Simply Bigger Trees is here! Re-built from scratch for Skyrim Special Edition, Simply Bigger Trees has a basic goal: Make all of the trees bigger, keep the look and feel of vanilla, retain compatibility with textures mods, and make Skyrim's forests worthy of their legend! This seemingly small change has MASSIVE atmospheric impact in-game.  This is specifically aimed at those who like the look and feel of the vanilla game, but just want things a bit more big and wild.

All vanilla tree meshes and their collision are resized, and animations adjusted, which has such a dramatic effect on the game that entire portions of the map become nearly unrecognizable (in the best way.) Dense canopies of branches envelop you through Falkreath as you hunt wild creatures. The Rift is more magical and lush than ever before. For those who play as a hunter, or simply enjoy the nature of Skyrim, this is a must! It is actually possible to get lost in the forests, and camping under the branches has never felt so good and ~ IMMERSIVE ~.


• All vanilla trees, collision, culling bounds have been resized to 1.8x their original size for dense, lush forests that are easy to get lost in
• Vanilla trees in SE are more lush than they were in classic, so they look better than ever.
• Tree branch / swaying animations have been slowed down to half their speed to more realistically match the larger size
• Full scaled LODs now packaged with the mod, including high-definition LOD textures, making transitions almost indistinguishable (thanks PaleRiderx!)
• A plug-in to adjust the few stray trees that were protruding through cliifs and such as a result of being larger (thanks solangel777!)
• Realistic Aspen Trees compatibility (including full LOD)
• Works with ALL vanilla tree re-textures
• UPDATE: Vurt of SFO fame was gracious enough to let me include new textures based on his pine and snow pine textures from SFO v1.87.  I have made some tweaks and alterations, and new normals.  These are included in the OPTIONAL FILES, and you can see them in the IMAGES section.  Thank you, Vurt!  These are more "fluffy" and fuller looking than vanilla, and comes down to preference.


• Choose vanilla or Realistic Aspen Trees version (only one), and install using NMM, or manually
• OPTIONAL: Vurt of Skyrim Flora Overhaul fame has let me use some of his pine and snowy pine textures as a base for a new set of textures.  You can grab these in the optional files, and there are screenshots in the images section.  They're "fluffier" so it comes down to preference.
• OPTIONAL: If you want 20% larger plants for an even more wild feel (non-harvestableones: shrubs, ferns, etc.) grab the optional BIGGER PLANTS add-on
• If you're experiencing shadow-pop, you may want to add this to your Skyrim.INI under [Display]:

fMaxHeightShadowCastingTrees=10000.0000


RECOMMENDED MODS:

• EdmondNoir has made a patch to reposition all hanging moss!  Grab it here! SBT Tree Moss Fix
• If you want some better tree bark textures, check out somerandomguy83's HQ Tree Bark
• If you're looking for better vanilla pine needle textures, check out Vanilla HD Tree Branches

IMPORTANT NOTES:

• The ESP is now required, which contains tree clipping fixes, and tree animation adjustments, as well as for loading the BSA packages
• If installing mid-game, some areas you have already explored may not have the few positioning/clipping changes applied, since positions of trees are sometimes stored in the save. This is VERY minor, as there are only a handful of position changes anyway, but I wanted to point it out so in case that damn Riverwood path tree is still clipping after install, you'll know why :)


If using a combo of other tree mods, LOD may be mismatched; if you experience smaller or different-looking trees, that is why.  Let me know if you experience anything.  Without DynDOLOD, mixing and matching tree mods will almost always result in weird LOD.  It's best to just use either/or for now until more detailed patching becomes available.

• Semi-compatible with SFO (see Skyrim Flora Overhaul below)
• Fully compatible with Realistic Aspen Trees (including matching LOD) - Install this mod AFTER R.A.T.
• Compatible with Trees in Cities / Dawn Of series, etc. (may have some minor clipping but I use them and have no real issues.)
• Compatible with any vanilla tree re-texture that does not alter the meshes
• Compatible with any mod that does not replace tree meshes
• Compatible with any house or landscape mod that moves or disables trees
• Fully compatible with gameplay mods like Frostfall, Campfire, etc.
• Unpredictable behavior with mods like Fantasy Forest Overhaul which hand-place lots of trees; you may get trees overlapping onto roads and such

• Skyrim Flora Overhaul - If you are using SFO, load SFO AFTER Simply Bigger Trees. SFO will override all pines, snowy pines, and all LOD, but you will still get my larger aspen and I reach trees. The distant LOD will not match my trees though, since SFO has its own LOD, so there will be pop-in of the aspen and reach trees getting bigger up close. If anyone would like to generate a hybrid set of LODs using a combo of this and SFO, feel free to grab the billboards in the optional files section and I will host the patch here!
• If you are using a mod that removes or repositions trees (for example, a cabin home that removes trees to clear space) load that mod AFTER SBT to make sure that the clipping fix plugin doesn't put the tree back.


The shadows in Special Edition are FAR better than Skyrim Classic. They're even better than ENB shadows in some ways! However, this comes at a cost of some performance. When enlarging the trees, they cast more shadows on the landscape, objects, and themselves, now that tree shading is enabled by default, and can hit FPS a bit in heavy areas such as Falkreath. In my testing with a GTX 980 and a modest Core i7 3930K 3.2ghz CPU, I had 60+FPS everywhere except places like Falkreath, which took about a 12fps hit because it is such a dense area. HOWEVER, this was because the shadows at ultra are set to 4096. This is in my opinion unnecessary. I lowered them to 2048 and my FPS shot up, and stays locked above 60fps. Even at 2048, the shadows are great and look a billion times better than classic! It’s a worthy tradeoff IMO.

I won't get into the blood and guts of INI tweaks, so please don't ask for general help as they are so detailed and system-specific, but you may have to lower your shadow draw distance to HIGH, and I highly suggest editing your INI files to set the shadow resolution to 2048.

-- Skyrim & SkyrimPrefs.ini --

[Display]
iShadowMapResolution=2048

For full tree distance tweaking, I highly suggest this wonderful guide over at S.T.E.P. project which was written for classic, but still applies to SE. http://wiki.step-project.com/Guide:Skyrim_Tree_Settings Be careful though! Using crazy settings combined with bigger trees can hurt performance. Go easy. Hit /r/SkyrimMods on Reddit for lots of in-depth discussion about shadow settings.

I also HIGHLY suggest you play at the default uGrids of 5. Going higher than this can cause issues with the game, and it's not worth it. Look into adjusting uLargeRefLODGridSize instead. Again Google is your friend there.