I have done a lot and lot of ingame comparisons and I got to this conclusion: I'm just going to stick with Qarl textures pack III for the old and dusty feeling they give to Ayleid ruins (they are called ruins after all).
Lougians are actually quite good if you are looking for that feel. Although i want to say that Ayleid ruins were made by elves, so not that weird that it would be a bit "magical".
Top job, mate! These textures look awesome. It shows that you've had full control of normal maps (meaning the bumps are where YOU want them to be, not just where the program you use has decided to place them), and diffuse maps look just like the all-time-favourite (until now) QTP3 but much better quality - hence from now on yours are the all-time-favourite Thank you very much for your neat and creative work.
I can't say for certain, since I don't have Qarl's textures downloaded at the moment (been reinstalling things), but from the relative sizes, yes, I believe these textures are at least twice the resolution of Qarl's.
The thing about Qarl's dungeon textures, and any typical texture replacer really, is that while they are technically the same size (2048x204, the majority of the textures are just the 512x512 originals resized, and then a detail overlay has been added on top. It gives the impression of more detail with tiny scratches and such, but the brunt of the texture with things like edges around blocks and other fine details are still just as blurry and low-res as they were before. You can only go so far using that additive method. I attempt to take things a step further by relying as little as I can on the original textures as a basis, and instead create new textures from scratch using natively high resolution photo sources.
Look here at a comparison of first the original, then Qarl, then my own version:
http://abload.de/img/arstone03v2ueo.jpg
As you can see when fully zoomed in, the stone edges and the grime on the surface is still just as blurry as the original. It has more sharp detail laid on top, but the whole thing is still really bottlenecked by the former stuff.
Another thing I try to avoid are normal maps that are overly detailed and noisy. This is another common trope among texture mods and I think it gets really distracting and unnatural in certain lighting conditions, so I make an effort to be more conservative about it.
These look beautiful! I'll have to figure out some way to allow Oblivion to use different textures for each ruin so I don't have to choose one retexture over the other (hopefully without having to make another set of nifs)
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Thank you very much for your neat and creative work.
I hope you will continue to add more of your work to Oblivion.
Look here at a comparison of first the original, then Qarl, then my own version:
http://abload.de/img/arstone03v2ueo.jpg
As you can see when fully zoomed in, the stone edges and the grime on the surface is still just as blurry as the original. It has more sharp detail laid on top, but the whole thing is still really bottlenecked by the former stuff.
Another thing I try to avoid are normal maps that are overly detailed and noisy. This is another common trope among texture mods and I think it gets really distracting and unnatural in certain lighting conditions, so I make an effort to be more conservative about it.
(hopefully without having to make another set of nifs)