I agree! So many years on, and Rengel's work remains such a distinct aesthetic. Some people prefer a more "realistic" look, but honestly, I like my fantasy game being fantastic here and there. Glad you're enjoying it!
imo, way better than JS Shrines simply for its appeal towards enhancing already existing meshes with a more colorful and fanciful option. More mod authors should just appeal to making vanilla more colorful and HD instead of turning it into a ridiculous ultra realistic experience like Lorerim.
If you're going to spend time very close to the shrines, the 4K will look better; if you don't approach them, there may be no difference in your playthrough, so the 2K would be enough.
Textures from the 2k version do not have mipmaps. Also there are nifs that have cubemaps without the enviroment mapping flags enabled to make the cubemap work. The talos nif has soft lighting that may cause it to look to bright, and some of the other ones have emissive on which will make it glow in the dark. Alpha properties are incorrect on the mara mesh. Uncheck enable blending, set alpha function to greater and alpha threshold to 128. Double sided flag can be added as well. There's also a paralax flag enabled on the multiparalax nifs that can be removed to. Thanks!
Hi there, thanks for the notes! The mod is a basic port of Ren's original, and in 2017 (good lords, time flies) I knew very little about Skyrim's shaders. I want to re-build this mod's meshes from scratch, now that I'm passable at Blender and decent with NifSkope. For one, the green Mara shrine mesh, as you flag, achieves the "holes" by using alpha transparency, rather than just having actual holes.
Anyhow, when I get to it, I'll go over the notes you post 😊
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 :)
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Does anyone recommend 2K or 4K for the shrines?
If you're going to spend time very close to the shrines, the 4K will look better; if you don't approach them, there may be no difference in your playthrough, so the 2K would be enough.
Anyhow, when I get to it, I'll go over the notes you post 😊
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.