Skyrim Special Edition

About this mod

Enhances your existing textures without performance loss

Requirements
Permissions and credits
Changelogs
Donations


THIS IS NOT A RETEXTURE MOD AND IT WILL USE YOUR EXISTING TEXTURES!
more information after the videos

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Forewarning:
 
While greatly enhancing close distance and close-up detail of your textures on many objects, the general look of your texture on these objects will be altered (watch videos to understand exactly what I mean), so if you are not bothered by close distance and close-up detail of textures and you like how your medium-distance and distant objects look then this mod will not be of any help to you, but if you are annoyed by the constant smudged textures you see when you walk too close to objects, then this mod will be very helpful.

Basic information:

This mod will increase texture quality for all your existing textures and any other new textures that you will download in the future, for objects that I edited.  Your textures will remain the same, but their pattern will appear smaller (that's how we get extra close-up detail from them). And if you don't like the look of your old texture for a particular object with a smaller pattern after installing ETD, you can just install a new texture (as you normally would, no extra work needed) for that object that has a larger image pattern to begin with, so even if the pattern is made smaller by ETD, they'll still look good for you, but also have an enhanced close-distance detail.

While I have edited alot of objects (1085 so far), it does not increase texture detail on absolutely everything yet, to find out which objects I edited so far, read this information in the installer window.

This mod doesn't require you to do anything special for the most part, just download it and install supplied files.
This mod does not contain any .esp files and there are no scripts, this mod only provides meshes and textures. This data is not stored in your save games, so it will never corrupt your save game and this also means that this mod can be fully or partially installed/uninstalled freely at any point in your game with 0 problems.  

And because we are using the same texture and only really changing the method of how this preloaded texture is applied onto an object mesh, even after increasing the resolution and detail of your texture, your performance will not be affected in any way.

That's all you need to know to start using it, but you can

Read below for 


More information and some of the known drawbacks of this method:

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This mod mostly contains vanilla meshes with changed UV-maps.

This mod will enhance texture detail of modified objects (through installation of supplied meshes) by letting the mesh faces use larger area of the loaded texture and allowing the mesh itself to use more samples of the same texture to effectively multiply the resolution. 

Before this mod, to get a higher clarity image, you'd need to upgrade your texture resolution, which came at the cost of more Vram. And on some objects, even having 4k textures wasn't making them look as good as you'd expect, this can happen if the face of any particular mesh is using too small an area of the texture relative to it's size. When we edit the UV-map, we can make mesh faces use a larger area of any texture that's loaded for it, or by letting the mesh use more samples of the same texture where needed, and all at the cost of 0 extra Vram or GPU utilization. While this mod mostly benefits people who use low resolution textures to save Vram, it will still work even if you use 4k textures, although unless you play on a 4k monitor, it's positive effects will be somewhat limited to meshes which had terrible UV-maps to begin with.
 
However, because we are now letting each mesh face use a much large area of the same texture, the repetitive pattern may become obvious when used in conjunction with particular textures that aren't well suited.
 
So, keeping all this in mind, there are 3 possible drawbacks (i like to think of them as trade-offs) that you should be prepared to encounter:

1)  Because we are now letting each mesh face use a much larger area of the same texture, you may sometimes notice that the texture on a distant object looks repetitive, this happens if the texture you use, uses a very distinctive pattern and when you look at this object from a distance, it becomes obvious that the same texture is being applied more than once. In 70% of the cases, this can be solved by using a different texture that doesn't have distinct patterns that you can easily tell apart. On my end, to hide repetition, I do use reduced scaling where the objects are in the open space and are often viewed from the distance and I try to move the texture patterns around where seams are not an issue, but to get extra resolution with no performance impact this mod depends on texture repetition, so on certain objects it's just not possible to do anything about it and this should be expected.

2) For outside objects like Forts, the transition from distant object (LOD) to a real model will become much more obvious, as the texture pattern on the real model is much smaller than it was on the LOD model. I personally used DynDoLod to give Fort LODs a smaller texture pattern, but without DynDoLod i'm not sure how to address this yet. Don't select Forts (exterior) option during installation if this bothers you.

3) Depending on the texture you use, you may notice seams at the locations where the textures are being connected.
This happens because the texture imagespace only used a single stretched texture, and when we increase the amount of textures for that same imagespace, If the textures are not seamless, a seam may appear at the connection points of these textures. This issue however, is pretty rare.


Installation

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FOMOD installer is now included for an easy installation process. 
Installer contains an all in one installation process which will install all the available meshes and a segmented installation which will let you selectively pick which objects you would like this mod to apply to. Both these installer options have a full SMIM compatibility setting, which will remove any conflicting files from installation process.

To uninstall simply delete the mod and if you were using SMIM or other meshes that you've overwritten, install them again.

Manual installation:

All the folders inside core folder of the archive are named according to what they change, just copy meshes and textures folders and put them inside skyrim sse/data folder

All folders inside Vanilla_textures folder are optional, you don't really need them but you can install them if you want original Bethesda textures instead of the new ones that Bethesda rolled out with SSE.
Optional files are located inside the optional folder.


More detailed information is provided in the first sticky post in the comments section.

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Credits:
Renthal311 for allowing me to use his woven fence meshes as part of my farmhouses enhancements.
Langley02 for providing grave textures for Windhelm graveyard.
Cabal120 for providing a stonewall texture.

Permissions:
You are free to use any of my work in your mods, it'd be nice to get credited if you do, but whatever, as long as your work benefits our community i'm happy.