Gap between full grass and grass LOD

[spcarso]

Hello Sheson - (Big fan - thanks for everything you do.)
I have a gap between the grass around me and the grass off in the distance.

The grass in uGridsToLoad looks great

The LOD grass in FarGrids looks great

No LOD/Grass in NearGrids.

My SkyrimPrefs.ini has uGridsToLoad at 7 and uLargeRefLODGridSize at 11

My question is, should I be adjust the SkyrimPrefs ini or am I doing something odd in the generation.

In the DynDOLOD_SSE.ini I have GrassLargeReference=0
Thanks so much.

[BrotherShamus]

Apologies on not including the Dyndolod log and thank you for you reply.  I do have the grass mode set to two in the NGIO GrassControl.txt as well as when generating Dyndolod.  I also have the settings correct (the same as the link you've provided).  This thread seems like it'll have some useful information so I'll have a look here to see if I can find a solution.

 

Thanks again.

[sheson]

6 minutes ago, BrotherShamus said:

Apologies on not including the Dyndolod log and thank you for you reply.  I do have the grass mode set to two in the NGIO GrassControl.txt as well as when generating Dyndolod.  I also have the settings correct (the same as the link you've provided).  This thread seems like it'll have some useful information so I'll have a look here to see if I can find a solution.

 

Thanks again.

Use tll to check if full grass renders past the active cell (uGridsToLoad) to the edge of the uLargeReferenceGrid. 

https://dyndolod.info/How-LOD-Works, https://dyndolod.info/Help/Large-References

[BrotherShamus]

Here are two screenshots (https://imgur.com/a/zGs7LDk)... I'm not quite sure if they can help but they are 'tll' and 'not tll'.  I'm still reading through the links you've provided to hopefully get a better understanding.

Looking at this now, it seems the issue is with NGIO and not Dyndolod if I'm understanding correctly...

[sheson]

14 minutes ago, BrotherShamus said:

Here are two screenshots (https://imgur.com/a/zGs7LDk)... I'm not quite sure if they can help but they are 'tll' and 'not tll'.  I'm still reading through the links you've provided to hopefully get a better understanding.

Looking at this now, it seems the issue is with NGIO and not Dyndolod if I'm understanding correctly...

There seems to some grass beyond the active exterior cells.

It seems thin, which could be due to the mipmaps of full grass texture fading into transparency because of the creator not using alpha-to-coverage.
With LOD toggled off, use tfc to fly closer to check if the already loaded full grass meshes become more full.

Did you generate high resolution terrain LOD level 4 meshes so the grass does not disappear under coarse terrain LOD?

[BrotherShamus]

Flying to the affected area with terrain lod off and using freecam, the grass did appear fully as I got nearer to it.  However, this also happened with LODs turned on.  As far as terrain lod, I generated with Lodgen but will have to recheck my settings.  In that I'll likely have to regenerate everything... is there a particular setting I should be mindful of?  Will I have to recalculate object bounds for my grass mods?

edit: I'm not sure if this is the correct information but this is from my SSELodgen_log.txt:

[00:12] Generating terrain LOD meshes for worldspace Tamriel 
[00:12] Reading G:\DynDOLOD folder\Lodgen\xLODGen\Edit Scripts\LODGen_Terrain_Tamriel.bin
[00:20] Data from -64,-64 to 63,96
[00:20] Protect Cell Border LOD 4: True
[00:20] Specific level: No
[00:20] Max Level: 32
[00:20] Specific quad: No
[00:20] Output: G:\DynDOLOD folder\Lodgen\xLODGen\Lodgen Output\meshes\terrain\Tamriel\
[00:20] Quality LOD32: 0   Max Vertices: 30767   Optimize Unseen: 550
[00:20] Quality LOD16: 15   Max Vertices: 30767   Optimize Unseen: 0
[00:20] Quality LOD8: 10   Max Vertices: 30767   Optimize Unseen: 1000
[00:20] Quality LOD4: 5   Max Vertices: 30767   Optimize Unseen: 1000

Edited February 14 by BrotherShamus

[sheson]

9 hours ago, BrotherShamus said:

Flying to the affected area with terrain lod off and using freecam, the grass did appear fully as I got nearer to it.  However, this also happened with LODs turned on.  As far as terrain lod, I generated with Lodgen but will have to recheck my settings.  In that I'll likely have to regenerate everything... is there a particular setting I should be mindful of?  Will I have to recalculate object bounds for my grass mods?

edit: I'm not sure if this is the correct information but this is from my SSELodgen_log.txt:

[00:12] Generating terrain LOD meshes for worldspace Tamriel 
[00:12] Reading G:\DynDOLOD folder\Lodgen\xLODGen\Edit Scripts\LODGen_Terrain_Tamriel.bin
[00:20] Data from -64,-64 to 63,96
[00:20] Protect Cell Border LOD 4: True
[00:20] Specific level: No
[00:20] Max Level: 32
[00:20] Specific quad: No
[00:20] Output: G:\DynDOLOD folder\Lodgen\xLODGen\Lodgen Output\meshes\terrain\Tamriel\
[00:20] Quality LOD32: 0   Max Vertices: 30767   Optimize Unseen: 550
[00:20] Quality LOD16: 15   Max Vertices: 30767   Optimize Unseen: 0
[00:20] Quality LOD8: 10   Max Vertices: 30767   Optimize Unseen: 1000
[00:20] Quality LOD4: 5   Max Vertices: 30767   Optimize Unseen: 1000

Always upload the entire log files.

DynDOLOD or LOD being on/off does not affect how full grass renders and looks.
If you also see the full grass above the terrain LOD meshes when flying close, then it means coarse terrain LOD meshes are not hiding it. So setting a better quality of 0 for example won't likely change anything. Setting Optimize Unseen to 1000 seems like a mistake, especially for LOD level 4.

Either NGIO is not loading the full grass to edge of the uLargeRefLODGridSize because of its INI settings. In that case it might load more in a circle with a too small diameter around the player.
If the full grass just seems to constantly fade in from nothing to full the closer you get, then it might be due to the full textures having bad mipmaps that fade into transparency. To test for that, you could remove the mipmaps from the full grass texture with an image editor or command line tool like texconv.

[BrotherShamus]

My settings for Lodgen were taken from a guide... I can regenerate with my old settings (I believe taken from the STEP guide) after I sort my problem with the grass.  The only difference between my grass/LOD generation this time is that I'm using Vramr and ParallaxGen but I don't know that they would cause this (after grass cache generation but before running Texgen/Dyndolod).  I've used the Skoglendi, Origins of Forest combination several times and never had an issue.  Also, I posted my GrassControl.ini on the NGIO page and they didn't mention anything so I assume that it's as it should be so I'll look into removing the mipmaps to test it out.  

[sheson]

36 minutes ago, BrotherShamus said:

My settings for Lodgen were taken from a guide... I can regenerate with my old settings (I believe taken from the STEP guide) after I sort my problem with the grass.  The only difference between my grass/LOD generation this time is that I'm using Vramr and ParallaxGen but I don't know that they would cause this (after grass cache generation but before running Texgen/Dyndolod).  I've used the Skoglendi, Origins of Forest combination several times and never had an issue.  Also, I posted my GrassControl.ini on the NGIO page and they didn't mention anything so I assume that it's as it should be so I'll look into removing the mipmaps to test it out.  

If you use VRAMr to change textures, I'd suggest to disable the mod containing its output temporality and check if the full grass in the distance looks any different. 

You could also generate LOD with Mode 1 accordingly and set NGIOs DynDOLOD-Grass-Mode to 1 accordingly.

[BrotherShamus]

Disabling VRAMr output made no difference.  I'm a bit intimidated by removing the mipmaps from my grass mods so it seems grass-mode 1 is the only sensible option.  Thanks again for your help.