Majestic Mountains v 3.0 30/04/2020

TABLE OF CONTENTS
--------------------

1. Installation
1.1 updating to MM v 3.0
2. Snow
2.1 Improved Snow
2.2 Snow compatibility
2.3 Landscape adjustments
2.4 The Projecteddiffuse
3. Moss
4. Sun
5. Lod
6.Troubleshooting

GENERAL USAGE NOTES
--------------------


1.0
---

INSTALLATION
-----------------
Majestic Mountains is a pretty complex mod which started as a simple mountain retexturing and grew over time to a mod that changes a lot of whole Skyrim.
I splitted the mod into several modules. Some are important and some optional.
The mod is seperated into:
MajesticMountains.esp
- (important) it includes compatibility fallbacks, snow adjustments, snow shader fixes and tweaks and Solsteim ash blending

MajesticMountains_Landscape.esm
- (important) it includes landscape vertex color adjustments for snow blending

MajesticMountains_Moss.esp
- (optional) it includes the moss projection material you will find on many spots in Skyrim

SunDaytimeSouth/ North
- (optiional) it changes the sun position, Please use Enb helper to solve Problems with daytime registration!

Complementary Textures
- (optional) I created the pack when I got reports off poeple that didn't find fitting landscape textures. It offers almost all landscape textures in 2k with special textures for Blended Roads and landscape lod textures. The textures are a seperate download on the mod page.

The Lod Ressources
- (optional) You need this packs for creating a fitting mountain lod.
There are two ways to generate lod in Skyrim.
Either you use SSELodGen/xLodGen or DynDoLod. DynDoLod is the recommended method because you can create an almost seamless mountain lod with it.
I've uploaded a lod texture pack for each tool.


Download and install the mod with your preferred mod manager and use Loot for sorting the plugins.

After you have installed the mod there is an important step for getting fitting snow.
If you are using Skyrims snow shader then you can skip this step.
Otherwise you need to set "benableProjecteUVDiffuseNormals" to "1" in your SkyrimPrefs.ini. This setting applies a texture to snow on objects.

The snow should fit really great. If it doesn't then have a look in the Troubleshooting section in this readme.


1.1
----

UPDATING TO MM V3.0
-------------------------------
MM v 3.0 makes huge improvements in terms of compatibility.
You should test if compatibility patches are still needed after updating to MM v 3.0. Most patches can safely be uninstalled after the update.

2.0
----
This section describes more detailed the snow system of Majestic Mountains.
I made two important steps for snow fitting.
The first step was setting all snow material to white into the esp.
And the second step was creating a fitting projecteddiffuse in the effects folder. This textures is applied to the white snow material.
This creates a similar look like Better Dynamic snow.


2.1
----

IMPROVED SNOW
------------------------
Majestic Mountains was designed to work at best with the new Snow Shader of the SE.
But certain bugs within this shader forced me to redesign the snow and to implement some workarounds.
The reason why I don't give up the shader is the fact that it prevents Skyrims ambient occlusion on snow material wich is especially for glaciers a real benefit.
And on the other side it reduces visible seems between the snow landscape textures and snow coverd objects.
The downside of the Snow Shader is a limited compatibility with some snow mods, a landscape normal map bug and washed out decals on a certain darkness level.
The decals will start disappear in lighting situations with a dark ambient light.

You can always adjust the snow settings to fit your needs in the MajesticMountains.ini in Skyrim's data folder:
You can find your favorite settings ingame with the command:

setini "fSnowSSSColorR:display" (your number) for example.
setini "fSnowSSSColor:Gdisplay" (your number) for example.
setini "fSnowSSSColorB:display" (your number) for example.

The tint and brightness depends on the relations between the values of r,g and b.
Once you've found your favorite setting simply write the values in the ini then.


2.2
----

SNOW COMPATIBILITY
------------------------------
The snow in this mod is designed for working with the projecteddiffuse texture. This texture is usally loaded if the Snow Shader is enabled in the launcher and will be skipped when it is disabled.
If you want to play without Improved Snow you need to set "bEnableProjecteUVDiffuseNormals" in your SkyrimPrefs.ini to 1.
This setting projects snow on all objects in a very similiar way like Better Dynamic Snow. But with a lot of advantages over it.


The snow is compatible with other snow mods like Footsteps and No Snow under the Roof. But Better Dynamic Snow needs some considerations.
Things are getting a bit more complicated for Better Dynamic Snow v. 2.10.1.
MM v 3.0 should work better together with BDS out of the box. But there is still a lot of testing needed and any version that is higher than v. 2.10.1 will be compatible with MM v 3.0.
Better Dynamic Majestic Mountains is the common compatiblity patch for BDS and MM. But version 7 is incompatible with Majestic Mountains v 3.0.
Version 7 is the latest version while I was writing the readme. A version 8 or later should restore the compatibility.


2.3
----

LANDSCAPE ADJUSTMENTS
-------------------------------------
One of the main reasons why Skyrims snow is fitting badly are vertex colors. Vertex colors are set directly in the mesh on the polygon surfaces.
Majestic Mountains removes this colors on the mountain and rock meshes and on the landscape.
This creates a much better fitting between mountain/ rock meshes and the surrounding landscape. Although the fitting can never be perfect because of different light reflection angles.
The landscape edits are converted to esm in the latest preview. This ensures a better compatibility with mods that are editing the landscape at the cost that overwritten landscape parts may have a slightly unfitting snow.

The reason why I created an esm for the landscape edits was a better compatibility with mods that are altering the landscape too (like Cutting Room Floor).
If a mod overwrites an edited snow area the vanilla vertex colors are restored there and the snow fitting isn't a bit worse but this is a very minor issue.
And most mods that are editing landscape usally don't edit snow cells very often.
You can mostly ignore that kind of conflicts.


2.4
----

THE PROJECTED DIFFUSE
-----------------------------------
The projecteddiffuse.dds is a texture within the effects folder.
This texture is applied to all snow materials on meshes if "benableProjecteUVDiffuseNormals" is set to "1" in your SkyrimPrefs.ini.
It should be the same texture like snow01.dds in the landscape texture folder in Majestic Mountains 1.8.
Since most snow retexture mods don't have a projecteddiffuse.dds that is equal to snow01.dds this WOULD make them incompatible with Majestic Mountains.
BUT everyone can work around this incompatibility.
Simply delete the projecteddiffuse.dds in the effects folder, copy over the snow01.dds of your preferred snow mod and rename the copied texture to projecteddiffuse.dds.
That's it!
Everyone can make every snow retexturing compatible within seconds.


3.0
----

MOSS
-------
A lot of mountains are coverd with moss to hide possible tiling and to give the environment a more diverse and interesting look.
The moss was put into a seperate esp. This gives the user the choice to play without it.
There are two moss types in this esp. A greenish moss that fits to many parts of Skyrim and especially in the reach region
and a more brownish moss for the Tundra and the Rift.
There were a lot of mesh redirections necessary to control a more regional based appearance of the moss.
This leads to an incompatibility to mods that are redirecting mountain meshes too like "Moss Rocks" with this plugin.


4.0
----

SUN
------
Since all mountain meshes are casting shadows with this mod I decided to alter the sun direction too.
Especially the SunDaytimeSouth.esp creates a really interesting look because the sunlight comes from a new direction.

The sun direction was transfered into seperate esp files.
"SunDaytimeNorth_MM_default" and "SunDaytimeSouth.esp".
"SunDaytimeNorth_MM_default" contains the Majestic Mountains default setting while "SunDaytimeSouth.esp" is naturally correct way of
the sun during day. You should only have one of them active. I'm planning an installer for future versions to prevent searching the modlist for the esp files.
CAUTION
Sun direction MAY cause conflicts with future versions of ENB.
If you run into a 95 percent daytime issue you need to disable sun direction esp`s.

Make sure that MajesticMountains.esp is on top of the other parts of the mod.

The load order of the other parts doesn't matter. They don't conflict with each other.


5.0
----

LOD GENERATION
------------------------
Majestic Mountains contains it's own lod atlas texture for object lod. But if you are using DynDoLod you can create your own custom lod with the lod resources wich are uploaded as optional files.
This resources are using lod textures in 1k. The lod generators are are scaling them down automatically.


I suggest to have a look into the Tucoguide (https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/10694/?) for a description of the lod creation process.


6.0
----

TROUBLESHOOTING
---------------------------
-I figured out that many weather mods are changing the snow material color too. Putting them below Majestic Mountains in the load order may lead to unfitting snow.
If Loot puts MajesticMountains.esp higher than a weather mod and you are getting a strange snow color you should change the load order.

-Disable Skyrims Snow Shader if you are using Better Dynamic Snow or if you get glowing mountains, rock meshes at night. But this is only necessary if the whole objects glows.


-If you are getting grey/ white mountains then make sure that the MajesticMountains.esp is enabled and move it lower in your load order.
And if you are using DynDoLod then you have to rerun it after that step.
This issue is caused by reverting my snow material settings by another mod.

-If you are getting black mountain or rock meshes after the installation then you should reinstall the mod.
This usally solves the problem.

-The MajesticMountains_Landscape.esm can cause conflicts with other esm files that are changing the landscape like Beyond Skyrim: Bruma.
You can solve this by moving the esm up in you load order.

-It appeared SSE Engine Fixes might be causing an issue. If you are having this problem, and are using SSE Engine Fixes, go into the
.ini file under skse/plugins/EngineFixes.ini, and set this line
BSLightingShaderForceAlphaTest = false



Befor reporting an issue make sure that you've tested the mod on a clean savegame without any other mods than Majestic Mountains.
Report issues in the comment section or via pm please.
I'll try to help as fast as possible. And if I can't solve the issue there were many helpful members active in the comment section.



PERMISSIONS
---------------

- You may change the files and use them into your own mod with following conditions:

-You want to create a compatibility patch.
-You are creating a larger mod like Falskaar and you want to include Parts of Majestic Mountains.
-You may upload this mod without changes if you give me full credit and link to the main mod.
-You are allowed to get donations if you are using parts of my files
-You are allowed to create showcases on Youtube and to monetarize the video.
- You don't need to contact me first. A simple credit is enough honor for me.