DROPPED Obsidian Mountain Fogs (by DrMegaloblast)

[z929669]

12 hours ago, TechAngel85 said:

I've been thinking the same thing. It was in Lighting, which was wrong so I tossed in in Models & Textures.

It's not a Fix. If I sort it objectively, it ends up down in Immersion.

Immersion seems reasonable, especially if the flowchart got you there. OP tags updated

[DoubleYou]

After playing with this awhile, I've found that at times this mod just simply looks off.

 

 

[z929669]

55 minutes ago, DoubleYou said:

After playing with this awhile, I've found that at times this mod just simply looks off.

It's definitely ENB throwing things off, and it's not finished for those weathers. Maybe try with 81a at night. Also, are you running Picta? You mentioned Improved Clouds, but it's Picta that interacts with Obsidian.

[DoubleYou]

24 minutes ago, z929669 said:

It's definitely ENB throwing things off, and it's not finished for those weathers. Maybe try with 81a at night. Also, are you running Picta? You mentioned Improved Clouds, but it's Picta that interacts with Obsidian.

Couldn't remember the name when I was recording. Don't have Picta in atm. But, I would argue that even without ENB it stands out badly. ENB exacerbates the issue.

Unfortunately, Youtube compresses the crap out of it until you can't really see it anymore, even at 2k.

[TechAngel85]

On 11/15/2021 at 9:18 PM, DoubleYou said:

Couldn't remember the name when I was recording. Don't have Picta in atm. But, I would argue that even without ENB it stands out badly. ENB exacerbates the issue.

Unfortunately, Youtube compresses the crap out of it until you can't really see it anymore, even at 2k.

Z is correct. If you're going to use the ENB for anything, only use it on weathers that are complete. Else, it will look bad for many things. In fact, for most testing you really should just Shift+F12 to turn it off. The ENB should be shaped around a complete Guide up to it's section, not the Guide around it.  But if you're going to use it, right now Clear Groups 1, 2 and Special should be done baring any issues found. For these weathers, these fogs  should be handled properly with ENB. They are set to be lighter and less dense during the day (sun, evaporation, ya'know...nature) and then back to fuller density at night. They are completely adjustable via the [Volumetic Fog] parameters. They can be blown out during sunrise/set so that is something to be watchful of.

With that said, you are just echoing my original comments about this mod. The color and lack of or too much lighting influence (mesh) causes them to stand out more than vanilla. Granted this mod is simply adjusting the size so all these issues exist in the vanilla files, but making them larger is causing those issues to stand out. Some or all of this is probably fixable with adjustments to the meshes. ENB can hide the issues well enough.

[z929669]

ENB definitely can make mods like this look bad. I have noticed many issues with this mod in testing myself in just daylight, but they pretty much go away once I switch to clear weather. That said, there still may be some tweaks needed  for the volumetric fog params even in clear weathers. This may be why the tundra was so foggy in those screens I posted with Picta. Maybe hiding that one mesh isn't necessary. I never looked at turning ENB off in that shot or tweaking the volumetric fog ENB params.

EDIT: Well, just tested and the tundra fog issue is not exacerbated in clear weather by ENB. I messed with all of the volumentric fog params, and they had little to no impact, and turning off ENB made the tundra fog much worse. It's definitely the interaction with that mesh from Picta with this mod. I think we'll need to keep Picta and this mod in mind if we notice any other fog issues. It may be worth disabling this mod to more fairly evaluate Picta. It may end up that this mod is too problematic, IDK.

[TechAngel85]

1 hour ago, z929669 said:

EDIT: Well, just tested and the tundra fog issue is not exacerbated in clear weather by ENB. I messed with all of the volumentric fog params, and they had little to no impact, and turning off ENB made the tundra fog much worse. It's definitely the interaction with that mesh from Picta with this mod. I think we'll need to keep Picta and this mod in mind if we notice any other fog issues. It may be worth disabling this mod to more fairly evaluate Picta. It may end up that this mod is too problematic, IDK.

That's what I would have expected. Only hiding it completely with the ENB would fix what Picta is doing, but that would defeat the purpose of having the mod.

If I had to guess, Picta is using this as a cheap "volumetric fog", possibly for effect or possibly to hide any distant issues...who knows, but that is my guess. There are better solutions for this, like Volumetric Mists, which is similar to the fogs in Vivid Weathers (below) that we use for LE:

(pic is from SE)

These mods are designed to hide the edge of the world and other issues like distant z-fighting and lack of LOD (those not using DynDOLOD) by just covering it up with cloud/fog. Cathedral Weathers found another way to do it but without all the near-distance clouds/fogs/mists. It's still using fog and clouds, but out at the horizon.

[z929669]

11 minutes ago, TechAngel85 said:

That's what I would have expected. Only hiding it completely with the ENB would fix what Picta is doing, but that would defeat the purpose of having the mod.

If I had to guess, Picta is using this as a cheap "volumetric fog", possibly for effect or possibly to hide any distant issues...who knows, but that is my guess. There are better solutions for this, like Volumetric Mists, which is similar to the fogs in Vivid Weathers (below) that we use for LE:

(pic is from SE)

So are you saying this mod is an alternative to Picta or Obsidian? Or do you think we should stick with those with the Picta mesh hidden?

[TechAngel85]

4 minutes ago, z929669 said:

So are you saying this mod is an alternative to Picta or Obsidian? Or do you think we should stick with those with the Picta mesh hidden?

No, not really. If you look at the shots it provides more of mists in the valley and some in the air (see CW compare). It would say pic either Obsidian or Volumetric Mist, not both. Else we can run our own flavor of Obsidian via the Patch because all it's doing is resizing the vanilla objects that are already there. Our flavor would be smaller...could do both, if the mountain fogs are smaller.

If I find some time I could peak at the meshes.

[Mousetick]

Obsidian Mountain Fogs Tweaked

Quote

• In order to prevent DynDOLOD from throwing large reference errors, the ESP has been flagged as ESM, and had a problematic record (a new added sky static with the wrong Z coordinates) removed.
• Obsidian Mountain Fogs primarily works by significantly increasing the scale of placed vanilla sky statics. I have reduced the scaled of these edited records optionally by 10% and 20%, reducing them to be overall more subtle, but still a great improvement over vanilla. The reduced size versions are still larger and more noticeable than in vanilla.
• The plugin has also been compressed and flagged as an ESL so it doesn't occupy ESP space in your load order, thanks to Kulharin.
• I also cleaned the mod of the one ITM record it had.

I haven't tried it or even looked at it yet, but might be a good option for STEP.

[TechAngel85]

36 minutes ago, Mousetick said:

Obsidian Mountain Fogs Tweaked

I haven't tried it or even looked at it yet, but might be a good option for STEP.

Sounds like what we've been wanting. I didn't know the perms were open or I would have done something similar a long time ago.

I've been thinking of making my own from scratch using cleaned vanilla textures, but there's not much need for it now with this out.

[z929669]

Droppedfor 2.1.0  in favor of Obsidian Mountain Fogs Tweaked