snow is too bright during the day but perfect on evening and night. is there any way to tone it down during the day? i dont use any ENB's or Parallx mods.
This will unfortunately be a problem with a pure vanilla game; ENB offers the best options to take the edge off the brightness. If I make it any dimmer, then it's not as bright as I want the rest of the day.
Another question (sorry for spamming your page). I've got this working 90% with Atlantean Landscapes but the Mountain Trim and Rocks are using the Atlantean textures so they don't blend with the snow around them. It also seems like the snowdrift LODs are Atlantean (they look perfect when in the loaded cell but are off-colour from a distance). I've managed to mitigate that a bit by turning up the gamma in Lodgen but it's still noticeable. Is there a way for me to copy your snow textures onto these objects to tie everything together?
I'm also using Simplicity of Snow, if that matters.
Snowdrift lod models are using the regular landscape snow texture.
Gamma wouldn't affect the snowdrifts, only the terrain brightness. It's not really recommended to increase gamma for everything which is why I created the LODGen override textures to just give the snow a boost, but there's still some unknown factor with distant lod terrain being darkened in general.
Yeah, I've managed to fix the mountain trims by removing the single pass shaders from Atlantean but still can't get the LODs to match for the snowdrifts. I know I shouldn't be increasing the gamma but I've exhausted every other idea I've got. I brightened the noise.dds and am using the Lodgen override so the snow LODs are actually pretty close but the snow drifts are still brighter in the distance. This is just me trying to get everything right for a final 'perfect' LO. This is still the best snow mod out there by far.
I've learned very recently that apparently the singlepass LOD snow shader basically gets applied to all snow objects, even if you think they would just be a static texture. Experimenting with trying to create an esp patch that sets this to the correct RGB of the snow; so far at least darkening it showed changes on lod objects.
Ahhh... well beyond anything I'm capable of doing. I'm still testing things out for at least another couple of weeks so I've got time to do some experimenting. Honestly, the only place I really notice it is the glacial field outside Winterhold... unfortunately, that's also one of my favourite places for screen shots.
So my snow looks absolutely fantastic but I'm having an issue with the grey distant snow and trying to find a workaround. I'm covering Atlantean Landscapes complete along with the terrain blending I mentioned in a previous post. What I've done so far is copy the snow01.dds, brighten it in Paint Net and changed the name to projecteddiffuse.dds. I did something similar with the snow01_n.dds and changed the name to projectednormal.dds. I dropped them in my textures/effects folder and it did seem to help a bit. I'm not sure what format to save in though... I went with BC7 (sRGB, DX11+) but that was kind of a stab in the dark. I also went with normal compression, didn't generate cube maps or mip maps. Is there something different I should be doing?
edit: this was my 1000th post. Just wanted to commemorate the occasion with this edit.
I don't think projected diffuse is used in lod. I also would like to find a way to deal with this (noticed it previously in Glacies) but according to Sheson it's an issue with noise.dds darkening the textures. Try using vanilla noise.dds even if it doesn't blend out grass as well and see if the brightness is improved. There's also raising xlodgen gamma to compensate but this would affect your other lod textures as well.
I had family visiting for the weekend so I wasn't able to try much but I did try a couple of things. The vanilla noise.dds was still too dark so I brightened it but this was the best result I was able to get. (https://ibb.co/1Zq5zdL) I did read on the Dyndolod site that lod doesn't touch projected diffuse but I also read a post on the forums here where someone claimed to fix a similar problem by brightening the snow textures and using those as the projected diffuse.
I'm sure there's a solution on the Dyndolod site but I have a really tough time understanding a lot of what goes on there. I'll keep digging and see what I come up with.
Try the Snow Colour Fixes mod below, I copied its changes to my list and will do some testing. It makes the LOD Snow darker than Majestic Mountains sets it to (something like 238 vs 255), but it'll depend on how dyn is treating lod objects with snow. The solution basically may be toning *them* down so it's not stark white vs off-white.
I'm guessing the brightest for SOS would be the best choice? I've used this before but had a problem with some walls in Windhelm disappearing. Worth a shot though!
edit: Found this on the Simplicity of Snow page... now I'm more confused... hahaha.
Q: Should I use "Paraphernalia - Snow Colour Fixes"? A: You can, but it would be placebo. the simplicity of snow patch under "Paraphernalia - Snow Colour Fixes" does nothing, because the material color values only affects singlepass material shaders, which simplicity of snow mostly doesn't use. Here is a demonstration. There are a few singlepass material shaders included in SOS for special cases; however, the author of "Paraphernalia - Snow Colour Fixes" erroneously made copies of those material records instead of editing the originals. The copied records are not used by anything and don't affect anything in the game.
I think it's beyond my capability to make this work. I'm sure it would be simple if I wasn't using the Terrain Blending but that mod has become essential to me as I can't stand the janky landscape transitions with parallax. Still the best looking snow IMO.
Terrain blending will cause issues with Simplicity of Snow/BDS2 apparently (any non-singlepass material) in snow areas unfortunately, but it shouldn't affect distant snow color. Are you talking about the lod or closer?
It's the snow lod... I've tried many variations of the vanilla noise.dds, the noise.dds here on Nexus and swapping out textures and I could only make it marginally better. I also tried replacing the Atlantean snow textures with yours but nothing seems to have worked.
Flew around in my game a bit with tfc 1 and did confirm lod snow is darker than the objects with snow. I'll see if I can figure something out for this but it's also sort of "just Skyrim" to a degree.
Yeah, I hear that. Maybe after TES6 comes out, someone will 'Skyblivion' SSE...
edit: just an update. I ditched the AIO landscape in favour of a modular setup so I could use this and the LODs are much better. Living in Canada, I'm very familiar with the way snow should look and this is the only parallax snow that achieves it.
It did seem to help but the tradeoff was that I lost terrain blending. I decided that it was not worth it so I went back to the AIO with this. Using the Lodgen file here for running Lodgen made a bit difference. Now I just gotta figure out how to get my snowy trees to be the same, wintery colour.
edit: wrote this before trying the update... blending works awesome now.
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I'm also using Simplicity of Snow, if that matters.
Gamma wouldn't affect the snowdrifts, only the terrain brightness. It's not really recommended to increase gamma for everything which is why I created the LODGen override textures to just give the snow a boost, but there's still some unknown factor with distant lod terrain being darkened in general.
The snow LOD is vanilla.
My landscape mod is Majestic Landscapes.
edit: this was my 1000th post. Just wanted to commemorate the occasion with this edit.
I'm sure there's a solution on the Dyndolod site but I have a really tough time understanding a lot of what goes on there. I'll keep digging and see what I come up with.
edit: Found this on the Simplicity of Snow page... now I'm more confused... hahaha.
Q: Should I use "Paraphernalia - Snow Colour Fixes"?
A: You can, but it would be placebo. the simplicity of snow patch under "Paraphernalia - Snow Colour Fixes" does nothing, because the material color values only affects singlepass material shaders, which simplicity of snow mostly doesn't use. Here is a demonstration. There are a few singlepass material shaders included in SOS for special cases; however, the author of "Paraphernalia - Snow Colour Fixes" erroneously made copies of those material records instead of editing the originals. The copied records are not used by anything and don't affect anything in the game.
edit: just an update. I ditched the AIO landscape in favour of a modular setup so I could use this and the LODs are much better. Living in Canada, I'm very familiar with the way snow should look and this is the only parallax snow that achieves it.
edit: wrote this before trying the update... blending works awesome now.