it's not a permissions thing.

 

Thanks for the tips and suggestions. I'll try them out the next time I regenerate, although it might be a bit because I've set aside xLODGen for now to work on setting up DynDOLOD.

[sheson]

For testing LOD distances in Tamriel with colorful textures, you can get Test-Terrain-Tamriel.7z from the first post.

 

[HunterZ]

  On 8/29/2020 at 1:39 AM, z929669 said:

 

Way to go on the testing! (your more images link does not render anything for me for some reason ... I access that site often, so pretty sure it's the link)

 

Very interesting ... I have a feeling that contrast=64 and gamma=1.2 may look even better while keeping non-snow colorful and relatively darker still without affecting snow too much.

 

I love your idea for -255 brightness ... it's very instructive for verifying terrain position and transitions.

 

For LOD32 in game, try using console:

~cow tamriel 13 -13

That will put you at the top of the map to test.

 

Also, you may get even better results by increasing the following just a tad bit in the game INI (according to our DY's work on these settings under SLE):

fMapMenuOverlaySnowScale=0.00001

fMapMenuOverlayScale=0.00001

Here is the world map with contrast=64, gamma=1.2. The difference seems subtle - maybe a little more color detail in this one, although this is also post-DynDOLOD. With the exception of snow application, the world map rendering seems to be pretty forgiving of tweaks to these settings:

 

And here it is with the fMapMenuOverlay(Snow)Scale=0.00001 settings. I think it looks awful. Seems to force many of the landscape and object textures to be rendered at a much lower resolution:

 

Here are a couple of in-game flyover videos as well - lots of pop-in and z-fighting, but a lot of this is because I'm at speeds and elevations that wouldn't commonly be experienced during normal gameplay:

[z929669]

RE fMapMenuOverlay(Snow)Scale=0.00001 setting: I don't see much diff from those screens, but I think I see what you mean. You may want to try running "A Quality World Map". This has a standalone option for a clear, cloud-free map that makes comparing much simpler (clouds obscure things and are not consistent, so compares are very difficult).

 

Our main page on the wiki links to our SLE/SSE INI guides, which have some good descriptions of most INI settings. Many SLE INI settings still apply to SSE. This may give you some ideas on that setting.

 

EDIT: The SLE/SSE INI guides are not the end-all/be-all, but they are the most comprehensive that I have seen, and they are maintained by the creator of BethINI.

[HunterZ]

  On 9/1/2020 at 7:29 PM, z929669 said:

RE fMapMenuOverlay(Snow)Scale=0.00001 setting: I don't see much diff from those screens, but I think I see what you mean.

The snow textures on the landscape meshes for Throat of the World, the textures on TotW's rock objects, and the land textures on the island in the middle of the lake to the right of TotW all look extremely low-fidelity to me with the tweaked setting compared to the vanilla values.

 

It's entirely possible that the tweak has a different effect if fully following STEP, but I'm not doing that.

 

  On 9/1/2020 at 7:29 PM, z929669 said:

You may want to try running "A Quality World Map". This has a standalone option for a clear, cloud-free map that makes comparing much simpler (clouds obscure things and are not consistent, so compares are very difficult).

I've come across A Quality World Map, but I'm confused as to what exactly it is/does. My impression was that it's probably just custom, tweaked pre-generated LOD32 data or something, which isn't interesting to me on its own.

 

If I end up posting more map screenshots in the future, I'll try the standalone cloud removal option.

[DoubleYou]

I don't recommend tweaking the overlay settings. If you do, you need to probably tweak the corresponding normal overlay settings as well to make them look right.

[Sqepticism]

Hello, joined here hoping someone can help me out.(for Fallout 4/Fallout4VR)

I've used it successfully before however this last time I made my own textures-I used Intel DDS plugin for Photoshop and while the textures worked in game, the LOD would not generate with them.

Would some conversion formats show up in game but not when generated with xLODGEN?

[sheson]

  On 9/7/2020 at 4:26 AM, Sqepticism said:

Hello, joined here hoping someone can help me out.(for Fallout 4/Fallout4VR)

I've used it successfully before however this last time I made my own textures-I used Intel DDS plugin for Photoshop and while the textures worked in game, the LOD would not generate with them.

Would some conversion formats show up in game but not when generated with xLODGEN?

If a texture can not be read, there should be some kind of error message in the log. TexConv can typically read all kinds of texture formats.

 

If a terrain LOD texture is not or can not be generated there should be some kind of message or error message in the log.