[LE] Skyrim High Res Terrain Heightmap

[Lalalolo1000]

Hello there,

I am quite new to Skyrim-modding and am trying to wrap my head around how Skyrim-Landscapes works.


What I got so far is that there are High-Res square-textures and normal-maps in "textures/landscape" (I guess these are the one we see in the game).
However there is also this ominos "textures/terrain" that I have some questions about:

1. I know how the naming of the textures work (tamrielLODLEVEL.X.Y) and that they are used for the world-map LODs,
but are they also used to generate the in-game terrain?

2. And if so, do pixel-colors in the tamrielLODLEVEL.X.Y-texture represent a texture from "textures/landscape" that is than rendered during runtime?

3. If not so, how is Skyrim's terrain generated and where is the high-res information stored ("meshes/landscape" is full of low-res nif-files)?

For anyone being concerned about Ripping, EULA and so on:
I am mostly interested in how the Creation-engine handles terrain!
Even if ÃÂ I was interested in high-res ripping the skyrim heightmap and textures, I would only do so to render some nice scenes in my favourite path tracer ÃÂ (no harm done)
and yes I know about "tesannwyn", but the exported height- and color-maps are not as high-res as I expected them to be...


Thanks for the help!
Lalalolo

Edited August 6, 2018 by Lalalolo1000