I love the "slightly embossed" look. The biggest problem with the murals for me has always been the lack of contrast, it makes them look like just a bunch of squiggly lines in a sea of gray.
It's been quite some time since the last update, so I imagine this is likely to never be finished, but I'll take what I can get. Thanks. :)
I would love to use this mod and with new VR (which I do not play) there is a call for high detail. I hope you find the time to continue and draft 'em for Skyrim SE.
Your vision of the murals is a beautiful one, but the originals are beautiful too: The left one doesn't suck. It was a great artistic style and portrays an "Old Dragon Gods" religion, while yours is more like "Our Great Ancestors" vision.
I think you misunderstood my intention, though I've tried my best to make it clear. The problem isn't with the artistic style of the originals, and I've never once criticised that. In fact, I've tried to keep as close to the originals as possible - you can probably see this most of all in the Bear mural. I've tried to recreate, not reinvent. (the moth mural was harder to stay faithful to, since certain elements on it were simply too low quality for me to even see properly understand the artist's intention)
The problem is with the technical implementation of the murals. They're such a low resolution that they barely even look like rock, are covered in blocky compression artifacts, and have that unpleasant 'oily' lighting that comes from very blurred normal maps. Even Da Vinci's Last Supper would look terrible if treated like that.
If you use a lot of texture mods and have beautiful crisp rock textures everywhere else, those vanilla murals really become an eyesore.
Then let me be more clear, so that you can see that I did understand your intention:
Technically your murals are superior because of their greater detail Realistically, the vanilla murals are probably better because they look more timeworn Artistically, both look great in their own right
Another thing about all modded retextures (not just this one! ) is that the normal maps are always much much weaker and flatter. I think Bethesda has a system where they convert a "real" carved 3d object into a flat normal map to keep their depths so dramatic. The resolution and artistry in this mod is certainly wonderful, but it doesn't look like deeply carved stone.
There is no timewear in tombs unless there is water running over the murals. Check out pictures of Egyptian or other tombs on first entry, they look brand new, maybe covered in dust, but no timewear on the inside, that is all on the outside.
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It's been quite some time since the last update, so I imagine this is likely to never be finished, but I'll take what I can get. Thanks. :)
that must have been really hard to do each wall ,so thank you so much kudo <3
The problem is with the technical implementation of the murals. They're such a low resolution that they barely even look like rock, are covered in blocky compression artifacts, and have that unpleasant 'oily' lighting that comes from very blurred normal maps. Even Da Vinci's Last Supper would look terrible if treated like that.
If you use a lot of texture mods and have beautiful crisp rock textures everywhere else, those vanilla murals really become an eyesore.
Technically your murals are superior because of their greater detail
Realistically, the vanilla murals are probably better because they look more timeworn
Artistically, both look great in their own right