SKYRIMLE Rock Mod Technical-ish Comparison

[Guest]

Welp looks like not too many are interested, but it has certainly helped me in knowing a lot of retextures contain vanilla assets. I think this should be taken into account in the future, because scaled assets will see a quality drop, and mods like Brown Mountains, whavever you may think of it, have had more effort put into them.  Normals are not too bad, but some here look really blocky. And yeah, honestly Phry, I have never seen them look that flat on my end. The normals are quite deep as you probably saw. I'm going to have to add some darker details, which I don't really want to do. Maybe my mountaineer friend Ess could direct me somewhere for reference, so I know what details to "bake" in? 

Edited June 8, 2014 by Guest

[DoubleYou]

I've only ever been able to wholly endorse AOF Mountains. They were the only ones I came to love in-game. I have yet to really compare them to current STEP (I never tested the change). All I know is current STEP looks fine, so I haven't really bothered.

[Spock]

Parallax or do not pass start and do not collect 2000$ and a place in my list! :) 

 

My general opinion about rock textures are that most of what is said is most likely true, however they are among the textures that really do benefit from parallax vs a good normal map.

I completely agree! But since I also use PPR I need parallax maps for FixParallaxBugs=True. I guess Vivid Landscapes - Rocking Stones and Mountains Parallax is the mod of choice for that atm.

Edited June 8, 2014 by Spock

[EssArrBee]

Pannonian did a bunch of different mountains. I like most of them.

 

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/users/3086192/?

[Guest]

Yeah AOF is really nice, actually one of my faves from the comparisons. I would say that is one of the best vanilla enhancments, and seems to have been done propely at least. Anyway the purpose of this was  merly because it was intriguing to me. I have a feeling city retextures contain a lot of reused stuff, but that is a much bigger challenge  

 

Ess - I was talking about real refs. I looked at Scandinavian rocks and they seemed monotone, rough up close and perhaps had cracks here and there. I think when I apply a crevices overlay, it would be much better. Would love some advice from you as I want to do it from scratch because it just feels better. 

Edited June 8, 2014 by Guest

[DoYouEvenModBro]

New:

 

 

Vivid Landscapes - Rocking Stones and Mountains Two by Aron

 

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/54540/?

[phryxolydian]

Yeah, that's the one we used in our comparisons. 

 

Just posted some comparison screenies between that one and v5.0 of the original here.

 

Parallax or do not pass start and do not collect 2000$ and a place in my list! :) 

I didn't use parallax cause only Vivid Landscapes has parallax maps, I think, and it didn't seem fair to the other mods. Besides, Sparrow was making such a big deal out of it, I thought I'd play along. 

 

/snip. Eventually I will get around to giving the meshes there unique names and unique texture paths instead of just using the same all over. 

You gotta teach me how to do that! How can this be achieved at all? It would require a lot of cell editing, no? Plus patches for tons of mods.

[Aiyen]

It is easy enough to do (nifskope and find the texture reference and alter the paths.) .. but you are right it would be a cell edit nightmare of epic proportions. It would be something you would do for your own install and not for anything that would be released. 

 

Also the memory cost increases as well since you have to load more textures. 

 

However some clutter items already exist in several variations (small rocks etc) and there you can just link to different textures instead of using the same all over. That sort of change only requires a new set of meshes.