Skyrim 2020 Parallax (by Pfuscher)

[Cantus]

Skyrim 2020 is a sprawling mass of meshes and textures, still under rapid evolution, but it makes for a very high-quality base layer that makes many other landscape, city, and clutter mods redundant.

Skyrim 2020 Parallax by Pfuscher at Skyrim Special Edition Nexus - Mods and Community (nexusmods.com)

It definitely keeps to a vanilla-plus aesthetic but in a photo-realistic way.

On the down side, it takes up a lot of disk space, and depending on whether you load the 2k, 4k, or 8k version, can be a resource hog. (I'm closer to "minimum" than "recommended" specs relative to the guide, so I'll probably downgrade to the 4k).

I'm troubleshooting my first pass through the Step guide but wasn't willing to do without 2020. So far they seem to be playing well enough together but it's a lot of surface area to look at.

The areas where I tend to run into conflicts that aren't automatically solved by default load order is some city replacers and JK's Skyrim.

I would recommend testing 2020 as a potential base layer for the next version of the guide, but with the assumption that it will be a time consuming process.

[TechAngel85]

Unfortunately, parallax is not supported natively by the game; therefore, Step will never include anything that is parallaxed. Supporting it requires breaking actual features of the game.

Anything to do with parallax will be beyond the scope of our Mandates.

[ButchDiavolo]

12 hours ago, Cantus said:

Skyrim 2020 is a sprawling mass of meshes and textures, still under rapid evolution, but it makes for a very high-quality base layer that makes many other landscape, city, and clutter mods redundant.

Skyrim 2020 Parallax by Pfuscher at Skyrim Special Edition Nexus - Mods and Community (nexusmods.com)

It definitely keeps to a vanilla-plus aesthetic but in a photo-realistic way.

On the down side, it takes up a lot of disk space, and depending on whether you load the 2k, 4k, or 8k version, can be a resource hog. (I'm closer to "minimum" than "recommended" specs relative to the guide, so I'll probably downgrade to the 4k).

I'm troubleshooting my first pass through the Step guide but wasn't willing to do without 2020. So far they seem to be playing well enough together but it's a lot of surface area to look at.

The areas where I tend to run into conflicts that aren't automatically solved by default load order is some city replacers and JK's Skyrim.

I would recommend testing 2020 as a potential base layer for the next version of the guide, but with the assumption that it will be a time consuming process.

Since parallax isn't a part of the STEP Mandates, using it is a personal choice. So you should only add it AFTER you made sure the STEP setup as intended works without problems.

Having said that, I recently decided to try-out parallax textures and meshes in my current playthrough. Or attempted playthrough, since I keep adding things. In my experience Skyrim 2020 by Pfuscher does NOT provide parallax to all meshes/ textures. So you will find a lot of missing textures (white/ grey shimmering ones). You will have to shop around to find other parallax replacers to make sure everything is covered. Or hunt down the "offending" meshes and manually remove the parallax abilities of those meshes with nifskope. So getting a useable Parallaxed Skyrim AE will take a bit of work.

Thankfully, there are a lot of parallaxed versions of major texture mods on Nexus, that are also included in STEP 2.0. You can most easily find them by clicking on the "Requirements" drop-down and looking for them in the "Mods requiring..." list.

And as always with mods adding meshes and textures, you will have to decide which mods/ look takes preference. And use TexGen/ DynDOLOD 3 to get them to work together.

Just my 2 cents on the matter.

[Cantus]

Interesting.

Yeah, Pfuscher mentions only having parallax on some of the files and not others.

I only ever got the grey shimmer effect when there was a mod conflict (ELFX + a city replacer + 2020, and usually ELFX was the problem) or the one time I accidentally updated Better Dynamic Snow. But I'm probably not setting up parallax correctly. Most of the instructions I've been able to find were confusing, contradictory, or both, and it's not really my area of expertise. 

But the textures did look pretty good with just the shader from BDS and no other tweaks, parallax  or no parallax ...

You make a good argument for full parallax not being worth the effort, at least not at my limited level of graphics enthusiasm.

[ButchDiavolo]

12 hours ago, Cantus said:

Interesting.

Yeah, Pfuscher mentions only having parallax on some of the files and not others.

I only ever got the grey shimmer effect when there was a mod conflict (ELFX + a city replacer + 2020, and usually ELFX was the problem) or the one time I accidentally updated Better Dynamic Snow. But I'm probably not setting up parallax correctly. Most of the instructions I've been able to find were confusing, contradictory, or both, and it's not really my area of expertise. 

But the textures did look pretty good with just the shader from BDS and no other tweaks, parallax  or no parallax ...

You make a good argument for full parallax not being worth the effort, at least not at my limited level of graphics enthusiasm.

Yeah, going full parallax is a bit of a chore. I am not even sure if it is completely possible yet. But the results can be amazing though. I just wanted to try it to see what the hubbub was about. And in my personal opinion it is... well, hubbub-able. But it deviates A LOT from a "normal" STEP 2.0.0 setup (it isn't vanilla+). Skyrim 2020 by Pfuscher changes a lot of textures for example.

As I said before, if you want to try out a more parallaxed setup, you will have to first follow the STEP 2.0.0 guide to get a solid base and get that working. That should be a "no-brainer" so to speak. If your base is flawed, adding parallax versions of mods won't work. Once that works, you have to make a few simple adjustments to the enbseries.ini to enable parallax. Again, without that, parallax just won't work. Only then can you start adding mods with parallax meshes and textures. As far as STEP 2.0.0 goes, there are only 3 mods in the list that have a parallax version: Assorted mesh fixes, Embers XD and Enhanced Vanilla Trees. That is all at the moment. So if you want parallax for cities etc, you will have to add other mods, like Skyrim 2020 and Skurkbro, which breaks away (completely) from the purpose of the STEP guide.

If you are interested, I can send you a list of the parallax mods I use, which gives a pretty decent (IMO) coverage of parallax in the game. Of course, the look is completely subjective. It is all a matter of personal preference. And it won't be supported by STEP. So if you run into trouble you can ask for help, but maybe people here won't be able to help. And I am by no means an expert on the matter!

Edited June 16, 2022 by ButchDiavolo