Water Lily and A Wet Elf
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34 comments
Thank you very much Jon... you are a master of making characters look fantastic and beautiful and still leave them this vanilla tough... this is a great kind of artwork
I mainly like them because they are a cool race and are not Altmer. Nor are they cannibals like the Bosmer. So the only "Mer" race I actually like. Plus they do have a bent towards rogue and mage abilities which is a favorite combination. They also make good Rangers. I am not certain where Marrok will line-up. I suspect something unique along the ranger/mage/thief line. A Nightwolf class most likely - a nightime ranger with skills in illusion and nature magic with talents for stealth and dual wield.
Glad you enjoyed the shots!
In-game I actually enjoyed hanging out here for about a half-hour. It was raining hard so I spent the time watching the night pass and morning arrive. With the mods I got I could hear the rain falling, see the splashes in the water, and have thunder and lighting in the background. It was very peaceful. Of course I also enjoyed playing around with the camera a little while this was happening to take some screenshots. I love rainy days on a river or lake - probably one of my favorite real life settings.
Love the bond forming between Fang and Marrok, wonderful shots as usual Jon! I really liked the main shot as well.
Sorry if I had not commented on any of your work, the small series of holidays of this period, cut off from work, prevented me from commenting on how I had to.
Also FO4 is running twice as fast and was able to up some settings for it so that game has slightly better visuals now. In general gaming and most PC tasks are about twice as fast so overall a nice improvement.
Anyhow I debated going with win7 (dislike win8 and 8.1 for a variety of reasons) but the new CPU I got, released this spring, isn't supported by win7 except with special patches and hacks. Plus all my other games run fine on win10 for the most part - it has mainly been Skyrim but possible other Dx9 games would have the same issue ... except most other Dx9 games also are not being pushed to their limits with mods and ENB presets.
But Skyrim is running pretty well now. Using the same settings as my old PC my FPS is double what it was. In some places I had to enable the FPS limit in ENB as it was going over 60. I still get stutters however and that is partly because of enblocal.ini settings. But without those settings I was getting CTD and ILS. So it is an acceptable pay off and its nothing like before. Overall the game runs smoothly - just needs to adapt sometimes to new areas.
Anyhow my favorite from the GS series are Vaermina 236, Shards 221, and Jyggalag 236. I also use Insomnia ENB on binary 262 (higher versions cause issues due to shader changes in the binaries), and sometimes use Ruby ENB and, recently, Antique Dragon, on binary 308.
Of all the presets only two really have a lot of my own stamp or influence and those are Hircine and Malacath.
Consequently if I do any more development work it would most likely be on Hircine and Malacath. I love Tansarville's work and when she saw me tinkering with them she asked me if I would like to take over managing them for her as she was tired of them (and hated dealing with Nexus). So I said sure. Since then I have used most of her versions of the Sombers to create the Grim and Somber set of presets. Some are very close to her work and some are more heavily tweaked.
Anyhow that is why they all share a similar feel (with Azura and Malacath maybe being the most different as they use newer code files that Tansarville made for me a year later).
So why Hircine and Malacath? Mainly because they are the ones that feel more like my work and consequently the two that also need the most polishing. Hircine is pretty good but there are issues with environmental fog and dusk/dawn that needs to be fixed. The contrast and color is also a bit overdone in some cases. Lastly it could benefit from having weathers implemented.
For Malacath - well I am very happy with exteriors in most cases. But interiors are flat and dull (except in a few cases) and needs an overhaul. In addition Malacath has the newest shader files and works well with binary 308 - so there is a lot I could do with it if I wanted.
I just don't know if I want to get back into that "addiction" as it is a massive time sink. Creating a preset is a massive mind-numbing amount of work. Even tweaking an existing one can be very time consuming and you need a lot of patience. I am just not sure I want to make that sacrifice in time when I have a lot of other things I would like to do.
IMO I spent a lot of time in the last 4 years making some mods and presets for two games (three if you count Garm on SE) and supporting them, as well as providing a variety of updates, so I am at a comfortable place now where I feel I have given back to the community while still providing basic support for what I have published.
All that being said it really depends on mood. Should I get bored with playing games (any game) and hit a dry spell where I need something to do ... and I find the motivation to work on the presets then I will. Whether that happens is very much up in the air though.