Bomrets Detailed Normal Maps for Vanilla Higher Res Landscapes




Introduction:

I always thought, that the vanilla textures are suitable for Oblivion and have their own "charm". But the normal maps are quite smooth and not very detailed. And this is in a time, where normal maps are becoming more important. While some great texture replacers hit the road since the release of Oblivion, they often have larger textures and so increase memory usage and are hitting the performance of lower- to medium spec machines (like mine ;) ). There are other people who like the vanilla textures best. I have made new and more detailed normal maps based on the vanilla ones with double the size of the original which should be seen as an alternative to my main mod.

Because of the bad pixelation some people have, I redid the landscape normals with another technique and double resolution. Now the pixelation should be hardly if ever noticed. Remember that it will never go away completely. This package is thought as an alternative who can/want to take a small performance hit for better visual quality.

There can be a performance hit but also a nice increase in visual quality (at least I think so ;)).


Installation:

Extract the included "textures" folder to Oblivion/Data. As these are only normal maps, you should not need any archive invalidation. If prompted just overwrite. If you just want to test this package, I recommend creating an Omod with the Oblivion Mod Manager!

Play!


Un-Installation:

If you have created an Omod, just delete it. If you have put in the textures like they are and do not have my whole mod, extract the "Uninstall Bomrets HiRes Landscape.bat" into your Oblivion/Data folder and run it. This will delete all normal maps, that come with this pack. Next time you start Oblivion, it will use the stock normal maps for the landscapes again.


Known Issues/Bugs:

Not really a bug, but since Bethesda used the DXT1c Compression for many normal maps there might be compression artifacts visible on the textures under certain lightning conditions (pixelation!). The only thing I could do about that would be decreasing detail, but that would ruin the purpose of this mod. The vanilla normal maps have these issues too. But as I recreated the normal maps with doubled resolution these artifacts should be noticed that much.


Incompatabilities:

This mod is fully compatible with Parallax Cities, Texians Window Lightning Aystem and any other mod, that does not replace the standart textures or alters them too much. Just install my normals after the forementioned and overwrite theirs. You will have no disadvantage (in case of ParallaxCities you even will gain a really nice visual advantage imho :)). It is not compatible with a mod that alters the base textures, like Qarls does. But you should not need my mod, if you're able to run and like Qarls either ;).


Final words:

Bethesda had a reason not to put much detail into the normals because the more detail, the more likely it is for artifacts to show up. But I think I made a good compromise. But look for yourself. Feedback and constructive criticism or help would be much appreciated, since I just started to work with Photoshop and this is my very first texture mod at all. :) I've put a large amount of my spare time into this project and really hope you like it too.
If you encounter anything that looks out of place, find a bug or see something that just looks ugly, contact me, so I can fix it.


Contact:

You can find me on the official forums at www.elderscrolls.com under the name Bomret or on the german forums of www.scharesoft.de/joomla/, also Bomret.

Or send me an E-Mail under [email protected]


Credits:

Many thanks got to Blade9722 for his tips
Credits also go out to the people that gave me feedback, so propably you :)
And of course Bethesda for the game itself.


Have fun :)

Bomret