DynDOLOD 3.00 Alpha 173

[z929669]

7 hours ago, sheson said:

Normally full grass has no normal maps. Hence the grass LOD billboard generation uses the default flat normal map as substitute.
Complex grass now has a normal map texture, so the grass LOD billboard generation uses it. Since object LOD requires normal map texture, and so does grass LOD, nothing else needs to change. Since complex full grass has normal maps too now, it means the grass LOD billboard direct/ambient light settings in TexGen and/or the GrassBrightness* INI settings most likely need adjusting. If ENB uses the "standard" shader for complex grass so it behaves like everything else including object LOD, then it the light between full grass / grass LOD should now behave full trees and HD tree billboards with Billboard1. Maybe try same direct/ambient light as HD billboards and the same values RGB GrassBrightnessTop* and GrassBrightnessBottom* respectively, so the color tone is not changed. 

If there is difference between full grass and grass LOD that me and speculate on, make a screenshot directly looking at it. All the screenshot you posted shows me is that there is grass LOD in the distance and there is full grass in the front. Maybe they are supposed to be different grass. Maybe the grass LOD needs brightness adjustment. Maybe a certain full grass has no billboard. Maybe the full grass fades badly because of its mipmaps.

Obviously, determine a specific full grass model in question and check its generated billboard texture looks as expected.

------

The temp textures filenames TexGen adds to the billboards txt seem to be wrong, since they are unlikely to be the texture filename(s) defined in the ferngrass01a.nif.
So ignore the message about the textures for now until next version.

 

Thanks for the detailed explanation. I understand now what to expect and will play around with brightness settings.

Also glad to have found the texture path issue fort split textures is not affecting the visual outcome. I will ignore this as I proceed.

[z929669]

15 hours ago, sheson said:

Normally full grass has no normal maps. Hence the grass LOD billboard generation uses the default flat normal map as substitute.
Complex grass now has a normal map texture, so the grass LOD billboard generation uses it. Since object LOD requires normal map texture, and so does grass LOD, nothing else needs to change. Since complex full grass has normal maps too now, it means the grass LOD billboard direct/ambient light settings in TexGen and/or the GrassBrightness* INI settings most likely need adjusting. If ENB uses the "standard" shader for complex grass so it behaves like everything else including object LOD, then it the light between full grass / grass LOD should now behave full trees and HD tree billboards with Billboard1. Maybe try same direct/ambient light as HD billboards and the same values RGB GrassBrightnessTop* and GrassBrightnessBottom* respectively, so the color tone is not changed. 

If there is difference between full grass and grass LOD that me and speculate on, make a screenshot directly looking at it. All the screenshot you posted shows me is that there is grass LOD in the distance and there is full grass in the front. Maybe they are supposed to be different grass. Maybe the grass LOD needs brightness adjustment. Maybe a certain full grass has no billboard. Maybe the full grass fades badly because of its mipmaps.

Obviously, determine a specific full grass model in question and check its generated billboard texture looks as expected.

Following up on this ...

I generated TexGen/DynDOLOD again using HD Trees direct/ambient defaults for grass and raised my DynDOLOD grass top/bottom RGB values by 0.05. As you can see, whatever ENB is doing to make use of the complex grass normal maps in post processing isn't happening likewise with LOD grass. I do think the grass normals make a slight difference for LOD, ENB doesn't make use of it. The panorama shot looks decent, but you can tell by the other shots that color is still off, and LOD is arguably too bright now. I prefer the TexGen defaults for grass and our custom values for DynDOLOD top/bottom (as shown in the second row from my original run). I have included several angles to show the effect of sun position (9:30 AM and sun is just to ESE of Whiterun):

ENB requires specific pixel values in the lower-left corner of the texture and in the alpha channel to flag ENB for these effects (link to guide):

[DoubleYou]

1 hour ago, z929669 said:

Following up on this ...

I generated TexGen/DynDOLOD again using HD Trees direct/ambient defaults for grass and raised my DynDOLOD grass top/bottom RGB values by 0.05. As you can see, whatever ENB is doing to make use of the complex grass normal maps in post processing isn't happening likewise with LOD grass. I do think the grass normals make a slight difference for LOD, ENB doesn't make use of it. The panorama shot looks decent, but you can tell by the other shots that color is still off, and LOD is arguably too bright now. I prefer the TexGen defaults for grass and our custom values for DynDOLOD top/bottom (as shown in the second row from my original run). I have included several angles to show the effect of sun position (9:30 AM and sun is just to ESE of Whiterun):

ENB requires specific pixel values in the lower-left corner of the texture and in the alpha channel to flag ENB for these effects (link to guide):

It would appear that the grass LOD is either too dark or too bright dependent upon the angle from your shots. I'm not sure if this could or couldn't be mitigated somewhat by adjusting TexGen settings. It looks like you should set Ambient lower and Direct higher.

[Mirari]

19 hours ago, sheson said:

https://dyndolod.info/Mods/Useful-3rd-Party-Mods
HD LODs Textures SE - install the DynDOLOD version. Overwrite any textures from DynDOLOD Resources SE but not the textures generated by TexGen. Adjust Max tile size on advanced options to match the downloaded resolution or use it to shrink higher resolution back down to lower resolution automatically while the atlas is created. Do not install / remove any tree LOD billboards. Use TexGen to generate all desired billboards.

As already explained, "DynDOLOD.exe uses the billboards it finds in the load order." That means, Billboards that are not in the load order can not be used. Without a LOD asset (and no rule that says to use the full model) something does not / can not have LOD representation.

As already stated: "From the TexGen log we can see it didn't generate that billboard." That means, TexGen will continue to not generate those billboards. See https://dyndolod.info/Help/TexGen-Configuration#Tree-Grass-LOD-Billboards to learn how TexGen uses the object bounds to determine for which trees it automatically generate billboards.

Thanks for the help. I'll do some reading to better understand the details of how DynDOLOD operates.

[sheson]

8 hours ago, z929669 said:

Following up on this ...

I generated TexGen/DynDOLOD again using HD Trees direct/ambient defaults for grass and raised my DynDOLOD grass top/bottom RGB values by 0.05. As you can see, whatever ENB is doing to make use of the complex grass normal maps in post processing isn't happening likewise with LOD grass. I do think the grass normals make a slight difference for LOD, ENB doesn't make use of it. The panorama shot looks decent, but you can tell by the other shots that color is still off, and LOD is arguably too bright now. I prefer the TexGen defaults for grass and our custom values for DynDOLOD top/bottom (as shown in the second row from my original run). I have included several angles to show the effect of sun position (9:30 AM and sun is just to ESE of Whiterun):

ENB requires specific pixel values in the lower-left corner of the texture and in the alpha channel to flag ENB for these effects (link to guide):

I can see there is a brightness difference and that there are full grasses without billboard representation.

Object LOD uses the default shader which uses diffuse and normal map textures, together with normal, tangents and bitangents vectors.
Whatever ENB is doing, you need to try to match the result. At the moment you can control the billboard texture and the  GrassBrightness* INI settings.

I suggest to set the all RGB values to the same value of 0.6 as a base and then adjust the overall brightness of the grass billboard texture in TexGen until it matches in brightness. Then fine tune with the INI settings.

If there is a mod that has complex grass textures for all vanilla grasses, let me know.

[z929669]

7 hours ago, DoubleYou said:

It would appear that the grass LOD is either too dark or too bright dependent upon the angle from your shots. I'm not sure if this could or couldn't be mitigated somewhat by adjusting TexGen settings. It looks like you should set Ambient lower and Direct higher.

 

1 hour ago, sheson said:

I can see there is a brightness difference and that there are full grasses without billboard representation.

Object LOD uses the default shader which uses diffuse and normal map textures, together with normal, tangents and bitangents vectors.
Whatever ENB is doing, you need to try to match the result. At the moment you can control the billboard texture and the  GrassBrightness* INI settings.

I suggest to set the all RGB values to the same value of 0.6 as a base and then adjust the overall brightness of the grass billboard texture in TexGen until it matches in brightness. Then fine tune with the INI settings.

If there is a mod that has complex grass textures for all vanilla grasses, let me know.

I'm not seeing any obvious missing grass billboards. I am using only 50% LOD grass, BTW, so that may make it look like there are some missing billboards. Maybe I should use 100% for testing though. These grass LOD are also based on GID CL grasses generated under 1.5.97.

It looks like the TexGen lighting is key. I had to carefully set top/bottom in the TexGen preview slider to maximize contrast. These settings seem to work well in terms of TexGen brightness and contrast. They yield the max contrast within the diffuse, but the normals are identical regardless of settings (which is the main limitation of LOD grasses I think). I know this because I can regen the grass Textures with TexGen using various settings in about 30 seconds and can watch the tumbnails change in Explorer. Normals don't change at all, regardless (which makes sense, since there are no recognized grass normals that TexGen can alter it seems):

Default TexGen grass settings

Tweaked settings that have worked best so far

GrassBillboards=1
GrassBillboardsDirect=300
GrassBillboardsDirectLR=4
GrassBillboardsDirectFB=4
GrassBillboardsDirectTB=-4
GrassBillboardsAmbient=15

Just need to mess with the tint a bit in the DynDOLOD INI settings. These shots are getting there with the following (will increase top in 0.100 increments in next run(s)):

; grass LOD brightness multipliers
GrassBrightnessTopR=0.375
GrassBrightnessTopG=0.395
GrassBrightnessTopB=0.380
; make bottom darker to fake shadowing
GrassBrightnessBottomR=0.120
GrassBrightnessBottomG=0.125
GrassBrightnessBottomB=0.130

ENB on  >>  ENB off

 

I haven't found any complex grass vanilla replacers. I might just do that if you or someone else doesn't beat me to it.

[z929669]

See my edits to previous

[sheson]

7 hours ago, z929669 said:

 

I'm not seeing any obvious missing grass billboards. I am using only 50% LOD grass, BTW, so that may make it look like there are some missing billboards. Maybe I should use 100% for testing though. These grass LOD are also based on GID CL grasses generated under 1.5.97.

It looks like the TexGen lighting is key. I had to carefully set top/bottom in the TexGen preview slider to maximize contrast. These settings seem to work well in terms of TexGen brightness and contrast. They yield the max contrast within the diffuse, but the normals are identical regardless of settings (which is the main limitation of LOD grasses I think). I know this because I can regen the grass Textures with TexGen using various settings in about 30 seconds and can watch the tumbnails change in Explorer. Normals don't change at all, regardless (which makes sense, since there are no recognized grass normals that TexGen can alter it seems):

Default TexGen grass settings

Tweaked settings that have worked best so far

GrassBillboards=1
GrassBillboardsDirect=300
GrassBillboardsDirectLR=4
GrassBillboardsDirectFB=4
GrassBillboardsDirectTB=-4
GrassBillboardsAmbient=15

Just need to mess with the tint a bit in the DynDOLOD INI settings. These shots are getting there with the following (will increase top in 0.100 increments in next run(s)):

; grass LOD brightness multipliers
GrassBrightnessTopR=0.375
GrassBrightnessTopG=0.395
GrassBrightnessTopB=0.380
; make bottom darker to fake shadowing
GrassBrightnessBottomR=0.120
GrassBrightnessBottomG=0.125
GrassBrightnessBottomB=0.130

ENB on  >>  ENB off

 

I haven't found any complex grass vanilla replacers. I might just do that if you or someone else doesn't beat me to it.

GrassBillboardsDirect[LR|FB|TB] control the sun position for the direct light.

Typically, the direct sun light influence should be minimal on diffuse textures if there are also normal maps. It is none for stitched and rendered object LOD textures, since they are used on actual 3D models. Billboards benefit a bit from minimal highlighting via direct light. Typically the "highlights" should mostly come from the normal map so they change based on the sun position in the game.

[MegaBastard]

I get this error on running TexGen:

Error: File not found textures\landscape\trees\erowanbranch01_n.dds. Used by Meshes\cwi\flora\hoddminir\trees\hodrowantreegkb03wflowers.nif CollegeOfWinterholdImmersive.esp CWIHodRowan [TREE:4428E5EB]

I'm not sure how to get the missing texture. I saw on an older post that there was an issue with Skyrim.ini archive not including the Skyrim - Textures.bsa, but my ini includes several .bsa named Skyrim - TexturesX.bsa with X between 0 and 7.

 

[sheson]

2 hours ago, MegaBastard said:

I get this error on running TexGen:

Error: File not found textures\landscape\trees\erowanbranch01_n.dds. Used by Meshes\cwi\flora\hoddminir\trees\hodrowantreegkb03wflowers.nif CollegeOfWinterholdImmersive.esp CWIHodRowan [TREE:4428E5EB]

I'm not sure how to get the missing texture. I saw on an older post that there was an issue with Skyrim.ini archive not including the Skyrim - Textures.bsa, but my ini includes several .bsa named Skyrim - TexturesX.bsa with X between 0 and 7.

 

I moved the post to the DynDOLOD 3 Alpha thread. See the first post.

See https://dyndolod.info/Messages/File-Not-Found-Textures

The log line tells you which texture is missing, which model is using it and which base record defined by which plugin is using that model.

None of the that is part of vanilla Skyrim. Typically the texture should ship with the mod to which the plugin CollegeOfWinterholdImmersive.esp belongs to.
Maybe the mod requires another mod which contains the texture. Check its requirements and installation instructions. Check its bug report, comment section, forum etc. for similar reports/questions.

Maybe the the base record xx28E5EB in CollegeOfWinterholdImmersive.esp is not used by any references. In that case the missing texture is irrelevant. You can check that by loading the plugin in xEdit, bring up the base record in the right window and check the Referenced By tab at the bottom. If it is not there, then the base record is not used (or you didn't let xEdit build the reference info.

[Perdurabo]

Hi

First of all to @MegaBastard the problem you described above is apperantly caused by missing normal maps in the assets used from Hoddminir Plants and Trees. Installing this fix cleared that error up for me:

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/53526

I do hope however that a kind soul can help with my problem as well J

It seems that DynDOLOD aborts the generation of LODs from worlds.
I’ve runned the process several times and Tamriel is always aborted and it varies if Solstheim or Sovengarde is aborted or if they are both completed successfully.
I cannot understand the error message in the log file and hope that someone can point me in the right direction.
I've pasted the log here: https://paste.ee/p/nvYmC
The exact error message is different from each run but usually it something about exception errors  
"Error processing Cylinder001 RemoveUnused REUV REUVFace1 Geometry 1 REUVFace2 RemoveUnused RemoveUnused System.ArgumentOutOfRangeException"

[sheson]

9 hours ago, Perdurabo said:

Hi

 

First of all to @MegaBastard the problem you described above is apperantly caused by missing normal maps in the assets used from Hoddminir Plants and Trees. Installing this fix cleared that error up for me:

 

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/53526

 

I do hope however that a kind soul can help with my problem as well J

It seems that DynDOLOD aborts the generation of LODs from worlds.
I’ve runned the process several times and Tamriel is always aborted and it varies if Solstheim or Sovengarde is aborted or if they are both completed successfully.
I cannot understand the error message in the log file and hope that someone can point me in the right direction.
I've pasted the log here: https://paste.ee/p/nvYmC
The exact error message is different from each run but usually it something about exception errors  
"Error processing Cylinder001 RemoveUnused REUV REUVFace1 Geometry 1 REUVFace2 RemoveUnused RemoveUnused System.ArgumentOutOfRangeException"

See the first post what log and debug log log from DynDOLOD to upload.

Set Verbose=1 in ..\DynDOLOD\Edit Scripts\DynDOLOD\DynDOLOD_SSE.ini so LODGen prints more information to its log. Upload that. If there are different error message in the LODGen log, upload the different logs with different error messages as well.

[Perdurabo]

3 hours ago, sheson said:

See the first post what log and debug log log from DynDOLOD to upload.

Set Verbose=1 in ..\DynDOLOD\Edit Scripts\DynDOLOD\DynDOLOD_SSE.ini so LODGen prints more information to its log. Upload that. If there are different error message in the LODGen log, upload the different logs with different error messages as well.

Ok, here are mye logs
DynDOLOD_SSE_Debug_log (truncated)
DynDOLOD_SSE_log (truncated)
LODGen_SSE_Tamriel_log (full log)

[sheson]

38 minutes ago, Perdurabo said:

Ok, here are mye logs
DynDOLOD_SSE_Debug_log (truncated)
DynDOLOD_SSE_log (truncated)
LODGen_SSE_Tamriel_log (full log)

Upload the entire debug log. Only truncate the normal log to the entire last session.

Also upload entire ..\DynDOLOD\Logs\DynDOLOD_SSE_Tree_Report.txt

What Windows version are you using?

[Perdurabo]

1 hour ago, sheson said:

Upload the entire debug log. Only truncate the normal log to the entire last session.

Also upload entire ..\DynDOLOD\Logs\DynDOLOD_SSE_Tree_Report.txt

What Windows version are you using?

I am sorry, I guess I did not read it good enough.
The entire debug log file is uploaded here: https://ufile.io/e4ucbmjk (its quite large, about 150 mb).
I am uncertain what is meant by the "entire last meaningful generation" so I've included the full log for DynDOLOD_SSE as well: https://ufile.io/2yyo7s8h
And the LODGen_SSE_Tamriel_log as well

I use WIndows 11

Edited May 26, 2022 by Perdurabo