VERY IMPORTANT NOTICE
PLEASE, DO NOT RUN ANY AUTOMATIC TEXTURE OPTIMISING TOOLS ON THIS MOD. IT WILL RADICALLY DECREASE THIS MOD'S QUALITY. MY MOD IS OPTIMIZED FROM RELEASE. THE TEXTURES ARE SAVED WITH DXT5 COMPRESSION ON PURPOSE. YOU WANT SHINY, GLOSSY, TRANSLUCENT ICE? THEN LEAVE IT AS IT IS.

This is a simple yet dramatic visual overhaul of the glacier landscape in GrandDukeAdense's Jerall Glacier mod (one of Unique Landscapes series).

It not only re-touches textures, but also introduces many changes to meshes - in their properties and sometimes UV-maps. Thanks to careful manipulation now your ice blocks will be translucent, but not transparent; colourless like water, but with strong blue reflections which change intensity and hue, depending on weather. They're not more slippery (at least for now), but definitely look so. Frozen bodies of water now really look frozen, and make use of a slightly pimped-up xrayy's texture (you can find the original one here).
I hope that this little contribution enhances your amazement in this beautiful part of Cyrodiil.

For the glacier I used a wonderful texture courtesy of Yuril and his Real Ice mod for Skyrim, which me and xrayy slightly modified to make it look excellent also on Gamebryo engine. There's also another glacier texture based on Yuril's. Recently I've added a couple of land textures - one with snow predominant in this area, and the other one with frozen snow specific to the glacier vicinity. All of these come in 1024x1024 pixels resolution with a normal map the same size.

A texture for frozen lakes and ponds is twice as large (both diffuse and normal map) - I didn't want to tamper too much with it to preserve its original charm. I only threw in some frozen floating debris, tweaked the hue and opacity, and re-made the normal map based on the original.

Other than that the big part of visual impact comes from tweaking the meshes, so make sure you don't skip them in your installation.



To see this mod in all its glory you need to have UL-Jerall Glacier installed and active (either the standalone version, or as part of the available compilation).

It's a simple replacement, so there's no esp for Nice Ice.

I'm sure you know how to install a replacement, but in case you don't, ask and you'll be given. ;)

I strongly recommend thet you use Weather - All Natural for a staggering variety of weather conditions in which to watch your ice melt :)


Credits:
I've added xrayy as a co-author, because he has contributed many awesome solutions and great ideas to this mod. A big thank you, mate. It's a real pleasure to work with you. :)

- xrayy for HD jerall ice texture for lakes, and for many other contributions.
- Yuril for Real Ice and the wonderful ice texture I borrowed from that mod.
- MaureenOlder for beautiful leaves just below the frozen surface of lakes.
- GrandDukeAdense for UL-Jerall Glacier.
(Jerall Glacier can be downloaded as a part of BAIN-ready compilation of all Unique Landscapes)
- Momo77 for his/her icicles - studying these proved that one icicle is worth a thousand-words-tutorial ;)
- Nifskope team for Nifscope.
- Bethesda for a fascinating, wonderfully moddable game.