I recently discovered this mod and think that the Shrines are GORGEOUS, but after seeing how that they won't work with an ENB...I am not gonna be able to use these ingame :( Any idea if a fix will ever be done?
Likely not anytime soon. The ENB series does splits assets into two pipelines: with and without alpha transparencies. Everything in the alpha transparency pipeline will look transparent, ignoring alpha masks. The author of ENB series has said he's not going to change that.
So a fix is, I have to redo the meshes. Right now I'm overhauling my tileset for the Riften Cistern (The Hamster Way), to overhaul the Ragged Flagon for my upcoming expansion for Thieves' Night on the Town, which is also in the works. I've learnt a lot in the past years, so although I think I could do a good overhaul of Ren's work, specifically on the mesh side (her textures are great), it's very low on my priority list.
I had been using the other popular shrine textures for the longest time, until today when I decided to go through my modlist one by one to find what I could do without for a new playthrough. I got to my shrines mod, and made the call to at least take a look on here to see if anybody else had done work on the shrines. And by Zenithar, man, I am so so so glad I did lol. These look utterly magnificent in game, and I'm considering installing the 4k upscale now that I know how beautiful they all are. The fomod with variants was a perfect touch, because I was split basically half & half between the first and second options for all 9 shrines. Honestly though, I would've been happy without the extra options just the same, because every single texture looks brilliant.
My favorites so far have gotta be: Zenithar (the black and gold variant), who is also my favorite Divine so I'm biased toward liking his shrines lol , Talos (the darker greenish option), Dibella (the Autumn colors option), and Arkay (with the red interior--11/10 work on that one). Those are just the ones I've seen in game so far, and I'm really excited to see the rest now, especially Akatosh. Thank you times a million for this incredible work, I am incredibly grateful to be able to play with these new looks in my game.
Yeah, Ren did an outstanding work on the shrines. Way back in 2017 (roughly a year after SSE's release), I realized the vanilla shrines look so very ugly to my eyes. And since no one had ported Ren's, I did. A few days later, others contributed texture upscales, so clearly the community was interested in making Ren's vision of the shrines look even better (beefier graphics cards also helped, 2016 was like 3 generations later, vs. Oldrim's 2010 woes lol).
And now that I've learnt a bit of NifSkope and Blender, there's a mesh overhaul planned. Not higher polygon necessarily, but just using more advanced Nif features, notably separating the shapes to use different shader settings (plus maybe a bit of UV displacement here, and other cubemaps there, and maybe a bit of billboard over here...). And finally making the Mara shrine's holes actual holes and not transparent regions lol Maybe even use alpha settings that align with ENB's constrained pipelines.
Anyhow, the overhaul will be true to Ren's vision, just using more advanced features overall.
There have been some great shrine retextures recently but this one's still the best. Polytheistic shrines and temples, in ancient or modern times, have always been colourful, distinct and lavishly decorated, and this mod is all the more immersive for reflecting that. None of that Judeo-Christian uniformity! Thanks :)
I have a problem with both textures of Kynareth and Mara's shrines and with the "tusk of mercy" texture for Stendarr's, they're all transparent and I don't know whats causing the issue, I tried to reinstall multiple times the mod, i tried it alone on a vanilla start, these 3 shrines are always transparent. What could be the issue? Should I try to install it manually?
Do you have ENB on? If so, it's a known limitation of ENB, where meshes that contain any transparent component become entirely transparent. More details in the Bugs tab.
Hi, this is silly but I can't actually tell which one is vanilla and which is modded since I've never played before and the pictures don't say before/after or anything like that. Can you please tell me if this is the modded or vanilla one?
That one is introduced by the mod, Kynareth's Chocolate-Mint. Each shrine has two modded looks. The installer (via Vortex) will ask you which version you want in-game. It also displays the vanilla one, so you can swap the looks of only a subset of shrines.
The original art is all Rengel's, I just maintain the SSE port. It seems she's active on the Nexus again, so you could message her directly :) https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/users/8464415
Wow, this is absolutely fantastic. I have 400 mods and this is one of the best looking. I love those little details, very visually pleasing. The little petal and so on...
Edit: Ok, so I may have been too excited with my praise. It's still amazing, but there are a couple of quite big issues. Could you pls help me?
1) Either of the versions of Mara and either of Kynareth are TRANSPARENT for some reason. It's only like, 20% visible or so. Might be connected to another mod I have, but it's really difficult to say, as I have so many... when I turn on the lantern it gets more opaque but I guess that's just how transparency works in the game. So I had to switch these two to vanilla.
2) Same with Stendarr, but in this case only the version with milk (or whatever it is) is transparent. When I use the gold version, it's fine. So I switched to the gold version.
3) The anvil of Zenithar has a weird pixel bug. I read below the reply that it's supposed to be a bit "rough" due to the iron, but this really looks like a graphical error - you can actually see large pixelated squares. However, only in the chrome version. So I switched to Golden Circuit instead, which has no pixels.
Btw: This is not a technical issue, just a subjective opinion - Talos looks way too clean, it's out of place. Both versions. So this one I also switched back to vanilla.
Edit2: Ok, so seems someone posted the same issue and fix in the Oldrim page:
I guess I will try to fix it locally, though I never worked with this NifScope
Edit3: Ok, so the above works!!! For anyone having problems with transparency, open NifSkope, open the Kynareth, Mara and Stendarr mesh files, find something called "NiAlphaProperty" in the top left menu, right click on it and Remove. And save the file. Do it for all three. Boom works. Awesome!
Ren chose to add certain transparency elements to the shrines. For Mara, the holes in the carving are faked with transparency patches, idem for the water (yes, it is supposed to be water) in the horn of Stendarr. I believe she also added some light transparency to Kynareth's (though I could be mistaken). As such, deleting the NiAlphaProperty node removes those effects, as you can clearly see on the screenshots posted in the Oldrim forum you mention. While that's preferable to ghost-shrines, I'd rather do a proper fix.
This is a known issue, and I'm right now playing with Nifskope flags to get the models to render properly under ENB environments. There will probably be an update soon.
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So a fix is, I have to redo the meshes. Right now I'm overhauling my tileset for the Riften Cistern (The Hamster Way), to overhaul the Ragged Flagon for my upcoming expansion for Thieves' Night on the Town, which is also in the works. I've learnt a lot in the past years, so although I think I could do a good overhaul of Ren's work, specifically on the mesh side (her textures are great), it's very low on my priority list.
And by Zenithar, man, I am so so so glad I did lol. These look utterly magnificent in game, and I'm considering installing the 4k upscale now that I know how beautiful they all are. The fomod with variants was a perfect touch, because I was split basically half & half between the first and second options for all 9 shrines. Honestly though, I would've been happy without the extra options just the same, because every single texture looks brilliant.
My favorites so far have gotta be: Zenithar (the black and gold variant), who is also my favorite Divine so I'm biased toward liking his shrines lol
Those are just the ones I've seen in game so far, and I'm really excited to see the rest now, especially Akatosh.
Thank you times a million for this incredible work, I am incredibly grateful to be able to play with these new looks in my game.
And now that I've learnt a bit of NifSkope and Blender, there's a mesh overhaul planned. Not higher polygon necessarily, but just using more advanced Nif features, notably separating the shapes to use different shader settings (plus maybe a bit of UV displacement here, and other cubemaps there, and maybe a bit of billboard over here...). And finally making the Mara shrine's holes actual holes and not transparent regions lol Maybe even use alpha settings that align with ENB's constrained pipelines.
Anyhow, the overhaul will be true to Ren's vision, just using more advanced features overall.
https://staticdelivery.nexusmods.com/mods/1704/images/13572/13572-1510812205-1632205343.png
Thanks!
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/users/8464415
Edit: Ok, so I may have been too excited with my praise. It's still amazing, but there are a couple of quite big issues. Could you pls help me?
1) Either of the versions of Mara and either of Kynareth are TRANSPARENT for some reason. It's only like, 20% visible or so. Might be connected to another mod I have, but it's really difficult to say, as I have so many... when I turn on the lantern it gets more opaque but I guess that's just how transparency works in the game. So I had to switch these two to vanilla.
2) Same with Stendarr, but in this case only the version with milk (or whatever it is) is transparent. When I use the gold version, it's fine. So I switched to the gold version.
3) The anvil of Zenithar has a weird pixel bug. I read below the reply that it's supposed to be a bit "rough" due to the iron, but this really looks like a graphical error - you can actually see large pixelated squares. However, only in the chrome version. So I switched to Golden Circuit instead, which has no pixels.
Btw: This is not a technical issue, just a subjective opinion - Talos looks way too clean, it's out of place. Both versions. So this one I also switched back to vanilla.
Edit2: Ok, so seems someone posted the same issue and fix in the Oldrim page:
https://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?showtopic=1354160/#entry63501836
I guess I will try to fix it locally, though I never worked with this NifScope
Edit3: Ok, so the above works!!! For anyone having problems with transparency, open NifSkope, open the Kynareth, Mara and Stendarr mesh files, find something called "NiAlphaProperty" in the top left menu, right click on it and Remove. And save the file. Do it for all three. Boom works. Awesome!
This is a known issue, and I'm right now playing with Nifskope flags to get the models to render properly under ENB environments. There will probably be an update soon.