ACCEPTED Superior Lore-Friendly Hair - HD textures (by skyrimaguas)

[TechAngel85]

STEP*  >>  Superior 1K**  >>  Superior 1K w/Less Saturation Optional

 

STEP*  >>  Superior 1K**  >>  Superior 1K w/Less Saturation Optional 

 

STEP* >> Superior 1K** >> Superior 1K w/Less Saturation Optional

 

*STEP is Realistic Hair and AOF Believable Hair.

**Includes less shiny hair optional.

***Realistic Hair was active in all shots.

[TechAngel85]

What do you guys/gals think? I'll open up a poll for voting. Please keep in mind the STEP Mandate when you cast your vote.

 

My review is that Superior looks great and more natural as hair should. Vanilla hair has always been too "highlighted" and bright, not to mention blocky. Superior really is superior. On the female you can see that the Less Saturated optional is closer to vanilla color and this is even more so true on the Khajiit. Without the Less Saturated Optional, the Khajiit hair is more brown than grey. The optional corrects this. (Hair on the Khajiits has always look funky, imo, because of the hair and fur textures are different.)

 

I took shots with Better Vanilla Hair meshes; however, I've decided this needs separate testing in its own thread because the mod only fixes some of the hairs; not all. I've put its thread in the Mod Testing forum with the other mods that are being tested if anyone wants to find the meshes the mod fixes and provide compares in that thread. (don't post them here)

[torminater]

Yup, Superior with less saturation optional looks definitely best.

[exploiteddna]

i completely disagree. problem with superior LF hair is that its too smooth in some areas. look at those screens and look towards the front on all of them (i.e. vertical strip of hair closest to the forehead/front of head). there are certain hairstyles too that its accentuated even worse and looks really really bad IMO. Some of the hair will be more rugged looking and then you have this one area thats all smooth and silky like they used a gallon of conditioner on it or something lol. I think its too smooth. Ill find some better screens when i have time and show you compares..its pretty awful. Some of it i think is the fault of the meshes, but until we get better meshes, i dont think we can use textures as 'fine' as this. Choppy meshes with super smooth hair.. looks dumb. At least with the rough/rugged/not-so-smooth hair it at least matches the choppy meshes and helps blend everything in. IDK its hard to explain, but hopefully someone out there knows what im saying and can back me up :)

[TechAngel85]

I understand what you are saying, but even so I think this mod is a move in the right direction. The hair in the compare with the male nord towards the front is fixed by Better Vanilla Hairs. You should check out that mod (it's up for testing) while doing your compares.

 

[phazer11]

Well I think I get what michael is saying IMO the textures are good but the meshes (even the fixed vanilla ones) aren't quite up to the task. The textures just show what a lacklustre job has been done with the meshes or bring out the worst in the meshes however you wish to put it.

[exploiteddna]

yeah that looks quite a bit better. The other thing is, let's say hypothetically that all of the meshes were fixed and everything is nice an smooth, the textures from superior LF hair still give a type of hair that is very smooth and silky. The question is whether or not that is acceptable to have on every single NPC in the game. Let me install SLFH the the BVH mod you just mentioned, and I'll find some of the hairstyles that i found particularly disgusting in the past when using SLFH and see if the improvements from BVH help.

But yeah.. that screenshot you posted does look pretty good

[TechAngel85]

Fair enough. I've been running around checking out the NPCs too and I must say that they don't look bad. I would highly suggest you active Beards and Brows when doing this. The finer texture of Beards and Brow pairs nicely with Superior LF Hair.

[exploiteddna]

i always have those 2 mods active on all of my profiles, so no problem 

[Aiyen]

All hair mods do not fit a medieval setting... this is not because of bad design of the textures etc. but simply because you are limited in how detailed you can make the hair. The vanilla meshes can only do so much. With vanilla texture resolution they do stand out like a sore thumb when EVERYTHING else about a char. is 2k resolution.

Yes they look a bit too clean! But compared to the alternative then it is a step in the right direction.

 

I also think the less saturated version removes much of this shiny hair salon look... perhaps it is just with my ENB I do not know, but I know that compared to vanilla they are superior.

 

Also they are superior to AOF hair (mainly because of the resolution), at least that is my opinion. Until the day someone makes new meshes for hair then I would say this is the best bet.

[exploiteddna]

I respectfully disagree. I think if, for whatever reason, we are stuck using vanilla mesh, we should use a texture that can better "hide" the poor quality of the mesh. Two mediocre things that blend together nicely are better than one great thing and one terrible thing that dont blend together at all. Just my opinion, of course.

 

That being said, I have used the meshes from Better Vanilla Hair and, wow, what a huge difference. I think it should be a requirement to use these meshes if you intend on using Superior LF Hair. Otherwise, I feel the best combination is AOF hair + vanilla mesh.

 

And of course we still have Realistic Hair, which covers all/most of the remaining hair textures aside from the hairlong.dds/hairlong_n.dds (which are the only two textures that are covered in the AOF hair and Superioir LF Hair mods, by the way). So, since Realistic Hair contains many textures that are simply not included in any of the other current/future/proposed hair mods, there shouldn't be any question about whether or not it should stay.

[EssArrBee]

I really don't like the less saturated version at all, it reminds me of the people that live in the desert for to long and have dried out hair. The first set of compares tech did really brings that out, and the current STEP mods were the best of that bunch, the second and third set it looked like the regular Superior were the best, but they just don't line up with the game.

[exploiteddna]

im just installed/activated the "less shiny" + "less saturated" version. we'll see how that looks (with BVH meshes, of course)

[Aiyen]

Essentially it cooks down to the meshes being really really bad. They just do not allow the detail required to make it look really great. But in general we are always going to have the issue of specularity in hair I think. If you remove specularity from the hairs then it just looks all bland and wrong. If you add just a bit too much relative to the lighting in the scene then it becomes too "hair salon" like.

 

Which is also why I normally check out hair mods without the extra lighting enabled when making new chars. Since it always makes the specularity stand out way way too much. There are really not many light sources in the game that are as intense and "up in your face" as the one in the char generation.

[TechAngel85]

Aiyen is right about the character creation menu. Running around in-game, Superior doesn't look near as bright/shiny as from in the character creation menu (which I just loaded up Race Menu in the shots I took). The optional light is turned on for the nords, but I believe I turned it off (if I remembered to do so for all shots) for the last set because it was like a spotlight and looked really bad on the little kitty. Lol!

 

Also, if Superior is accepted then I think from experience BVH will also be accepted as must for these textures. Someone with some skill just needs to create some meshes that work better (though BVH are an improvement, there's still room for even more improvement).