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About this mod
This mod seeks to alleviate hideous stretched snow effects on vertical surfaces. Currently fixes stretched snow, ash, and ice at Castle Volkihar, Windhelm, Forts, Nord ruins, High Hrothgar, Thalmor Embassy, and anywhere else using the static meshes from these places. Should work with any mod using vanilla assets right out of the box, (hopefully).
- Requirements
- Permissions and credits
- Changelogs
The Stretched Snow Begone ESP should be placed at or near the bottom of your load order to ensure that it overwrites vanilla static meshes used by the base game and by mods to fix ugly snow. Please feel free to leave a comment if you notice a part of the game I missed, if you would like a patch made for a mod using custom meshes, or if you have a suggestion.
OVERVIEW.
OVERVIEW.
So, as you can see from the images above, snow that is on vertical surfaces for me appears be stretched and thus very unpleasant to look at and I know from my research in to fixing this problem that many others are also suffering from this as well so after spending so much time making this mod for my personal use I figured I might as well release it here too.
Now let me make this clear; this mod does not fix whatever is causing this problem, it simply makes the ugly snow on walls and other vertical surfaces look much better than they did before. Before I continue I want to thank a few people and offer some links down below to the people who made this mod possible.
Special thanks to MisterMorden and TechAngel85 on the StepModifications Forums for providing me with the answers as to what the problem is and what could be done to fix the problem. Article used and link to the article below.
"bEnableProjecteUVDiffuseNormals causing/exacerbatingstretched snow on vertical surfaces?"
https://stepmodifications.org/forum/topic/16485-benableprojecteuvdiffusenormals-causingexacerbating-stretched-snow-on-vertical-surfaces/
Also, special thanks to soupdragon1234 for the creation of the “Better Dynamic Snow - Experimental shader” which I used in part to create the snow material necessary for my mod to function as a bug fix for the snow stretching/stripping bug, version 2.50 and above.
Link for the “Better Dynamic Snow - Experimental shader” mod below.
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/20290?tab=description
Mod Features.
The mod currently fixes the stretched snow bug at Castle Volkihar, Windhelm, Imperial Forts, Nordic ruins, High Hrothgar, and Thalmor Embassy as well as fixing any subsequent location using the assets from these locations and should also fix any mod that used vanilla assets too without needing a patch. If you notice any vanilla locations I missed please leave a comment.There are currently patches for JK's Candlehearth, Thanedom Assets, The Great Cities, and The Great City of Winterhold (for both version 3.02 and 4.00). If you are using a mod that suffers from the stretched snow bug please leave a comment.
In addition, the mod also fixes stretched Ice from a few locations such as the Bloodlet Throne and stretched Ash from Fort Frostmoth and it also fixes issues with blood appearing on the ground in Windhelm.
Finally, the mod actually adds more snow to the vertical surfaces at Castle Volkihar, Windhelm, Imperial Forts, Nordic ruins, High Hrothgar, and Thalmor Embassy thus covering these places in snow so if you desire a snowier Skyrim this is the mod for you.
Side note, only parts of vertical surfaces will be covered in snow, if you reference my screen shots at High Hrothgar you'll see that one side is covered in show whereas the other isn't, but I encourage you to look at this as a feature and not as the bug it really is because in real life only the parts of building facing a snow storm will be covered in snow while the other side will be free of snow.
Place the Stretched Snow Begone.esp at the bottom of or near the bottom of your load order to ensure stretched snow elimination in the vanilla game and in mods using vanilla assets.
What causes this problem?
Apparently setting bEnableProjecteUVDiffuseNormals to 1 is the cause of the stretched/stripped snow effects on walls. Turning it off does fix the stretched/stripped snow at the cost, however, of causing its own problems such turning the snow on buildings far brighter than the snow on the ground. The snow on the walls looks OK, but the snow on the buildings doesn't match the snow on the ground and is very immersion breaking and will hurt your eyes depending on what other mods you are using.
So, since there is no way to get the snow to match without setting bEnableProjecteUVDiffuseNormals to 1, it has to be turned on, or you could use better dynamic snow or simplicity of snow instead, as both of those mods do what bEnableProjecteUVDiffuseNormals does, but then we are back at square one with the stretched/stripped snow effect on building.
In addition, it seems the snow texture you use could make the snow stretching/stripping worse if it has a projected diffuse file. I used fluffy snow in the images above and as you could see the stretching/stripping was very bad.
I did test a few other snow mods that I had previously used such as Nordic snow, Cathedral snow, Vivid snow and had mixed results. The snow mod that seemed to deal with the snow stretching/stripping problem the best without this mod was Skyrim 3D Landscapes Groundcovers.
How does this mod address this problem?
With the current version of this mod, v2.50 and above, I addressed the problem by creating a brand new snow material and placing that snow material on well over 500 static meshes. This snow material is an improved version of the “Better
Dynamic Snow - Experimental shader” by soupdragon1234, so special thanks to them for their hard work and for their willingness to allow others to use and improve on their work.
Link for the “Better Dynamic Snow - Experimental shader” mod below.
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/20290?tab=description
This new material basically puts the snow seen on vertical surfaces at an angle. When the snow materials are places on a surface vertically (going up and down) that’s when we see the stretched/stripped snow that we don’t see when the materials are placed on a surfaces horizontally (going left to right).
As silly of a solution as it is, simply placing the snow material at an angle makes for a much better looking snow material on walls and buildings. In addition to changing the materials I also had to change a few of the directional material of certain static meshes to make them look more presentable.
The older versions of the mod were cruder, I replaced all of the materials with the vanilla material “SnowMaterialWinterhold [MATO:00108A84]," because by its very nature that material put less snow on the walls which would allow me to easily blend or hide the ugly snow into the vertical surface they were on.
Of course, however, even with the latest fix, which is the best I’ve come up with so far, my fix isn’t perfect as some structures, such as imperial towers, will still kind of have these distorted stretched/stripped snow materials, only now at an angle. Sometimes even on the fixed surfaces, if you look closely, you can still see some stretched or ugly snow materials on walls.
It doesn’t look nearly as bad as the original materials, but it’s still not perfect and I wanted to be honest about the fact that it’s not and there are still improvements to be made and I do plan to make them when I can.
Compatibility and Requirements.
This mod does not require Better Dynamic Snow and Simplicity of Snow, but works with Better Dynamic Snow and Simplicity of Snow right out of the box if you want to use one of those mods, just allow my mod to overwrite those and everything should work.
This mod should work with any other mod that uses the vanilla meshes I have modified so long as my mod is allowed to overwrite those mods.
This mod was built with USSEP changes integrated to certain meshes, there weren’t many and as such this mod doesn’t require you to have USSEP in order to take advantage of these changes made by USSEP, see comments for exact answers as to what changes were integrated.
This mod was also built to work with Icy Windhelm by wizkid34 which I highly recommend as my mod already somewhat makes Windhelm look more frozen than usual so you might as well complete the package. If nothing else get a mod that puts snow on the ground in Windhelm, the ground in that city is rather ugly if you ask me.
Mods that add custom static meshes will need a patch, an example of a mod that is both compatible and requires a patch (which is now available) would be The Great City of Winterhold as it uses vanilla static meshes from Windhelm, which are compatible, and uses its own custom meshes, which are incompatible without a patch.
*It has been reported from a user of the mod that the Better Dynamic Snow Synthesis patcher overwrites the changes from this mod so if you want to use the BDS Synthesis Patcher either do not include my mod in the patcher or do not have my mod installed when you run the patcher and then install my mod after it is done.
*It has also been reported from a few users that if you use DYNDOLOD with Stretched Snow Begone that the DynDOLOD.esm, yes the esm not the esp, may override Stretched Snow Begone even though my mod is overwriting the DynDOLOD.esm. The exact problem that the users noted was that the Windhelm market, specifically the WHmarket02 static mesh, was still suffering from the stretched snow bug and the fix was to go into xEdit and to select the DynDOLOD.esm. Then to find the WHmarket02 static mesh entry and the WHmarket02_DynDOLOD_NOFLAG static mesh entry and then to copy those files into a new overriding esp and then to change the snow material entries of those meshes to SnowMaterialBlacklight. Special thanks to gades28 and darkrain261 for alerting me to this issue and for offering solutions to this issue.
To ensure the greatest chance of comparability always load my mod low in your load order so that it overwrites everything else. The scope of what this mod modifies is very limited; it changes the materials on certain meshes, occasionally the angle direction of certain materials, and 6 mesh lods carried over from USSEP, so it's safe for this mod to overwrite everything else.
The mod has no requirements other than to have the Dawnguard and Dragonborn masters. I am using the Anniversary edition of the game, I don't know nor do I think that would cause a problem for anyone using an older version of the game, but I thought I'd put it out there anyways.
Now, if you find something I missed please leave a comment telling me the location in game or uploading a photo showing me where the problem area is and I will try to fix it as quickly as possible. Also if the location is from a mod please tell me which mod it is as it may have custom static meshes.
Limitations
As I mentioned in the "How does this mod address this problem?" section, this mod is not a 100% fix for the stretched/stripped snow bug as, even with the mod installed, you will occasionally see stretched/stripped snow in some places with the worst being in Windhelm and at some Imperial Forts.
If you travel to the Palace of the Kings in Windhelm and look up you will notice quite a bit of stretched snow and unfortunately that can't be fixed without causing another problem. I attempted to apply my custom material to the static meshes for the Palace of the Kings and the stretched snow disappeared, but the occlusion planes seemed to have been messed up by this causing the scenery to disappear and the reappear if you used the side entrances to the courtyard of the palace. So I decided to leave the stretched snow alone there to avoid causing further problems.
If you travel to the docks in Windhelm you will notice that parts of the walls are fixed and devoid of stretched snow, but then other parts of the walls have some stretched snow as well as some of the door frames including the frame to the big door connecting the docks with the city. My fix has been applied to the docks as the docks aren't completely covered in stretched snow and the stretched snow that does exist is at an angle showing that mod is having some effect as typical stretched snow is not at an angle, but vertical (going straight up and down).
The problem with the docks is that the docks are one big static mesh as opposed to many static meshes like in Windhelm proper so that limits the tweakablity of the docks and to top it off most of the static meshes I've dealt with are flat surfaces with no angles or curves, whereas the Windhelm docks static mesh is loaded with angles and curves causing my fix to go haywire. The only fix I've found for the docks is to remove some or all of the snow from the docks, but I haven't done that because I don't find the stretched snow down there to be too noticeable, maybe in a future update I will change that if people want it. Speaking of the docks, the door frames at the docks also suffer from snow stretch, but I've left it alone because the only way to fix it is to remove some or all of the snow and its not too noticeable anyways so again maybe I'll fix it in a future update if people want it.
There is a problem with Imperial Fort towers in that that the upper towers are like the Windhelm docks where one face of the tower looks fine, but the other face has stretched snow at an angle due to the curves of the tower and again like the Windhelm docks this is unfixable unless I start removing some or all of the snow.
If you travel to the Palace of the Kings in Windhelm and look up you will notice quite a bit of stretched snow and unfortunately that can't be fixed without causing another problem. I attempted to apply my custom material to the static meshes for the Palace of the Kings and the stretched snow disappeared, but the occlusion planes seemed to have been messed up by this causing the scenery to disappear and the reappear if you used the side entrances to the courtyard of the palace. So I decided to leave the stretched snow alone there to avoid causing further problems.
If you travel to the docks in Windhelm you will notice that parts of the walls are fixed and devoid of stretched snow, but then other parts of the walls have some stretched snow as well as some of the door frames including the frame to the big door connecting the docks with the city. My fix has been applied to the docks as the docks aren't completely covered in stretched snow and the stretched snow that does exist is at an angle showing that mod is having some effect as typical stretched snow is not at an angle, but vertical (going straight up and down).
The problem with the docks is that the docks are one big static mesh as opposed to many static meshes like in Windhelm proper so that limits the tweakablity of the docks and to top it off most of the static meshes I've dealt with are flat surfaces with no angles or curves, whereas the Windhelm docks static mesh is loaded with angles and curves causing my fix to go haywire. The only fix I've found for the docks is to remove some or all of the snow from the docks, but I haven't done that because I don't find the stretched snow down there to be too noticeable, maybe in a future update I will change that if people want it. Speaking of the docks, the door frames at the docks also suffer from snow stretch, but I've left it alone because the only way to fix it is to remove some or all of the snow and its not too noticeable anyways so again maybe I'll fix it in a future update if people want it.
There is a problem with Imperial Fort towers in that that the upper towers are like the Windhelm docks where one face of the tower looks fine, but the other face has stretched snow at an angle due to the curves of the tower and again like the Windhelm docks this is unfixable unless I start removing some or all of the snow.
If you want to patch your own game like I did.
If you want to do as I did, if for example you find a problem areas and you don't want to wait on me, then you will need to find the "FormID" code of the static mesh with the snow stretch bug, you could use the creation kit for that or you could use More Informative Console by Linthar, that mod isn't perfect at identifying the meshes in question, but it does work most of the time and is easier to use than the creation kit.
Once you find the code, using SSEEdit, you need to select whatever esm or esp files you need along with mine and use that code to find the static mesh record and click on it, then you need to right click the entry and hit "copy as override into..." and copy the entry into my esp file.
Once you do that click on the entry in my esp and look for the "Directional Material" entry, then change whatever the material is to SnowMaterialBlacklight, the code for which can be found under material object in my mods esp, that usually fixes the problem, but if not then change the Max Angle (30-120), lower the number to reduce the snow and increase the number to increase the snow. Then save and you should be good.