I'm making a grass mod and need some tips...

[eeept22]

Hello! I'm making a grass mod for Skyrim (not from scratch, just taking different grasses from different mods). I have a few questions about it. I'm working with regular grass, not complex grass.

• About “iMinGrassSize=”. Some mods propose “lush grass without hurting performance” by setting iMinGrassSize=60 (or similar values) and increasing Grass Density to 255, does this really make sense? Like, for example, would it be different if I took iMinGrassSize=20 (the default value) and set Density to, say, 70-100, would it have the same effect?
• Grass does not display correctly in NifSkope and in CK preview. Sometimes the top part is displayed, but most of the time there is nothing. Is there anything that can be done about it?
• (to the previous question) Vertex Colors. If I uncheck “vertex colors” on grass in NifSkope, it starts to display normally. Why do vertex colors have such an effect only on grass? Can I remove vertex colors from grasses, since the colors used there are mostly shades of white (i.e. the whiter the color of the vertex color, the less noticeable the effect)? 
• Some grass (both vanilla and from other mods) uses “HighFrequencyNormals.dds”, which looks like just a noise effect. What is it for if the grass doesn't support normal maps anyway(and even normal maps for complex grass are made differently)? Should I add this “HighFrequencyNormals.dds” or can I remove it from the grass?
• Some grasses are too bright with ENB on (with complex grass enabled), is there any way to fix this without making a special version for complex grass (since I don't play with ENB on all the time anyway due to pc performance, just turn it on for screenshots)? If I turn off complex grass, the grass becomes too dark (darker than if I just turn off ENB).

[DoubleYou]

• Maybe? I tried playing with this idea on my own grass mod and I honestly couldn't tell.
• Grass uses vertex colors to control wind movement, specifically the vertex alpha. Nifskope displays this as transparency.
• You need vertex colors for correct wind movement.
• I don't know anything about this texture.
• I do not believe there is any way around making separate complex grass and non-complex grass versions. I may be wrong about this though, as I am going from memory here.

[z929669]

59 minutes ago, eeept22 said:

• Some grasses are too bright with ENB on (with complex grass enabled), is there any way to fix this without making a special version for complex grass (since I don't play with ENB on all the time anyway due to pc performance, just turn it on for screenshots)? If I turn off complex grass, the grass becomes too dark (darker than if I just turn off ENB).

You don't need to worry about this. If you are not making CG-compatible grasses, then ENB users should know this and NOT enable CG in their ENB preset. I suggest your design your grass for non-ENB users. ENB can be tuned to make it look good, but most ENB users will want CG anyway.

If enabled, CG has 'basic'/'fake' settings for non-CG grass, so that's probably what you are seeing in your screens.