If using Vurts Trees you said you grab both the vanilla tree pack and Vurt tree pack from here, this correct? Also your link to Vurt's Trees fix is going to Melchior's Dhark mods instead of https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/46418/
Your great retexture "Bitter Coast Redux I - Landscape Textures v0.1"" has clearly labelled files ranging from 256 to 2048 resolutions. For these retextures not so clear. What is the actual resolution for Standard & HD ?
I had been avoiding installing a tree texture cause I thought I was going to use all of Vurts mods but wasn't really happy with them for various reasons. After installing your Bitter Coast Redux I - Landscape Textures(https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/45708) I gave this a whirl and am glad I did. Simple to install and looks great. Thanx.
I know now why the moss is so dark. In the original mod, the moss textures are almost in black and white, with a bit of brown, and the green color mainly comes from the vertex color of the meshes. Your textures are already green and quite dark, and the vertex color adds to that, which results in the moss being almost black. Any detail in the textures is lost.
The bark textures are also too dark, especially vurt_branchbark.dds. Once again, that's in part because of the vertex color of the meshes.
Maybe you can try to brighten them a bit. Then this mod could be truly great.
Not bad, but some of the textures for Vurt's trees (haven't tried the others, yet) are a bit too dark in my opinion. Also, the hanging moss textures don't look good on the meshes because they are not optimized for alpha testing.
Try Melchior's mesh fixes for Vurt's BC trees, he recently updated them to fix the moss positioning, and I assume also adjusted their alpha properties. Remiros fixed the alpha flags for all vanilla meshes in his M.O.P, so grab that too. ^^
The Vurt pack is a bit WIP still, will probably have an update to it soon enough. I've been using vanilla trees again myself. :P
Yes, I have tried that. Vurt's trees already use alpha testing, so that is unchanged, and Remiros "fixed" the meshes by switching from alpha blending to alpha testing, but your textures are better suited for alpha blending, because they have interpolated alpha maps - while alpha testing only shows either fully transparent or fully opaque pixels, with no steps in between. The "threshold" value in the NiAlphaProperty controls which pixels in the texture will be displayed transparent or opaque - the higher the threshold, the more opaque a pixel in the texture must be to be displayed. It is either 0 or 1, nothing in between. But with textures like your hanging moss, it is very difficult to find a good threshold value, because some parts have a high transparency and are completely lost with alpha testing, even with low thresholds. For the textures to work well with alpha testing, the alpha mask needs a much more defined outline.
Yes, Alpha Blending looks better because it displays partly transparent pixels in textures, but it has a relatively large performance impact and there are problems with overlapping parts. Which is why the vanilla trees are made of many different parts, because that fixes the sorting issues, but it also causes more draw calls. So Alpha Testing is better for performance in at least two ways, and with HD textures, not being able to use partly transparent pixels is in most cases a small price to pay.
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For these retextures not so clear.
What is the actual resolution for Standard & HD ?
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The bark textures are also too dark, especially vurt_branchbark.dds. Once again, that's in part because of the vertex color of the meshes.
Maybe you can try to brighten them a bit. Then this mod could be truly great.
The Vurt pack is a bit WIP still, will probably have an update to it soon enough. I've been using vanilla trees again myself. :P
Yes, Alpha Blending looks better because it displays partly transparent pixels in textures, but it has a relatively large performance impact and there are problems with overlapping parts. Which is why the vanilla trees are made of many different parts, because that fixes the sorting issues, but it also causes more draw calls. So Alpha Testing is better for performance in at least two ways, and with HD textures, not being able to use partly transparent pixels is in most cases a small price to pay.
I just use pixel-perfect alpha maps from my diffuse layer.