This water has been really incredible for me. Kudos to the original author and everyone else who has improved on this.
For those of you considering this, I strongly recommend the Green version. The colors are labeled Blue, Blue-Green, and Green, but really, Blue = Deep Blue, Blue Green = Deep Blue with a Slight Green Tinge, and Green = Actual Blue Green. Green for me looks nicest in deeper water features, since you can really see the nice green to blue transition, and it also plays nicely with shallow water features like creeks and ponds, where a more obvious green tinge is desirable.
For settings, wave height 30 in MGE XE looks best for me. It's calm enough to not look out of place in shallow water features, but it still gives a slight impression of rolling open water when looking at larger bodies of water. It also doesn't clip through the ground in areas like Seyda Neen. It's a compromise, but I like it.
For scummy ponds, I recommend using a transparent scum mesh that comes with a scum replacer (like from Epic Plants or a dedicated scum replacer), but disabling the textures that come with those. As with stock water, partially transparent scum textures look really bad with this water. I've tried basically all the scum textures, and the best one I've found is the scum texture from Morrowind Enhanced Textures (which I use with the Epic Plants scum meshes). It looks high quality, but it has a translucent green layer that mostly hides the water beneath, only letting the moving water below show a tiny bit.
The only downside I've found to the stock shader settings is the stormy weather foam setting. I like the idea in theory, but in practice, it creates a shimmering effect that rolls over the water during storms, which is very apparent during dark weather, which I find quite immersion-breaking. However, this is easily fixable. Go to the shader's files in your mod manager and open shaders\core-mods\XE Mod Water.fx in a text editor. Find this line:
This will completely disable the storm crest effect while leaving the other foam effects (which I quite like) alone. With all of these tweaks, I've been really enjoying this shader.
To disable a texture, double click the mod's name in the mod list in Mod Organizer 2.
Then click on the Filetree tab in the window that pops up, if it doesn't start there.
Then navigate to the texture you want to disable (probably found in the Textures folder, though it may be elsewhere), right click it, and click Hide. This will hide the file from the game without deleting it, so it won't be loaded, but you can come back and reenable it by clicking Unhide later.
I like the water of the mod but I prefer the sun reflection of the normal water of MGE XE. But I love the transition effect when you go in the water (which you can see on the last screen). Is it possible to have just this effect?
I like the how this looks, but is it possible to use this but revert change of the colour of the water to be less blue,green and more like how it looks when just using distant lands?
to a lower value, in XE mod water.fx. MGE's water has less of a tint so playing around with that value might make the water look more like vanilla MGE.
Do you have to regenerate distant land or something after you make changes to the plug and play section? I thought i finally figured that part out, but I cant seem to get vivec sewer waves enabled.
Edit: I tried regenerating distant land, i've copied the xe water mod and underwater fx docs into the core, core-mod, and xe shader directories all under data files/shaders and i still cant make these damn waves show up
I've found yes, you have to regen land to get the colour and transition effect to show up, but I also have no waves, no foam, and the tide seems to have gone out.
A great water shader, really makes water depth show. I've noticed, though, that this seems to make the water level drop? Which has made me realise the vanilla water level was dropped by MGE XE already, but this seems to have dropped it further. Just wondering whether this is only a me issue, or just something these mods do?
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For those of you considering this, I strongly recommend the Green version. The colors are labeled Blue, Blue-Green, and Green, but really, Blue = Deep Blue, Blue Green = Deep Blue with a Slight Green Tinge, and Green = Actual Blue Green. Green for me looks nicest in deeper water features, since you can really see the nice green to blue transition, and it also plays nicely with shallow water features like creeks and ponds, where a more obvious green tinge is desirable.
For settings, wave height 30 in MGE XE looks best for me. It's calm enough to not look out of place in shallow water features, but it still gives a slight impression of rolling open water when looking at larger bodies of water. It also doesn't clip through the ground in areas like Seyda Neen. It's a compromise, but I like it.
For scummy ponds, I recommend using a transparent scum mesh that comes with a scum replacer (like from Epic Plants or a dedicated scum replacer), but disabling the textures that come with those. As with stock water, partially transparent scum textures look really bad with this water. I've tried basically all the scum textures, and the best one I've found is the scum texture from Morrowind Enhanced Textures (which I use with the Epic Plants scum meshes). It looks high quality, but it has a translucent green layer that mostly hides the water beneath, only letting the moving water below show a tiny bit.
The only downside I've found to the stock shader settings is the stormy weather foam setting. I like the idea in theory, but in practice, it creates a shimmering effect that rolls over the water during storms, which is very apparent during dark weather, which I find quite immersion-breaking. However, this is easily fixable. Go to the shader's files in your mod manager and open shaders\core-mods\XE Mod Water.fx in a text editor. Find this line:
static const float wavefoamstrn = 0.795; // stormy weather wave foam strength; default: 0.795
And change it to:
static const float wavefoamstrn = 0.0; // stormy weather wave foam strength; default: 0.795
This will completely disable the storm crest effect while leaving the other foam effects (which I quite like) alone. With all of these tweaks, I've been really enjoying this shader.
Then click on the Filetree tab in the window that pops up, if it doesn't start there.
Then navigate to the texture you want to disable (probably found in the Textures folder, though it may be elsewhere), right click it, and click Hide. This will hide the file from the game without deleting it, so it won't be loaded, but you can come back and reenable it by clicking Unhide later.
static const float watcolstr = 1
to a lower value, in XE mod water.fx. MGE's water has less of a tint so playing around with that value might make the water look more like vanilla MGE.
Edit: I tried regenerating distant land, i've copied the xe water mod and underwater fx docs into the core, core-mod, and xe shader directories all under data files/shaders and i still cant make these damn waves show up
I've noticed, though, that this seems to make the water level drop?
Which has made me realise the vanilla water level was dropped by MGE XE already, but this seems to have dropped it further.
Just wondering whether this is only a me issue, or just something these mods do?