DROPPED Skyrim Flora Overhaul (by vurt)

[Aiyen]

Yeah but the the entire texture is still loading into memory... always wondered why the regular one was not made larger to use more canvas, hence provide more pixels for more detail.

 

As it is now then over 50% is just wasted space that still requires memory but does nothing visually.

 

And yeah vurt, your latest there are really nice looking!

[DoYouEvenModBro]

So sorry if this was clearly answered but I am still really new to all of this...

 

I know Vurt was forced to use 4k for his Regular Edition (i.e. v179e) because of his hand placed trees. His LODs were 22mb.

 

Why isn't he forced to do this anymore? The new Regular Edition v186'd LODs are only 5.33 mb, so 2k.

[z929669]

Yeah but the the entire texture is still loading into memory... always wondered why the regular one was not made larger to use more canvas, hence provide more pixels for more detail.

 

As it is now then over 50% is just wasted space that still requires memory but does nothing visually.

 

And yeah vurt, your latest there are really nice looking!

 

Is that a fact? Why not only the portion mapped to the mesh? Can't the GPU throw away the unneeded info in the same way the cookie maker discards the remaining dough?

So sorry if this was clearly answered but I am still really new to all of this...

 

I know Vurt was forced to use 4k for his Regular Edition (i.e. v179e) because of his hand placed trees. His LODs were 22mb.

 

Why isn't he forced to do this anymore? The new Regular Edition v186'd LODs are only 5.33 mb, so 2k.

He is not. He simply chose to use 2k textures this time ... it is easy to reduce textures, but one must paint new ones to increase (or do some fancy stuff to enlarge textures ... but this is not really increasing the resolution at all). He probably is just doing things the fast way until he is happy with the result ... then maybe he will do it up proper (or not, it does not really matter much IMO for LOD. 2k or even 1k is fine as long as there is the illusion of detail ... remember, you will never see a LOD up close).

[Aiyen]

afaik, and have studied up on then game engines can only determine whole textures and their mip map levels for memory assignment.

Also they can depending on design decide how many unused textures are used and load them regardless to speed up later rendering.

 

I have not read about anything that says they can just take in part of a file and then only use that, since the whole file would have to be in memory in order to access it to begin with.

 

Only things I have read about that could do that sort of thing is if you had like a 4000M(Or similar random high number) pixel image that you obviously cannot just load in at once, but have to create special routines to load in smaller chunks at a time... I believe this sort of method was used from a massive panorama in London some time back. But again have not read anything that indicate that this sort of code goes into game engines for the sake of foliage.

 

But if someone with more in-depth knowhow about the inner workings of game engines can say otherwise then fine! :)

[EssArrBee]

The only time mips can be moved without the whole texture file is after decompression. GPU cores don't have the power to split them while moving the textures from static VRAM up the hierarchy. GPUs have native support for low cost decompression, but that only helps when moving from texture memory to registers. Very good performance at that level, but you are barely saving any time at all (about 5 billionths of a second, estimate). It is the reason we now longer use lossless textures, just not enough space.

[z929669]

OK, so the 4k texture does cost a lot and reducing to 2k is probably just as beneficial to performance as always, even with foliage and other 'branchy' textures; however, the quality cost of inefficiently using the texture space seems like a huge hit for no quality payoff whatsoever.

 

@Vurt

It would seem that much could be gained by reducing the Basic LOD by, say, 10-20% in PNG format and adding the new trees to the right side of the image such that it all fits efficiently on the canvas ... then converting back. Since it is a LOD, it may not be that huge a deal though, but I just hate the idea of waste

[vurt]

You mean regular? Basic doesnt have extra trees.

 

The LOD's are really problematic and buggy to work with, huge effort.. Actually i dont even know the procedure of how to re-generate them, which i would need to do if i change the LOD texture in any way (placement of trees in the LOD). Not sure i understand what you mean with converting to .png?

[z929669]

You mean regular? Basic doesnt have extra trees.

 

The LOD's are really problematic and buggy to work with, huge effort.. Actually i dont even know the procedure of how to re-generate them, which i would need to do if i change the LOD texture in any way (placement of trees in the LOD). Not sure i understand what you mean with converting to .png?

Yes, just regular I mean. The one that does not use most of the canvas.

 

I am assuming it is necessary to work with a new source image generated in PS or Gimp. Something that scales continuously, like PSP, PNG or whatever image format. Obviously, the pixel resolutions for use after conversion to DDS will be set at 1k, 2k, of 4k. Maybe it is possible to manipulate the current hi-res DDS in PS and remake the DDS and redo the UV map ... not sure if that is how LOD works or not (I mean if they use models or if they are just decals of a sort). There must be some kind of mapping of LOD texture pixels to gamespace, since I can see the results of moving one of the trees in the LOD texture.

 

Basically, go from this:

 

to this:

[vurt]

Ga-Knomboe Boy (who did the LOD generation) did the LOD atlas that large because at the time we didn't know how many trees i would do. It's not possible to UV-remap the LOD meshes, because they're already used in the .BTT LOD files. Actually you can remove all the *_lod_flat.nif files from trees/meshes, they serve no purpose at all any longer (which reminds me that i should remove them from the mod).

[z929669]

OK, I am out of my region of comfortable-partial understanding and into the realm of befuddled misunderstanding, but I assume that this means that we are discussing the the inner workings of a LOD generator ...?

 

Come to think of it, why do we have TESlod for Oblivion and not for Skyrim?

[phazer11]

OK, I am out of my region of comfortable-partial understanding and into the realm of befuddled misunderstanding, but I assume that this means that we are discussing the the inner workings of a LOD generator ...?

 

Come to think of it, why do we have TESlod for Oblivion and not for Skyrim?

 

Or where do those two hooligans stand with Refscope for Skyrim (if anywhere).

[vurt]

Yes, that would mean the LOD generator.

 

Working on a ENB for SFO:

 

https://piclair.com/data/ksy9q.jpg

https://piclair.com/data/q211n.jpg

https://piclair.com/data/aaspw.jpg

https://piclair.com/data/51pxz.jpg

https://piclair.com/data/isqva.jpg

https://piclair.com/data/djo3d.jpg

https://piclair.com/data/rap0o.jpg

https://piclair.com/data/wjrsl.jpg

https://piclair.com/data/yjz71.jpg

https://piclair.com/data/cb04c.jpg

[vfxninjaeditor]

Vurt, lookin' good.

 

On my calibrated monitor, your ENB seems to have a pretty low contrast. Is that intended? Not that it needs to have a high contrast. It just seems to be a bit low.

[EssArrBee]

I was going to say the same thing, but I thought maybe he just really likes bloom.

[z929669]

187 Basic is the best version yet, IMO. I have some minor nits with regard to some of the pine color:

• some of the pines ar just a bit too bright green under vanilla lighting. I would darken and desaturate just a tiny bit.
• aspen LOD has brown aspen bark, which does not match the light gray of aspen bark.
• some of the LOD look a bit too "painted". I found this to be due to the alpha mask being too 'thick' or overexposed. I fixed this by thinning a bit, especially aspens. I also used noise for the alpha, which breaks up the color on the LOD tree edges, helping them blend better with various backgrounds (see my previous post on this)

Looking forward to similar changes in Regular version ;)

 

Question: there are now four LOD in the terrain/trees folder. Are these being applied at different times of day or different weathers by the plugin?