Gutmaw Posted February 21, 2016 Share Posted February 21, 2016 An example: by simply opening one of the dirtcliff nifs, and saving; I didn't even touch any of the expanders on the data, the dirtcliffs within the Tundra region showed the fieldgrass02 texture on top, when before they showed fieldgrass01. I have no idea how that can happen since the actual nif is set to fieldgrass02 and an esp record is what changes it to fieldgrass01; unless perhaps the flag for overriding the textures within that nif do not get set right during a save in certain circumstances. After some quick poking around, I also noticed that the specular color will change value even if you don't change it: simply by clicking on it to see the value will cause it to change. There are probably other nuances as well, but for now I am just ignoring that part: I will address meshes after I have finished everything with textures.What version of NS are u using? And was it a vanilla NIF or from a mod? I'll try to recreate it... If you're using NS 2.0, it may be a Mod Organizer/BSA thing... Link to comment
Electrocutor Posted February 21, 2016 Author Share Posted February 21, 2016 (edited) I am using v2.0, but am using it independently. The source NIF was directly extracted from vanilla. - No MO interaction- No previously altered NIF- No BSA interaction If you just want a quickly reproducible example:1. Open Road3Way01.nif2. Look at Road3Way01:0 BSLightingShaderProperty->Specular Color (#819bae)3. Double click on the color, but do not change it4. Unfocus from the color selection and notice that it is now #819bad While this is a tiny example where it only changes the Blue value by 1, it gets the point across. The Specular Color value change happens 100% of the time, while other weirdness seems to be criteria-specific that I have not yet figured out the pattern for (only certain nifs seem to go weird sometimes). Edited February 21, 2016 by Electrocutor Link to comment
Electrocutor Posted February 21, 2016 Author Share Posted February 21, 2016 (edited) This escapade through texture packs has really made me wish that their creators would come back and work on them more to fix problems. I'll give a quick generic overview of the larger packs from what I have seen so far. Realistic Overhaul- No parallax support- Several incorrect normals- Several over-sharpened diffuses causing pixelization SkyrimHD- No parallax support- Several oddly chosen diffuses that don't seem to fit environment Tribute- Many incorrectly made normals causing gross distortion- Several over-shaded normals causing irregular darkness Pfsucher- Only partial parallax support- Almost all textures don't really match their environment; you need to look at the actual diffuse picture and rename it go into the proper place.- Several textures show up as oddly pixelized- Several textures are not tile-able when they should be Noble- No parallax support- Many textures are under-saturated, giving a faded or hazy look SeriousHD- No parallax support- Several textures seem blurry as if out of focus Tamriel ReloadedHD- Many textures are pixelized: they look like low-res textures having been up-scaled and not cleaned up- Several textures seem blurry as if out of focus Vivid- Several incorrectly made normals causing gross distortion Cad25- Mostly, it's just too low-res to contend against the others, even though there are quite a few good textures. [Common to All Texture Packs]- Not a single texture pack has consistently and properly set the blue-channel in the normal map for depth; only a couple individual textures have a correct depth blue-channel normal.- All of the project parallax packs do nothing to make the texture packs actually properly show parallax: they only enable the meshes to partially allow it and drop in a few generic height maps to give a little perspective. ----Out of all the texture packs, I would say that Noble and SeriousHD are the two best-made, albeit neither support parallax. Vivid/Tribute have the best parallax implementation, but the lack of quality normals affects the outcome. ReloadedHD's included ESP allows for the most potential of texture layering, mixing, and regionalizing, but it seems to be only partially complete and the included textures leave a lot to be desired (in many cases the lower res textures from the original Reloaded are in fact higher quality). SRO is kind of all over the board: some are great, some are terrible, some are made right, some wrong; so it is hard to place. Honestly, I wish I could get the authors of all these packs to work together and help fix each other's texture packs, then release a full pack that includes multiple options for each texture.----The question then becomes how much time should I spend fixing up existing textures that were not done correctly versus just grabbing the one that looks best as-is. Allowing a texture to be parallax-compatible is very different from creating a proper parallax map. Plus, to properly use terrain parallax, you actually need to change all of the landscape meshes to change their alpha transparency from a 128 cut-off to a 192 cut-off and make sure that the diffuse alpha channel is between 128 and 255 (128 is at ground level); while also assuring that ground level is actually at 128. Since almost none of the texture packs have properly used the blue normal channel for a depth map, this becomes very tricky since I do not have a height map for the textures to start from, and can only attempt to extrapolate one from taking 4 versions of the normal red/green maps with 4 coinciding transparency maps and overlay all these together. Since many of the textures do not even have proper shading normal maps, this becomes even more unpredictable.----My current answer is to just use the textures as-is, while applying a straight 128 alpha channel to parallax-incompatible diffuse textures so that they will show up fine in-game. This will not yield the best result, but trying to fix all of these texture packs would simply take too much time. Edited February 21, 2016 by Electrocutor Link to comment
Electrocutor Posted February 22, 2016 Author Share Posted February 22, 2016 (edited) Favorites Update:*Currently requires FixParallaxTerrain=false [General]Dirt01 - Noble DirtPath01Dirt02 - SeriousHDRocks01 - VividDirtPath01 - aMidianBornDirtCliffs01 - SRODirtCliffsRoots01 - Vivid [Rocks & Mountains]Mountains\MountainSlab01 - VividMountains\MountainSlab02 - Vivid [Water]RiverbedEdge - NobleRiverBottom - NobleRiverMud - Noble [PineForest]FieldGrass02 - Amidian PineForest02PineForest01 - AmidianPineForest02 - SeriousHDPineForest03 - Noble PineForest02 [Tundra]FieldGrass01 - Noble Dirt01Tundra01 - SROTundra02 - Vivid Tundra01TundraMoss01 - ?TundraMossTest01- ?TundraRocks01 - Vivid FieldGrass01 *When I complete all landscape and terrain texture evaluations, I will give my favorites parallax treatment and ask the authors for permission to redistribute parallax-enabled versions of them. Edited February 22, 2016 by Electrocutor 1 Link to comment
Bradl3y Posted February 22, 2016 Share Posted February 22, 2016 Electrocutor Thank you for putting in all of this hard work. I am very much looking forward to the end results of your investigation into the matter. Honestly, I wish I could get the authors of all these packs to work together and help fix each other's texture packs, then release a full pack that includes multiple options for each textureThis should have been done a long time ago. Favorites Update:*Currently requires FixParallaxTerrain=false [General]Dirt01 - Noble DirtPath01Dirt02 - SeriousHDRocks01 - VividDirtPath01 - aMidianBornDirtCliffs01 - SRODirtCliffsRoots01 - Vivid [Rocks & Mountains]Mountains\MountainSlab01 - VividMountains\MountainSlab02 - Vivid [Water]RiverbedEdge - NobleRiverBottom - NobleRiverMud - Noble [PineForest]FieldGrass02 - Amidian PineForest02PineForest01 - AmidianPineForest02 - SeriousHDPineForest03 - Noble PineForest02 [Tundra]FieldGrass01 - Noble Dirt01Tundra01 - SROTundra02 - Vivid Tundra01TundraMoss01 - ?TundraMossTest01- ?TundraRocks01 - Vivid FieldGrass01 *When I complete all landscape and terrain texture evaluations, I will give my favorites parallax treatment and ask the authors for permission to redistribute parallax-enabled versions of them. I hope this becomes a reality. Let's assume the worst case scenario occurs. What happens if most of these mod authors don't respond? (never come back) or what happens if some or most of these mod authors do not give you their permission? The only reason I bring this up is because just yesterday (or the day before I think is when it all actually started) there was a mod hosted over at "the place that shall not be named" that was taken down because the mod author was using other peoples work. I don't think that guy was actually receiving credit for creating anything ... Basically he just grabbed a dozen or so mods and slammed them together to credit a (All In One) kind of a thing. In any case I'm following your progress and hoping for the best. Link to comment
Electrocutor Posted February 22, 2016 Author Share Posted February 22, 2016 If I get no permission, then I can use a lesser way of fixing many things. I can distribute a self-made tool that will fix up some of the glaring problems or provide basic fixes. For example, for the textures where the green or red channels of a normal are inverted, it could simply go to the texture pack directory and invert whichever ones need it. For those with completely broken normals, it could simply blank out the normal altogether so its flat, but at least that way the diffuse will show up. I have a few other ideas that follow this line of thought. It's become bad enough now, that I am building a spreadsheet to mark down everything that is wrong with each of the textures which I can refer to programmatically later on as well as post it to google for others' use. This spreadsheet will also contain a comma-delimited list of texture contents because many of the texture packs seem to put the wrong kind of texture with a certain name, but has a perfectly viable texture with a different name. The sheet will also contain a list of the observed placement of textures because the naming does not always match actual locations used. For example, PineForest01 should actually be considered as PineForestRocks as it is predominantly used surrounding rock formations, steep hills, and against mountain slopes. Link to comment
nappilydeestruction Posted February 22, 2016 Share Posted February 22, 2016 I really appreciate what you are doing here, this is very interesting indeed. Link to comment
Darth_mathias Posted February 22, 2016 Share Posted February 22, 2016 i am watching your work with great interest hopefully the tool you make will be simple to use. Link to comment
Electrocutor Posted February 22, 2016 Author Share Posted February 22, 2016 (edited) Quick tentative update on my favorites: [FallForest]Road01FallForest01 - NobleFallForestDirt01 - NobleFallForestGrass01 - NobleFallForestLeaves01 - NobleFallForestRocks01 - Noble FieldGrass02 Edited February 23, 2016 by Electrocutor Link to comment
Gutmaw Posted February 23, 2016 Share Posted February 23, 2016 I'm going to put up some of my patches for this if anyone wants them.https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=E58D98A67F526317%2110884 HearthFire Display Case Fix - USLEEP- Forward USLEEP changes Moonpath to Elsweyr - Patch- Fix the Dead Man's Drink mess it creates- *more changes to come Misc Edits (Directly Modified ESP)All Mods: Forwarding Height Map data for xEdit conflict sanityHey Elec, when u forward heightmap data, which data set are u using...the vanilla skyrim data, or the data from the last vanilla ESM/Usleep in load order? Thx! Link to comment
Electrocutor Posted February 23, 2016 Author Share Posted February 23, 2016 I just follow the chain of the official esms and usleep; whichever is the last height data is the one that I propagate. After I'm certain that I have everything I need forwarded and all things resolved, then I create a base modgroups file so that xEdit knows that all conflicts between the mods are resolved, even if they are different. I haven't gotten to it yet, but I expect that the height data will also need to be propagated from expansion mods. For example, if you add one of Arthmoor's town changes where there are a few extra buildings, the height data needs adjusted so that dragons won't clip through the buildings. If you keep your modgroups up-to-date, it makes it sooo much easier to find and resolve conflicts; plus once you have the conflicts resolved, you can create a modgroup for your resolution patch to clean up the xEdit clutter. ----Example base ModGroup: Weapons & Armor Fixes_Remade.modgroups[Weapons & Armor Fixes]Skyrim.esmUpdate.esmDawnguard.esmHearthFires.esmDragonborn.esmUnofficial Skyrim Legendary Edition Patch.espWeapons & Armor Fixes_Remade.esp Link to comment
Electrocutor Posted February 23, 2016 Author Share Posted February 23, 2016 (edited) So... I've come to a conclusion on parallax. FixParallaxBugs=trueThis alongside parallax-enabled meshes and parallax maps makes a very noticeable difference. The parallax map is able to be put into a separate _p grayscale texture file and does not need to be high resolution (not much impact on VRAM). FixParallaxTerrain=trueThis re-purposes terrain textures' alpha channel into a parallax map. When using a terrain texture with a high quality normal map, this effect is almost unnoticeable and negligible at the most. The loss of being able to use the alpha channel for transparency on textures used in landscape objects is a massive eyesore. Almost everything that would benefit from parallax (such as bark, rock roads, bridge stones, wood grain, etc) are not affected by this; with the exception being the _rocks01 textures. While it is possible to separate the terrain textures from the landscape textures via copy/paste and using a different alpha channel on each, this doubles the amount of VRAM needed for these textures with very little gain. Recommended Conclusion:FixParallaxBugs=trueFixParallaxTerrain=false I also want to drop a quick note that none of the parallax mods properly fully enable parallax; they mostly just enable bits and pieces, such as allowing parallax on the rocks for a bridge, but not for the bridge stones or dirt. I've decided to build my own set of parallax-enabled meshes. It would help me greatly if people could point me to any improved meshes aside from SMIM for landscape and architecture so that my starting point is high quality. As for a quick update on my texture pack evaluation. Bar none, Noble is the highest quality texture pack on the Nexus. There are certain things that I do not especially care for, and there are select textures in other packs that are at the same level of quality; but for the pack as a whole, none of the other texture packs even comes close to Noble. The diffuse textures from Hein84 are the same or perhaps even higher quality than Noble, but the normal maps are almost all wrong. Edited February 23, 2016 by Electrocutor Link to comment
Spock Posted February 23, 2016 Share Posted February 23, 2016 Thank you very much, this is an informative read! I am also very intrigued what will become of this project. Someone who really knows what he is doing looking into the parallax options. As for Mesh options:As far as I know there are only Animated Clutter, Ruins Clutter Improved and ELFX which alter meshes. ELFX is probably not really relevant because ELFX colors usually do not look good with ENBs. I would suggest NLA for a very natural color look. Another thing to consider when talking textures if also using an ENB is SSAO/SSIL:If you have tiles, the joints shouldn't be dark, there shouldn't be a lightmap effect. The darkness should come from the SSAO, or it will look bad with good (i.e. most realistic GI approximation possible) SSAO/SSIL settings.Many ENBs use very artistic settings for SSAO/SSIL btw. Mine are tweaked towards GI approximation using ray tracing as rough reference while adding a little artistic AO to hide texture/mesh seams. [sSAO_SSIL]EnableSupersampling=falseUseIndirectLighting=trueUseComplexIndirectLighting=trueUseComplexAmbientOcclusion=trueUseAmbientIndirectLighting=trueSamplingQuality=0SamplingPrecision=0SamplingRange=0.3FadeFogRange=0.5SizeScale=0.5SourceTexturesScale=0.5EnableComplexFilter=trueFilterQuality=0FilterType=-1AOAmount=1.1AOAmountInterior=1.1ILAmount=1.0ILAmountInterior=1.0AOIntensity=1.3AOIntensityInterior=1.3AOType=0ILType=0AOMixingType=0AOMixingTypeInterior=0EnableDenoiser=true Since you are so much into your search, I would like to ask what your favorite LOD textures are and if you know what textures need billboards for DynDoLod. I'm currently using Skyrim High Definition LODs - Dark LOD Textures. Nexus links for convenience:Animated Clutter: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/48287/?Ruins Clutter Improved: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/14227/?Skyrim High Definition Lods - Dark: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/58818/?ELFX: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/27043/?NLA: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/50065/? Link to comment
Electrocutor Posted February 23, 2016 Author Share Posted February 23, 2016 The shading problems that come up are mostly caused because after you enable parallax, the parallax map has the ability to raise and lower the entire square texture; so the edges of two adjoining textures may no longer actually meet. I intend to make sure that I pay attention to this: hopefully I can simply make adjustments to the base parallax level to get things working together well. I have a lot to do with just evaluating and fixing up the near-field textures, so I don't intend to do anything with LODs at this time. If I'm still motivated when I'm finished with this part, I may attack LODs later on. Thank you for the links. Link to comment
Darth_mathias Posted February 23, 2016 Share Posted February 23, 2016 So... I've come to a conclusion on parallax. Recommended Conclusion:FixParallaxBugs=trueFixParallaxTerrain=falseso this would your recommendation for SRLE Extended that i add FixParallaxTerrain=false to the guide? Link to comment
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