It is old, but also nobody has yet been able to figure out a reliable way to make fake water meshes look more like the water you see in the rest of the game.
The original distortion effects mod by Epoch already covered Vivec's palace. My intention is to mainly cover the water meshes from Tamriel Rebuilt and OAAB, but I can look into what's possible for the vanilla water meshes as well.
I encountered similar problems when I was adapting the OAAB streamGravel meshes, adding the Soft effect made everything see-thru. I had to settle for applying only the distortion effect over the water, instead.
An additional problem I had when testing the simpler single layer OAAB water meshes, is that their water textures are a lot darker, and so end up becoming much more transparent than the equivalent TR meshes when Soft effect is applied. Changing the alpha value in NiMaterialProperty has only a limited effect in helping with this.
You gotta make sure its applied to just the water trishape, but with these specific meshes the water is quite close to the other meshes so you will have to turn the soft effect depth way way down
You should put the distortion meshes into an NiLOD node and figure out a good distance to disable them, since as of right now the distortion is applied based on the viewer instead of the object so it becomes stronger the further away/smaller the object is and can cause bad artifacts. I haven't uploaded a fix for the Vivec water in my mod yet because I've just been busy with madness.
Hi, thanks for checking out the meshes I made. Models and textures are an area I don't have detailed knowledge of, so there was a bit of guesswork involved in duplicating your ideas into other meshes. Feel free to point out anything else you find I've overlooked.
I had already started experimenting with NiLOD's for performance reasons, as an example for the 1024x1024 mesh tr_water_sqflow1024.nif, I've currently settled on limiting the distortion to <4000 distance. For smaller meshes, I'll limit the distance even lower. Do these kind of numbers sound sensible to you?
For a decently large water body in my upcoming madness mod I put it even lower, at 1200 units with a distortion strength of 0.1, but with a higher strength you might want it even lower. I would experiment and pay attention to how the distortion changes as you get further away. For reference, a cell is 8192 units.
Lack of tr_water_cvflow1024_DG suggests you did it on release Tamriel Data. I edited most of water statics half a year ago to unify their UV tiling for seamless transitions. Please update to TD addon files if it's easy to do.
Hi, I used the files from Tamriel Data 10.1, since those are the files from the official public release. I had assumed that files from TD addon are for internal project use only, and not for public distribution. Is it okay to release modded versions of those files?
Do you know if these UV changes were also applied to the equivalent water meshes in OAAB data?
I am not sure if it's placebo or what but this seems to have fixed some weird aliasing I was getting in water reflections as well, but either way, thanks :)
This is great! Most of the TR water meshes are straight copies of the ones I made for OAAB_Data. Do you plan to update this to cover the rest of the OAAB meshes?
Yes, I do plan on doing that. I'm waiting to make sure the existing meshes I've made, don't have any issues with the various modded setups that people use.
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An additional problem I had when testing the simpler single layer OAAB water meshes, is that their water textures are a lot darker, and so end up becoming much more transparent than the equivalent TR meshes when Soft effect is applied. Changing the alpha value in NiMaterialProperty has only a limited effect in helping with this.
I had already started experimenting with NiLOD's for performance reasons, as an example for the 1024x1024 mesh tr_water_sqflow1024.nif, I've currently settled on limiting the distortion to <4000 distance. For smaller meshes, I'll limit the distance even lower. Do these kind of numbers sound sensible to you?
Do you know if these UV changes were also applied to the equivalent water meshes in OAAB data?
I am not sure if it's placebo or what but this seems to have fixed some weird aliasing I was getting in water reflections as well, but either way, thanks :)