This (with your recoloring and clutter), combined with Nwahs and Mushrooms Team Silt Strider, is the absolute best Silt Strider (for OpenMW)! It looks incredible and is vanilla friendly! Just the fact that it's so vanilla friendly while looking so amazing, means it beats Lougian's version of the Silt Strider, which changes the look way too much for my taste. FANTASTIC WORK greg and Nwahs and Mushrooms Team!
Commenting on your most recent Normalmaps - thanks for these! Downloaded all and have started using them, appreciate your work and especially for this mod, since the silt strider killed my frame rate before installing this!
The Indoril NormalMap from HiRez Armor is awful using OpenMW, maybe one for the pipeline? :)
unfortunately, many of the performance issues from hater8's mod have to do with how many draw calls are in the mesh, and if anything my mod will make that performance hit ever so slightly worse.
https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/49023 this mod that revenorror published a few hours after mine should reduce the number of draw calls and improve performance, but full disclosure, i've not tested it myself.
i'm a close-to-vanilla player, personally, so Hirez armor patch isn't likely to be supported by me. i'll be going without internet soon, so today's upload will likely be the last one for some time, but i hope to continue the project once i get internet again. if someone wants to do a patch while i'm gone, they have my permission, but must give credit.
Thanks - I had that mod installed, but mistaken the changes from coming from this instead (too many mods to keep track of!). Still, the vanilla styled texture is great, keep up the work :)
Thanks for the response, I've just removed the normal maps from HiRez armour since they're horrible to play with. Personally I find the vanilla textures (from Intelligent Textures) too bright compared to HiRez armour, tho I prefer the styling of vanilla more.
I like to be vanilla as possible, so I understand your answer! Anyway, thanks again!
Looking forward to trying this out! The original mod already has a bump mapped version, which recent versions of OpenMW are able to handle correctly. Could you explain how your mod is different as far as appearance goes? Which version of the original mod do you recommend?
so the patch fixes the obnoxious gloss thats common with bumpmapped items. it doesn't remove it, but it reduces it to a much more likeable level. the normalmaps will reduce the obnoxious sheen on the siltstrider's clutter items, i recommend using these two to anybody who uses the siltstrider mod, its even nicer with the patch. the normalmaps will be helpful to anyone with a vanilla friendly texture set, even people without the siltstrider mod. it normalmaps the crates, barrels, eggs, baskets, etc in all of the game, not just on the siltstrider. IMHO this is the real must-have. the recolor is mostly for nostalgia seekers like me. it sets the brightness and color tones extremely similar to the vanilla siltstrider, adds back the warts on the siltstriders' legs, all while preserving most of the detail of the newer texture set. this one is purely preference. essentially, this is all just a flavor enhancement broken up into different bite-size servings, to complement hater8's excellent mod. though even people that don't use it can still find something good here. the only thing i would caution, is people running any far from vanilla clutter textures may be better off without the normalmaps file, or to load the normalmaps file at the top of their virtual load order. reply back if you'd like a more technical and detailed explanation without layman's terms.
That makes sense. Basically you've swapped the "fake" bump mapping and all that notoriously entails with proper normal maps. Do you recommend using the non-bumped version of hater8's mod?
first i will say that bump-mapping can be good, but IMHO it doesn't hold a candle to normal+specular/PBR mapping together. the two together is a method with almost infinitely more control over the render. in my experience, the "not bump mapped" version is the same mesh, but lacking the texture, and therefore lacking the effect. it happens to use the same naming suffix that OpenMW normalmap path defaults to, so unless you want to manually change all of your normalmap texture names and change the INIs, you'll see the same result regardless. if hater8 releases a version of the mesh that doesn't have the bumpmap flags & path, i would recommend that hypothetical version in a heart-beat for people using OpenMW, and while i M A Y be able to produce a modified mesh like that, i'd basically be stealing his mod but not currently offering specular maps. IMHO it would be very disrespectful, and the chance this hypothetical scenario happens is very low, and not in the near future. i've been in talks with hater8, but this isn't an issue that i'm willing to stop my ongoing projects to pursue. if anything, this is as much my problem as it is his. unfortunately i can't really use layman's terms this time, i hope you can understand.
I understand just fine! I have just enough nifskope chops to be able to remove any inessential filepaths for normal maps in those meshes myself, if I decide its necessary. I am however still curious how your patch reduces fake-bumpmap shininess, since it doesn't seem to overwrite any files from the original mod.
Coincidentally, someone just released a modified version of hater8's silt strider meshes this morning. Improved collisions and optimization, with optional texture atlases. I thought you might be interested.
the texture that i replace (for users who DL the OpenMW patch) is the reflection texture. i damn near turned the glossiness down to single digits, thats the main method i used to reduce the overbearing glossines, without removing the effect. if you can get permission from hater8, and are able to gut the bump-map flags and paths from the mesh, i'll gladly link to your page from my page. i plan to finish normalmapping morrowind before i look into specular maps, so for the time being i felt bumpmapping is sufficient in this specific case. i've already attempted to reach out to the author of the other mod. atlasing is great way to cut down on the overhead in morrowind and i'd like to support it where it makes sense to do so.
12 comments
The Indoril NormalMap from HiRez Armor is awful using OpenMW, maybe one for the pipeline? :)
https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/49023 this mod that revenorror published a few hours after mine should reduce the number of draw calls and improve performance, but full disclosure, i've not tested it myself.
i'm a close-to-vanilla player, personally, so Hirez armor patch isn't likely to be supported by me. i'll be going without internet soon, so today's upload will likely be the last one for some time, but i hope to continue the project once i get internet again. if someone wants to do a patch while i'm gone, they have my permission, but must give credit.
Thanks for the response, I've just removed the normal maps from HiRez armour since they're horrible to play with. Personally I find the vanilla textures (from Intelligent Textures) too bright compared to HiRez armour, tho I prefer the styling of vanilla more.
I like to be vanilla as possible, so I understand your answer! Anyway, thanks again!
the normalmaps will be helpful to anyone with a vanilla friendly texture set, even people without the siltstrider mod. it normalmaps the crates, barrels, eggs, baskets, etc in all of the game, not just on the siltstrider. IMHO this is the real must-have.
the recolor is mostly for nostalgia seekers like me. it sets the brightness and color tones extremely similar to the vanilla siltstrider, adds back the warts on the siltstriders' legs, all while preserving most of the detail of the newer texture set. this one is purely preference.
essentially, this is all just a flavor enhancement broken up into different bite-size servings, to complement hater8's excellent mod. though even people that don't use it can still find something good here.
the only thing i would caution, is people running any far from vanilla clutter textures may be better off without the normalmaps file, or to load the normalmaps file at the top of their virtual load order.
reply back if you'd like a more technical and detailed explanation without layman's terms.
in my experience, the "not bump mapped" version is the same mesh, but lacking the texture, and therefore lacking the effect. it happens to use the same naming suffix that OpenMW normalmap path defaults to, so unless you want to manually change all of your normalmap texture names and change the INIs, you'll see the same result regardless. if hater8 releases a version of the mesh that doesn't have the bumpmap flags & path, i would recommend that hypothetical version in a heart-beat for people using OpenMW, and while i M A Y be able to produce a modified mesh like that, i'd basically be stealing his mod but not currently offering specular maps. IMHO it would be very disrespectful, and the chance this hypothetical scenario happens is very low, and not in the near future. i've been in talks with hater8, but this isn't an issue that i'm willing to stop my ongoing projects to pursue. if anything, this is as much my problem as it is his.
unfortunately i can't really use layman's terms this time, i hope you can understand.
Coincidentally, someone just released a modified version of hater8's silt strider meshes this morning. Improved collisions and optimization, with optional texture atlases. I thought you might be interested.
if you can get permission from hater8, and are able to gut the bump-map flags and paths from the mesh, i'll gladly link to your page from my page. i plan to finish normalmapping morrowind before i look into specular maps, so for the time being i felt bumpmapping is sufficient in this specific case.
i've already attempted to reach out to the author of the other mod. atlasing is great way to cut down on the overhead in morrowind and i'd like to support it where it makes sense to do so.