This mod, while functional, is currently not supported. I released a new grass mod on the Nexus, a little cleaner and alot more performance friendly, which can be found here.
News -v1.3 released. Changes to tundra and forest region for even better looks (at least I think so). Check v1.3 Screenshots. Default version has no green tundra anymore, I feel like a main version should stay closer to vanilla and not force anything on the mod user. Green tundra version in optional file still available. -Sorry to Windows 7 users, I still have to find a way. Texture conversion tools won't allow me to get the BC7 textures needed for Windows 7 compatibility.
After some walks in snowy area, I never saw Vel_Snowgrass02, Vel_Snowgrass03 and Vel_Snowgrass07 but Vel_Snowgrass14 is everywhere. I did something wrong ?
You're doing nothing wrong, I think these ones grow more often because they are the nicer looking ones, that is why I cranked up their density when I build the mod..
Any chance of getting a "lite" or downsized version of this mod, maybe with lower textures/less triangles? I have a Ryzen 5 2600 / 16 GB / Gtx 1660 and this mod lags the heck out of my game especially outside of Whiterun. This is IMO the best grass overhaul there is - I find other overhauls tend to make grass too lush whereas this fits Skyrim's climate perfectly and fits the vanilla appearance. Anyways this mod looks great.
I am in fact working on a new grass mod for a while which will release today or tomorrow, it will be alot more performance friendly, it is using simpler meshes and filling textures (to tackle the complaints about this mod, and fixing some other things).
It will be with somewhat taller grass though, I don't know if you will like it or if it will be too lush then. I made grass taller now because since we are able to draw grass beyond the cell border now it is not necessary anymore to keep grass low in order to make it fade out naturally without visible seam, the same can be achieved now with taller grass and properly crafted mipmaps.
As for this one, it won't be updated for a while at least I fear, since I need a small grass break after releasing the new stuff :P Changing all meshes for this one might be possible but is definitly tedious.
Excited to see that you have a new grass mod. The screenshots look good, I'll have to give it a try even if the grass is taller (although it's interesting to learn about mods - I had no idea that's why this mod had shorter grass). And I totally understand if this one isn't updated for a while (or never). I still hope you update this mod eventually but I totally get being grassed-out or not wanting to deal with the tedium. Thanks for answering my question.
Perfect blend with skyland textures (i just removed every lanscape textures/meshes from vgo besides grass, well, i'm win7 user, so those textures cause ctd, no big deal to not use this :D)
only the grass from Reach area not fit well, beacuse grass look more like a tundra grass, should be more green, and maybe little more diversity too https://imgur.com/CYO0qMA https://imgur.com/KlKgZ7x
very nice mod, i'll use this one for a little longer (mainly because its a best tundra i've seen)
btw, i've tried your new grass overhaul, hmm... looks much worse, but i'm using no grassias mod (extended) and have imingrassize at 75, maybe thats the problem
If you use the new mod, you have to set iMinGrassSize alot lower (20 is default). Only then I would compare the two.
This mod here is definitly more diverse at the moment, and I love the tundra of this one aswell. Problem is many users said it is heavy on performance (which is partially true since complex meshes are used, but I think quite some people did not set up inis properly..). If you can run it, feel free to stick with it.
The new mod is more focused on achieving a dense and lush look with performance in mind, while this one focuses purely on diversity and detail at any cost.
i've spend some time to find if i can get the look i want with the new mod, and i've set iMinGrassSize to 60, 35 and finally to 20, and i've turned off "no grassias" mod in close range looks almost the same, well, not exactly, but in every case i felt like i was walking on almost empty terrain between sparse clumps of grass far range was cool, with 35 and then 20 it was visible change with density so, vgo is ok, little probem for me with the Reach, and in one place between glaciers i saw a marshland grass, strange but i can live with that :D i always had potato pc, so playing with less than 25 fps and some stuttering in cities or other heavy modded places is quite normal :)
I think when there is marshgrass for glaciers that is problem of the game's landscape, hard to change with grass mod.
Yea, the new mod is less dense in close-up view but looks dense at far range. It's a "trick" by using mip-maps correctly, and it allows to gain ridicolous good performance. VGO on the other hand is real dense even close-up.
Hi, Velanimus, I'm remodding my Skyrim SE as I built myself a new Super PC so now's the time I waited for long, A "Balls To The Wall" extreme skyrim se modding. Seen that yours is the most demanding so that a go haha, of course i'm taking it cause it seem the most beautiful, on my old modding sets I were using Verdant.
So 40 in the INI is only for screenarchery or it actually playable?, what you would suggest for my PC specs and my most hungry mods already installed:
I9 9900K - 64GB Ram 3.6ghz - RTX 2080TI - Base game installed with all my other games on a raid0 triple sata SSD WD Red. and MO2 and all the mods on a dedicated NVMe SSD wd black used only for that.
Already istalled, a lots of fixes and minor stuffs, the bigger ones are: Noble skyrim 2k + 2018-2019-2020 parallax by pfuscher + 8k for some landscapes by pfuscher Skyrim 3D Trees & Plants + always different 3d trees with 4K + parallax by pfuscher SMIM of course Majestic Mountains Cathedral Really Blended Roads Better Dynamic snow + fix for road, mountain etc
It run on both ENB and Reshade togeder + stereoscopic 3D and I'll check to add Ray Tracing.
I take it your question refers to iMinGrassSize? Your specs are huge, but still I wouldn't go below 54-60. Anything below will just stack grass patches on top of each other and kill performance without measurable gain in visual fidelity. If you want to have fitting ground textures for the grass (this mod ships those aswell), make sure my mod overwrites ground textures from other mods. It comes down to personal preference though.
Good, I used 60 as it was your suggestion for Ultra, but I not got any good results, it go very well I don't lag but it horrible visualy, something iswrong cause it nowhere like your pictures, observed 2 main thing and took pictures of;
First the worse thing is all the "spikes" that come from the grass from a medium to long distances witch completly broke the visuals as you can see. https://prnt.sc/vryxx7 https://prnt.sc/vrywe9 https://prnt.sc/vrywnq https://prnt.sc/vryx4b 2nd: theses blue patch of flowers just show when I'm very near and vanish after a go back a few meters witch is also sad. here you'll see as I aproach: https://prnt.sc/vryyq7 https://prnt.sc/vryywq https://prnt.sc/vryz3b I tested this today with only the minimum base mods, like skse, engine fixes etc, no graphics mods at all shader or textures etc exepts your grass and started a new game, so I'm kinda in a dead-end here. I've this in my INIs:
This was asked previously. I found out by now that the lines are an artefact that arise from mip map generation (textures that are close but have steep camera angle towards camera use small mip map. These small mip map have non-transparent color data at great height, and the mesh is also high (the closer textures are just fully transparent in the upper half of the texture), thats why you see those grass lines going up that far. While i find those lines actually neat in the distance, i agree they are distracting up close. It will be fixed in the next version / next mod i started working on a little, but it takes time. Fixing it for all those textures in this mod would be too much work unfortunately, as it requires manual mip map editing for every texture.
Snow grass fades out early intentionally, i used low alpha test coverage upon mip map generation, because i found no way to set up snow grass without having an ugly line in the distance, where grass stops to render (very visible in the snowy regions where you can see far). If you dont like the snow grass and prefer bare snow texture, simply get rid (or set to density 0) of the snow textures in Tes5Edit (the entries named Vel_Snowgrass01-15)
Cool, at least it mean my set is ok, the problem is even in the distance the "no-alpha" artefacts seem to go mostly all vertical untextured straight line of the same color witch look unatural for the grass even if it a line of only one pixel wide. The medium range stay the worse of course as the lines go all angles witch cause the illusion sometime that there some long herbs and you go forward and nope just shorter grass.
If it too much work, maybe I could help if you are ok with that. In fact I made my PC not just for (overkill) gamings but as a combo gaming / graphic workstation. Not worked mipmaps for a time but I could refresh that with you, and start with a batch of the more present ones inworld.
That is very kind of you, but the only solution would be to manually go through hundreds of textures (= thousands of mipmaps) In Photoshop/GIMP and erase spots in the upper half of each picture that could lead to the artifact. I am in fact doing some manual tweaks in mipmaps for a new project i started, but i think it is too rough to go through the process for this mod, given the number of textures..
To make it clear for you, I drew a completly unrealistic mipmap2 for this texture by hand. Now if you load this texture in game onto a grass model, when your camera is exactly at a distance or angle (BOTH influence which mipmap is used) displaying this very mipmap, you would see ugly artifact. The 'line artifact' we talked about is actually a grass surface applying a mipmap with color information from the very bottom to the very top of the texture. Because usually my grass paintings in the textures dont go up to the top end of the texture and the ingame meshes are thus fully transparent and not visible at the top, this 'line' suddenly appears higher than it should. The faulty grass surface looks like a line because it only loads the faulty mipmaps at very steep camera angels, hence the problem is settled in the very small mipmaps.. not mipmap2, more like mipmap8-11. You have to understand that mipmap10 is only four pixels and the last mipmap is only one pixel because mipmap series decreases as geometric series (512x512, 256x256, etc). If e.g. mipmap11 has clear color information and not enough transparency you would always see a line if it gets loaded ingame, because it is not transparent at top obviously. I am pretty sure other grass mods have the same issue occasionally, it is a little more visually noticable on my mod because I use meshes with alot of surfaces (for realistic grass sprouts). Mipmaps are also the reason why it is totally stupid to use textures greater than 1k or max. 2k for pretty much anything ingame, because you never see the actual full resolution, but people dont know that (or the play at FOV 30 and press their nose against everything they run past ;)). Of course you can use textures without mipmaps but then you get insane flickering because the gpu has to decide which avg. color a pixel on your monitor screen receives based on thousands of pixels input from a texture that is far away but gets loaded in full resolution, and gpu is making artifacts from that.
Fix would be to redo/ go through all mipmaps and figure out what are the faulty ones, or maybe more efficiently, find the faulty textures by identifying the model ingame. And then make those ones transparent at upper regions. But since i started working on a new mod fixing such issues, believe me it is not worth it diggin to far here, given the number of textures. However, I really appreciate your interest and willingness to help out, most mod users don't wanna know how things work, so this is really welcome :)
Thank you very much to take the time for this explaination, I like creating myself (not did any mod here yet) but did 3D and texturing for other platforms. So yeah I like to know how thing works. Started with Quake III with GTK Radiant long ago then the Source Engine, wanted to learn Unreal Engine 4 but never took the time yet, I know very well the SL by Lindenlab engine as well as it mostly on that that I do 3 layer textures with "materials" theses time (diffuse, normal, specular) or simple alphas with 32 bit texture or more complexes one with fusion masks where I can do clothings that can be added pieces by pieces to save all possible combo like for a lingeries set.
I'll try to finish my modding as now I'm at the point where the loot sugested order is not enought and got to manually place some at the bottom each time. When I'm done we could de a video featuring your updated grasses, on my machine I should be able to rec an ultra setting while keeping a 60+fps.
By the way what are the lines in INIs for where the grass begin to fade and the one for the distance where it completly gone, I might want to put it further. same for the Lods but I wait until the end of my modding to works on the lods.
I am not an expert myself, grass & texture mods are among the simpler things to do, it is a hobby and learning by doing for me. However the time spent on modding Skyrim has given me some experience how things work in the game.
Regarding the ini settings, allow me to just quote from my description page:
"fGrassStartFadeDistance determines at which distance grass will start to build a gradient of decreasing density up to the distance determined by fGrassFadeRange. It makes sense to use this gradient as there is no point having high density far away from the player, it is wasted performance. fGrassMaxStartFadeDistance determines the distance at which grass that is already loaded will fade out again. fGrassMinStartFadeDistance is believed to be unused by the game."
What you should certainly check out regarding grass distance is the mod "no grass in objects" by meh321, the mod actually does more than the name implies. It is a plugin that has, among others, a feature to load grass beyond the Ugrids-line, which is pretty much a game breaker (since we are forced to stick with Ugrids5 in Skyrim, as everything higher creates risk for long-term game-saves through malfunctioning scripts and other reasons). DynDolod ultra tree feature already made it possible to replace ugly 2D-tree LODs, now there is also the possibility that grass is loaded further to smoothly cover the ugly transition from loaded cell to unloaded cell. Such features are badly needed, since the game is from 2011 and the engine gives some limitations of how far one can go visually (even if there are super hungry ENB shaders, they cannot make it pretty from every angel when you have ugly LODs in your face). Keep in mind that the grass extension setting from meh is thus far a bit clunky to use, you have to pre-cache grass to not run into instability and random CTD. This takes a while and the cache only lasts if you dont change any mods that influence grass in any way.
I would surely appreciate a video of the new mod once it is finished, however it needs quite some time, I am still working on the first region and testing things. The new mod also specifically has this increased grass distance from meh321 in mind and i create mipmaps that look good from afar.
Hello, I'm having an issue, grass just wont appear at all. I remember having this issue the last time I tried this mod but can't remember how I solved it. Needless to say I also disabled the grasscontrol mod, tried a cell change, started a new game, loading velanimus last in load order, loading velanimus last in MO2.
edit: after running the game with only velanimus active it seems to be a mod incompatiblity, no clue what could be causing this though.
Have you set your ini files according to the description? This mod works pretty much like any other grass mod. It's hard to troubleshoot this without further info, but i can pretty much assure you it is not the fault of this mod. Maybe check in TES5Edit if something overwrites this mod?
I've got no idea whats causing this, I did set my files accordingly. I'll check it out in tes5 edit when I bother too. although I didn't have any other mods installed I was surprisingly enough not getting an fps loss, so that was nice. I also found an LOD that actaully makes it look as if there is grass on the ground, so the distance looks alot better. All that said I was actually not losing any fps with mysetup and kynes grass installed when using about double the vanilla grass distance with grass controls.
edit: it's suprising how much the engine is still holding our graphics back, I never go above 45% on my gpu or cpu.
from the performance hit, i am going to say that the grasses, do in fact, not, have mipmaps. giving the grasses mipmaps would probably make this mod lossless in performance. atleast thats the result from experience.
Yeah i noticez this after checking myself aswell as just reading through the description again. I did actually reply to this comment after reading that you were actually working on it. Do you know why the perfomance hit of this mod is so huge? I tested it out on the whiterun plains and went from a steady 60 to somewhere around 20-30.
The mod is mostly using high quality meshes (meaning lots of triangles) which look less 2D at the spot where the grass grows from the ground, as opposed to simpler meshes often occuring in other grass mods.
This combined with high ini settings which i recommend in description gives a good performance hit, no doubt. How ever, the mod is crafted in a way that you should be able to reduce grass density quite a bit if you are not happy with the performance, and still obtain nice looking results. I don't know why hardly anyone tries to lower inis according to my description and instead complains about performance :( This is probably the most in-depth grass mod on the nexus with regards to matching grass-ground and grass-fade transitioning by carefully adjusted mipmaps. The problem is hardly anyone is interested in these aesthetics attributes, people prefer fat juicy grass patches, even if they look like horrible, unnaturally patchy pixels growing out of ground in the distance.
If I recall correctly this mod also, adjusts the landscape texture to match the grass, meaning it wont have that ugly ass pop-in that it usually does. gonna give it a new try after this convo and try to lower it, but with the release with grasscontrol by meh321 matching landscape to grass may not be required anymore, even though it looks alot better, as the new grasscontrol is supposed to extend drawing distance to unloaded cells.
This mod adjust landscape and even LOD textures aswell to give a single fit. However, within the scope of vanilla/cathedral weathers (i used the latter). Fancy weather mods and/or ENBs alter the image space with brutality - this also affects the color fit between grass and ground textures, nothing i can do about.
What you tell me about this modification of grass draw distance / colorization by meh sounds very interesting, is it out already, where can I find it? I took a long break from Skyrim, just started looking at it today again a little bit ;) Hence my answer to your comments
However, drawing grass beyond Ugridsborder, while sounding fun, doesnt make much sense. The engine is using the smallest mipmap for textures at this point, you see no details in the grass, just blocky pixels or nothing (depending on settings upon mip map creation). Its an engine limitation. If you use textures with no mip maps you get extremly sexy screenshots, but there is brutal flickering as the high res textures in the distance all overlap and fight for 1 pixel of your computer screen. (Well, if you use a 5k monitor you might still see details maybe...)
yes the grasscontrol mod is out already. I havent tested out the extended draw distance as its supposedly unstable and can cause crashes but I am going to try it with and without velanimus now. bu drawing into unloaded cells, I only mean this is possible, I believe the mod uses the settings in your ini to decide how far it should draw, currently I am going to try twice the vanilla distance which I think is 36000
Keep in mind that this will hardly impact my mod, because my mip maps are designed in a way that they will naturally fade out at distance (approximately when getting close to the UGrids5 border). You will still get the performance impact because the meshes will load beyond the border, but you will not really see the textures. Better try another mod with this new meh-feature ;)
Thanks for giving me a heads up to mehs work on beating the engine, though :) Maybe I'll get back to grasses when I find the time, making another mod with some new ideas, and good performance out of the box. I learned alot from making this one, i was just exhausted after it was finished. But it needs time.
One of the best grass mods i have ever seen. For me it doesn't have much effect on performance, unless I use Ultra .ini settings from description. For me .ini sweet spot is; fGrassFadeRange = 10000 iMinGrassSize = 60 Other settings doesn't effect performance so im using settings from description. Btw I was using "Realistic Grass Field" with "iMinGrassSize = 30" when i switched to this i just got 1 less fps.
I've got a GTX 1660 8gb V-ram... Gorgeous but takes a big toll on my fps, my gpu couldn't take it, went down to 25 fps. If you have the specs to handle this I'd highly recommend it.
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-v1.3 released. Changes to tundra and forest region for even better looks (at least I think so). Check v1.3 Screenshots. Default version has no green tundra anymore, I feel like a main version should stay closer to vanilla and not force anything on the mod user. Green tundra version in optional file still available.
-Sorry to Windows 7 users, I still have to find a way. Texture conversion tools won't allow me to get the BC7 textures needed for Windows 7 compatibility.
It's normal with this mod, or how i can fix it?
I did something wrong ?
Thanks you ! :)
It will be with somewhat taller grass though, I don't know if you will like it or if it will be too lush then. I made grass taller now because since we are able to draw grass beyond the cell border now it is not necessary anymore to keep grass low in order to make it fade out naturally without visible seam, the same can be achieved now with taller grass and properly crafted mipmaps.
As for this one, it won't be updated for a while at least I fear, since I need a small grass break after releasing the new stuff :P Changing all meshes for this one might be possible but is definitly tedious.
only the grass from Reach area not fit well, beacuse grass look more like a tundra grass, should be more green, and maybe little more diversity too
https://imgur.com/CYO0qMA
https://imgur.com/KlKgZ7x
very nice mod, i'll use this one for a little longer (mainly because its a best tundra i've seen)
btw, i've tried your new grass overhaul, hmm... looks much worse, but i'm using no grassias mod (extended) and have imingrassize at 75, maybe thats the problem
This mod here is definitly more diverse at the moment, and I love the tundra of this one aswell. Problem is many users said it is heavy on performance (which is partially true since complex meshes are used, but I think quite some people did not set up inis properly..). If you can run it, feel free to stick with it.
The new mod is more focused on achieving a dense and lush look with performance in mind, while this one focuses purely on diversity and detail at any cost.
in close range looks almost the same, well, not exactly, but in every case i felt like i was walking on almost empty terrain between sparse clumps of grass
far range was cool, with 35 and then 20 it was visible change with density
so, vgo is ok, little probem for me with the Reach, and in one place between glaciers i saw a marshland grass, strange but i can live with that :D
i always had potato pc, so playing with less than 25 fps and some stuttering in cities or other heavy modded places is quite normal :)
Yea, the new mod is less dense in close-up view but looks dense at far range. It's a "trick" by using mip-maps correctly, and it allows to gain ridicolous good performance. VGO on the other hand is real dense even close-up.
So 40 in the INI is only for screenarchery or it actually playable?, what you would suggest for my PC specs and my most hungry mods already installed:
I9 9900K - 64GB Ram 3.6ghz - RTX 2080TI - Base game installed with all my other games on a raid0 triple sata SSD WD Red. and MO2 and all the mods on a dedicated NVMe SSD wd black used only for that.
Already istalled, a lots of fixes and minor stuffs, the bigger ones are:
Noble skyrim 2k + 2018-2019-2020 parallax by pfuscher + 8k for some landscapes by pfuscher
Skyrim 3D Trees & Plants + always different 3d trees with 4K + parallax by pfuscher
SMIM of course
Majestic Mountains Cathedral
Really Blended Roads
Better Dynamic snow + fix for road, mountain etc
It run on both ENB and Reshade togeder + stereoscopic 3D and I'll check to add Ray Tracing.
so that about it :-)
Thanks for checking out this mod! :)
First the worse thing is all the "spikes" that come from the grass from a medium to long distances witch completly broke the visuals as you can see.
https://prnt.sc/vryxx7
https://prnt.sc/vrywe9
https://prnt.sc/vrywnq
https://prnt.sc/vryx4b
2nd: theses blue patch of flowers just show when I'm very near and vanish after a go back a few meters witch is also sad.
here you'll see as I aproach:
https://prnt.sc/vryyq7
https://prnt.sc/vryywq
https://prnt.sc/vryz3b
I tested this today with only the minimum base mods, like skse, engine fixes etc, no graphics mods at all shader or textures etc exepts your grass and started a new game, so I'm kinda in a dead-end here. I've this in my INIs:
Skyrim.ini
[Grass]
bAllowCreateGrass=1
bAllowLoadGrass=0
fGrassMaxStartFadeDistance=18000.0000
fGrassMinStartFadeDistance=0.0000
bDrawShaderGrass=1
fGrassFadeRange=13400
fGrassWindMagnitudeMax=125
fGrassWindMagnitudeMin=5
iGrassCellRadius=2
iMaxGrassTypesPerTexure=15
iMinGrassSize=60
Skyrimpref.ini
[Grass]fGrassStartFadeDistance=2360.0000
fGrassMaxStartFadeDistance=18000.0000
fGrassMinStartFadeDistance=0.0000
So what do you think, did you aleady seen these graphics artefacts?
Snow grass fades out early intentionally, i used low alpha test coverage upon mip map generation, because i found no way to set up snow grass without having an ugly line in the distance, where grass stops to render (very visible in the snowy regions where you can see far). If you dont like the snow grass and prefer bare snow texture, simply get rid (or set to density 0) of the snow textures in Tes5Edit (the entries named Vel_Snowgrass01-15)
If it too much work, maybe I could help if you are ok with that. In fact I made my PC not just for (overkill) gamings but as a combo gaming / graphic workstation. Not worked mipmaps for a time but I could refresh that with you, and start with a batch of the more present ones inworld.
https://ibb.co/F8hbDGf
To make it clear for you, I drew a completly unrealistic mipmap2 for this texture by hand. Now if you load this texture in game onto a grass model, when your camera is exactly at a distance or angle (BOTH influence which mipmap is used) displaying this very mipmap, you would see ugly artifact. The 'line artifact' we talked about is actually a grass surface applying a mipmap with color information from the very bottom to the very top of the texture. Because usually my grass paintings in the textures dont go up to the top end of the texture and the ingame meshes are thus fully transparent and not visible at the top, this 'line' suddenly appears higher than it should. The faulty grass surface looks like a line because it only loads the faulty mipmaps at very steep camera angels, hence the problem is settled in the very small mipmaps.. not mipmap2, more like mipmap8-11. You have to understand that mipmap10 is only four pixels and the last mipmap is only one pixel because mipmap series decreases as geometric series (512x512, 256x256, etc). If e.g. mipmap11 has clear color information and not enough transparency you would always see a line if it gets loaded ingame, because it is not transparent at top obviously.
I am pretty sure other grass mods have the same issue occasionally, it is a little more visually noticable on my mod because I use meshes with alot of surfaces (for realistic grass sprouts).
Mipmaps are also the reason why it is totally stupid to use textures greater than 1k or max. 2k for pretty much anything ingame, because you never see the actual full resolution, but people dont know that (or the play at FOV 30 and press their nose against everything they run past ;)). Of course you can use textures without mipmaps but then you get insane flickering because the gpu has to decide which avg. color a pixel on your monitor screen receives based on thousands of pixels input from a texture that is far away but gets loaded in full resolution, and gpu is making artifacts from that.
Fix would be to redo/ go through all mipmaps and figure out what are the faulty ones, or maybe more efficiently, find the faulty textures by identifying the model ingame. And then make those ones transparent at upper regions. But since i started working on a new mod fixing such issues, believe me it is not worth it diggin to far here, given the number of textures. However, I really appreciate your interest and willingness to help out, most mod users don't wanna know how things work, so this is really welcome :)
I'll try to finish my modding as now I'm at the point where the loot sugested order is not enought and got to manually place some at the bottom each time. When I'm done we could de a video featuring your updated grasses, on my machine I should be able to rec an ultra setting while keeping a 60+fps.
By the way what are the lines in INIs for where the grass begin to fade and the one for the distance where it completly gone, I might want to put it further. same for the Lods but I wait until the end of my modding to works on the lods.
Regarding the ini settings, allow me to just quote from my description page:
"fGrassStartFadeDistance determines at which distance grass will start to build a gradient of decreasing density up to the distance determined by fGrassFadeRange. It makes sense to use this gradient as there is no point having high density far away from the player, it is wasted performance. fGrassMaxStartFadeDistance determines the distance at which grass that is already loaded will fade out again. fGrassMinStartFadeDistance is believed to be unused by the game."
What you should certainly check out regarding grass distance is the mod "no grass in objects" by meh321, the mod actually does more than the name implies. It is a plugin that has, among others, a feature to load grass beyond the Ugrids-line, which is pretty much a game breaker (since we are forced to stick with Ugrids5 in Skyrim, as everything higher creates risk for long-term game-saves through malfunctioning scripts and other reasons). DynDolod ultra tree feature already made it possible to replace ugly 2D-tree LODs, now there is also the possibility that grass is loaded further to smoothly cover the ugly transition from loaded cell to unloaded cell. Such features are badly needed, since the game is from 2011 and the engine gives some limitations of how far one can go visually (even if there are super hungry ENB shaders, they cannot make it pretty from every angel when you have ugly LODs in your face).
Keep in mind that the grass extension setting from meh is thus far a bit clunky to use, you have to pre-cache grass to not run into instability and random CTD. This takes a while and the cache only lasts if you dont change any mods that influence grass in any way.
I would surely appreciate a video of the new mod once it is finished, however it needs quite some time, I am still working on the first region and testing things. The new mod also specifically has this increased grass distance from meh321 in mind and i create mipmaps that look good from afar.
edit: after running the game with only velanimus active it seems to be a mod incompatiblity, no clue what could be causing this though.
Good luck
edit: it's suprising how much the engine is still holding our graphics back, I never go above 45% on my gpu or cpu.
source:: https://www.reddit.com/r/skyrimmods/comments/ik8hcz/a_review_of_grass_performance_studies_resolution/
This combined with high ini settings which i recommend in description gives a good performance hit, no doubt. How ever, the mod is crafted in a way that you should be able to reduce grass density quite a bit if you are not happy with the performance, and still obtain nice looking results. I don't know why hardly anyone tries to lower inis according to my description and instead complains about performance :( This is probably the most in-depth grass mod on the nexus with regards to matching grass-ground and grass-fade transitioning by carefully adjusted mipmaps. The problem is hardly anyone is interested in these aesthetics attributes, people prefer fat juicy grass patches, even if they look like horrible, unnaturally patchy pixels growing out of ground in the distance.
What you tell me about this modification of grass draw distance / colorization by meh sounds very interesting, is it out already, where can I find it?
I took a long break from Skyrim, just started looking at it today again a little bit ;) Hence my answer to your comments
However, drawing grass beyond Ugridsborder, while sounding fun, doesnt make much sense. The engine is using the smallest mipmap for textures at this point, you see no details in the grass, just blocky pixels or nothing (depending on settings upon mip map creation). Its an engine limitation. If you use textures with no mip maps you get extremly sexy screenshots, but there is brutal flickering as the high res textures in the distance all overlap and fight for 1 pixel of your computer screen.
(Well, if you use a 5k monitor you might still see details maybe...)
fGrassFadeRange = 10000
iMinGrassSize = 60
Other settings doesn't effect performance so im using settings from description.
Btw I was using "Realistic Grass Field" with "iMinGrassSize = 30" when i switched to this i just got 1 less fps.