[WiP] Community shader PBR support

[Exist]

Hi, writing about support for the new Community Shaders PBR assets. Hopefully not much would be needed from your side. I will mention some facts I believe are causing issues with LODs. Because the PBR textures are incompatible with vanilla, we use unique paths (textures/pbr/ prefix) to avoid unintended meshes from using one of them and looking wrong. Meshes that use PBR can be distinguished by the Unused01 property in Shader Flags 2. PBR albedo is brighter than vanilla diffuse and is saved in dds with the sRGB flag, which converts it to linear on the gpu. Now the problems:

1. Some object LODs seem to be using regular textures, for example mountains. Because LODs won't use the PBR shader, using unmodified PBR textures makes it look wrong. This is our issue and I think authors can just generate lower res textures in the vanilla paths that will only be used for these LODs. I don't know how many LODs actually use regular textures but hope not many.
2. TexGen seems to ignore PBR textures. I suppose TexGen always uses vanilla paths and ignores Texture Set records, otherwise I don't know why this would happen. In this case it would be nice to take texture set paths into account, or check if a PBR path exists before vanilla one. For landscapes we could also have authors generate low res versions at vanilla paths, but it's not viable to do this for everything.
3. DynDOLOD uses PBR textures, but probably because of the sRGB flag (which converts them to linear) the LODs are too dark. This happens to tree LODs, objects such as farmhouses and nordic ruins seem good, but not sure. This would probably happen in the textures in the previous point too if they weren't ignored. From our experiments vanilla diffuse is roughly halfway between usual PBR albedo brightness in linear and sRGB. So it would be best to do something like apply power of 1/1.5 to make the brightness consistent with vanilla. Ideally it could be multiplied with ambient occlusion and adjusted based on metalness which are in another texture, but that's not needed.

Hopefully I got the reasons for why it doesn't work right, I will include some comparison screenshots and links to PBR assets so you can try it yourself. Thank you for taking the time to read this and I hope this can be supported. Oh and feel free to ping me or others on CS or Cathedral discord, I might forget to check back here for some time.

https://imgsli.com/Mjg5ODQ5
https://imgsli.com/Mjg5ODUy
https://imgsli.com/Mjg5ODU0
https://imgsli.com/Mjg5ODU1

More info about our PBR implementation: https://github.com/doodlum/skyrim-community-shaders/wiki/True-PBR

Some assets to try:

Trees - https://mega.nz/file/dqdzGLwY#jBJFwPIWv7iX314UEKZnHCRvlITLbXI7saLY-4oV6Nw

Farmhouses - https://mega.nz/file/duUxDKiA#mnzDzjBFXEIDq-MFoucOHRJT55wOmbUNHOLZ5JxG3lY

Lots of other stuff - https://onedrive.live.com/?authkey=!AB5oYH6iqIMDkHM&id=C23FB01B59FA671C!2427&cid=C23FB01B59FA671C

[sheson]

  On 4/19/2025 at 10:48 PM, izzybinbizzy said:

TexGen_SSE_Debug_log.7z 1.54 MB · 0 downloads

Apologies again long day. No crash again. 

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It is OK to do whenever you find the time. Run again with StitchThreads=4. Upload new logs.

[izzybinbizzy]

Left GLdebug on as well hope that's not an issue. 

TexGen_SSE_Debug_log.7zFetching info...

[izzybinbizzy]

I may be switching up some major mods in my load order, before i do, do you need any more testing? 

[sheson]

  On 4/20/2025 at 9:50 AM, izzybinbizzy said:

Left GLdebug on as well hope that's not an issue. 

TexGen_SSE_Debug_log.7z 1.56 MB · 1 download

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Thanks.

  On 4/20/2025 at 5:16 PM, izzybinbizzy said:

I may be switching up some major mods in my load order, before i do, do you need any more testing? 

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No, that is alright. Just use TexGen as usual, in case of problems upload new logs.

[Dmail]

Coming back here to say somehow I managed to generate the DynDOLOD Output. However it took 8 hours to generate 6.68 GB. I don't really understand why it took so long. I don't have seasons of skyrim enabled, and my settings are from here (the HD options for both TexGen and DynDOLOD). So, besides PBR Textures, the only other culprits I can think of are Complex Grass, Grass Lod, or Ultra Trees. But should it take so long with all this enabled?

Edited Monday at 12:15 AM by Dmail

[z929669]

  On 4/28/2025 at 12:14 AM, Dmail said:

Coming back here to say somehow I managed to generate the DynDOLOD Output. However it took 8 hours to generate 6.68 GB. I don't really understand why it took so long. I don't have seasons of skyrim enabled, and my settings are from here (the HD options for both TexGen and DynDOLOD). So, besides PBR Textures, the only other culprits I can think of are Complex Grass, Grass Lod, or Ultra Trees. But should it take so long with all this enabled?

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PLEASE: Post your logs. Why is that harder than speculating and making multiple posts over weeks?

Answers are just guesses without the required logs. The logs provide basic information to begin answering your question, including timestamps on each line of the log, the mods active in the LO when you ran TexGen and DynDOLOD, warnings/errors, and much more.

[sheson]

  On 4/28/2025 at 12:14 AM, Dmail said:

Coming back here to say somehow I managed to generate the DynDOLOD Output. However it took 8 hours to generate 6.68 GB. I don't really understand why it took so long. I don't have seasons of skyrim enabled, and my settings are from here (the HD options for both TexGen and DynDOLOD). So, besides PBR Textures, the only other culprits I can think of are Complex Grass, Grass Lod, or Ultra Trees. But should it take so long with all this enabled?

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Read https://dyndolod.info/Official-DynDOLOD-Support-Forum#Post-Logs which TexGen and DynDOLOD logs and debug logs to upload when making posts.

Also read https://dyndolod.info/Official-DynDOLOD-Support-Forum#Copy-and-Paste-Text

See https://dyndolod.info/Generation-Instructions#Prerequisites
In case ParallaxGen is used, run it before TexGen and DynDOLOD, as they will use information from its ParallaxGen_Diff.json file in the data folder to properly match certain LOD models. ParallaxGen output should overwrite the full models included in DynDOLOD Resources. Leave the default setting of ParallaxGen to ignore meshes in ..\LOD\.. folder. See Community-Shaders - PBR for more.

See https://dyndolod.info/Mods/Community-Shaders.

Read the answers for https://dyndolod.info/FAQ#Long-running-time-or-output-several-GB-in-file-size

[dosiAimer]

Hi, sheson.

Dyndolod threw an error when creating the first linear texture.

Here are the bugreport, DynDOLOD_SSE_log and DynDOLOD_SSE_Debug_log.

https://mega.nz/file/iE1EXJzA#gSnJe2Nv2e9I_tbqyuMrFN5VFNMUHOUYUsVKWIPkXeM

Not sure if it's related to Texgen process, so TexGen logs are below.

https://mega.nz/file/nJsTFRrQ#N_QdyhNnsfirximoNSkbqj45VG2mdqyz60zCIYBI3Q8

[sheson]

  On 4/28/2025 at 9:43 AM, dosiAimer said:

Hi, sheson.

Dyndolod threw an error when creating the first linear texture.

Here are the bugreport, DynDOLOD_SSE_log and DynDOLOD_SSE_Debug_log.

https://mega.nz/file/iE1EXJzA#gSnJe2Nv2e9I_tbqyuMrFN5VFNMUHOUYUsVKWIPkXeM

Not sure if it's related to Texgen process, so TexGen logs are below.

https://mega.nz/file/nJsTFRrQ#N_QdyhNnsfirximoNSkbqj45VG2mdqyz60zCIYBI3Q8

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Do not set CreateMod to 1 in D:\SkyrimTools\DynDOLOD\Edit Scripts\DynDOLOD\TexGen_SSE.ini when generating LOD textures.
Generate TexGen output normally, install it, then run DynDOLOD again.

[dosiAimer]

  On 4/28/2025 at 10:29 AM, sheson said:

Do not set CreateMod to 1 in D:\SkyrimTools\DynDOLOD\Edit Scripts\DynDOLOD\TexGen_SSE.ini when generating LOD textures.
Generate TexGen output normally, install it, then run DynDOLOD again.

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Thanks. It succeed and lod looks good in game.

[Dmail]

First, sorry for not posting the logs, I was exhausting my options and now I'm out of ideas. I didn't post my log earlier because I was re-running DynDOLOD with different settings to see what changed. I'll post now my most recent run, 7 hours for 4,57 GB. No Seasons, No Ultra Tree, every texture size settings halved.
And I can't upload the realtime log here because it's way larger than 4 MB. I'm trying to upload the log to Pastebin but it freezes when I try to Ctrl + C the content there. I'll return with the link if I have any luck.

DynDOLOD_SSE_log.txtFetching info... TexGen_SSE_log.txtFetching info...

[sheson]

  On 4/29/2025 at 3:05 AM, Dmail said:

First, sorry for not posting the logs, I was exhausting my options and now I'm out of ideas. I didn't post my log earlier because I was re-running DynDOLOD with different settings to see what changed. I'll post now my most recent run, 7 hours for 4,57 GB. No Seasons, No Ultra Tree, every texture size settings halved.
And I can't upload the realtime log here because it's way larger than 4 MB. I'm trying to upload the log to Pastebin but it freezes when I try to Ctrl + C the content there. I'll return with the link if I have any luck.

DynDOLOD_SSE_log.txt 2.38 MB · 1 download TexGen_SSE_log.txt 594.1 kB · 0 downloads

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Read https://dyndolod.info/Official-DynDOLOD-Support-Forum#Post-Logs how to zip and upload la\ge log files to a file service. Also read which TexGen and DynDOLOD debug log to also upload when making posts.

Do not install the game into Program Files x86 to avoid interference with UAC, anti vir etc. Especially antivir scanning every file read/written file can slow down things.

Converting all the PBR textures seems to take some time, probably because of their high resolution. You might benefit from using this test version of DynDOLOD https://mega.nz/file/0MQiUbaT#ldl240hkprEZogE9gxrjOUxYEVzpWtqloNelG7qMbQY

Fixing the deleted and duplicated references might improve the time it takes to scan Tamriel a bit.

Generate Occlusion.esp with quality 2 if it takes a long time. Or generate it only once for the load order and keep it separate. That will work if world, cell and land records in particular do not change.