Shaikoten

@mystikhybrid: No problem man, I'll fix it up for the public release whenever we get to it! @darthsloth74: Yeah, feel free to shoot a PM if you're shy about the commentary. Right now I'm not trying to force anyone into specific roles if it's not their specialty. Everything is already moving on at a very fast pace, and I don't see a need to rush what may come naturally; I'll keep in correspondence with the appropriate artists to make sure it gets taken care of.

Well it looks like we were sold snake oil. Some of the textures from the HD2K pack don't look very perceptibly different from far away, so I think a lot of people WANTED to think they looked better. It's kind of like when an audiophile pays $200 for a pair of headphones that may not objectively be better than what they upgraded from, yet they swear they can hear a difference. Needless to say I'm going to look at things a bit closer before including them now. And I'll pass it on to you guys to look at too. One pack I was considering inviting to the project is Z4G4's landscape pack. You can find it here: http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=2146 Any thoughts about the quality of the work? (Unlike the last pack, I opened this one in photoshop. It seems muuuuuch better :D)

darthsloth74: Yeah, everything that sticks to vanilla in that pack is gorgeous. Heck, even the old oblivion logo looks a hell of a lot better than the necromancer skull in the game. I always kind of hated the green logo. But we should probably stick with the Skyrim style logo just for the sake of accuracy/canon reasons, so if you do end up swapping them I'll definitely add that in. Ghogiel: Thank you for this, seriously. I hadn't opened any of the textures from Nebula's stuff in photoshop yet, and I see what you mean now. The technical commentary is immensely useful. Do you think any of his work is salvageable? Like is it just the Windhelm stuff that suffers? How about the terrain? The Whiterun stuff is a little hit or miss too, and overall I'd much prefer to use Chris2012's work, but currently I don't think he's interested in contributing.

Thanks for the feedback. Not much that can be done about the first point, I'm afraid, but if anyone comes up with a solution we'll be sure to implement it. Wonky terrain comes with the territory in Bethesda games. I'll look into the Windhelm stuff and let Nebula know about it. Compared to Vanilla I haven't really noticed much of a difference in the mipmapping between the two, but I may not be looking hard enough! I saw your Yosolda outfit retextures and was really impressed. I know from experience, it's definitely kind of painstaking to do those minute textile details. The other robe textures you worked on are great, but with the use of the oblivion logos and addition of runes and that sort of stuff, I think they fall more under a reimagining than a simply an improved texture, so I think it would be against the vision of the project to include them. But yes, if you'd approve of us including the Yosolda outfit and any others you work on that fit our criteria, I'd be happy to add them in this project. It doesn't need to be a complete pack to be included. Don't let the group intimidate you. It's really been extremely loose so far and I think it will probably stay that way. I come from other, more established modding communities and I thought there would be a lot more IRC, chatting, and comprehensive forum posts in the Skyrim scene. Turns out that's not the case, but it's possible to be quite productive without them. Just shoot me a PM if you release something new and I'll be happy to add it. No pressure, no claiming anything. It'll all get done eventually I'm sure!

I'm going to be removing wrcastlecarpets01 and 02 because despite the resolution increase, it makes the texture almost completely unreadable and blurry. If anyone else finds blurry textures like this in the packs let me know ASAP so it can be fixed.

I am aware that there are a couple of textures that really don't look particularly good -- not necessarily because they break the art direction, but because they've lost definition instead of gained it. These will be removed in the next release until we can find better replacements. But things won't be perfect with the first few releases, and this is still a sort of pre-release. If you, or anyone else sees textures in this pack they don't think are up to par, please let us know so we can work on fixing them.

Good, as always, to see all the activity on here. If anyone PM'd me and I haven't responded yet I apologize, I got a little swamped and have to double check which ones I got to reply to and which ones I missed. I'm going to be updating the pack with everything you guys have added, so if you want something in the next release post it here by 10 EST tomorrow. Tobe: Keep up the good work as always, really liking everything I've seen thus far! Witcher79: All of your WIPs are looking great. Is anything ready to be added from your stuff yet? DarkRiegn: No team name yet, but I've flirted with the name "The Adoring Fans" just to add a touch of humor. After all, modding is about fun. Other than that, I'm still keeping my eye on the new releases and looking for more people to formally invite to contribute. With a few more additions I might feel comfortable uploading the pack to the Nexus. A few people have already downloaded the WIP I uploaded earlier, and I've been getting a lot of positive feedback. But some critical feedback would be good too, as to which textures are keepers and which may need to be reworked. I'm also looking for someone to take very high resolution screenshots of the pack in action, with maxed settings, so we can best show off the full effect of the pack when we upload it to the nexus. If you're good at taking flattering before and after screenshots and superimposting them, get in touch with me via PM and I'll let you know the moment the next release hits so we can get to work. Please feel free to flame me for the Adoring Fan reference! And as always, have fun.

Updated with a few screenshots in the OP under spoilers. I imagine there may be some small FPS loss when we complete more, but I doubt it will be very large. Actually what's more noticeable for me is increased loading time, but it's still very tolerable to me, and I have a particularly slow hard drive.

To uninstall, just delete the texture folder inside your data folder. It's that simple.

So true about screenshots being better. But they're mostly already well known packs, I'll probably just recycle the author's screenshots for the time being. It will be uploaded onto the nexus soon, but this is just a quick internal release before we go really public with it. On FPS effect... it doesn't noticeably affect mine at all, and I'm about 40fps on ultra before and after the pack.

So you want Skyrim to look better but you don't have the time or patience to look through every freaking SkyrimNexus entry and look at all of the new mods as they come out, try them and tweak them. You wish there was a single pack you could download to make things EASY for you. One file, one install, one link. That's all. Your wish has now come closer to reality. After a lot of emails, PMs, and creative collaboration I've gotten a bunch of texture artists to work with one another on a full Skyrim retexture project. Tonight is the team's first alpha release! This is intended as an internal build, but luckily for you, team membership is pretty informal. Things aren't perfect yet, and we need the help of testers and contributors to get it there, but it is currently the most comprehensive pack you'll find. With the permission of all of the artists, it includes work by Nebula1, Iskou, Ghogiel, Tobe, and Mystik, with more to come very soon. The Pretty Pack aims to be a full retexture of Skyrim to increase the quality of all of the game's texture assets, while being faithful to Bethesda's original art direction. In many cases the textures we include will be higher resolution, designed for PC gaming rather than consoles. We deserve better! If you want instant updates on the project, follow @Shaikoten on twitter. If you want to chat with people involved in the project, join #prettypack on the Quakenet IRC network. If you want me to shut up and give you the link to our first release, here you go! PRETTY PACK A001 - 188.66 MB: http://www.mediafire.com/?i99unovnrxd9hkh Please enjoy, and give our artists some feedback! A few selected screenshots taken from the various author's pack pages (I could only post 10) -- we'll take screenshots with the combined pack soon. Screenshots in spoiler.

Alright, I'm just about ready to do an internal release of this, I've got all the files compiled and set to go. Some of the textures in the pack so far will not be up to our standards or fitting with the design of the pack: I want to ask for the help of you guys, with good eyes for this sort of thing, to point out the individual offending textures and make note of them so we can either fix them or redo them. If I've forgotten to include anyone's work, please remind me and it will be added for the next release. Currently this pack contains: Nebula1's various textures (Windhelm, Whiterun, landscape) Mystik's plants Isoku's fire effects and rain ripples Ghogiel's eyes Tobe's furniture/misc I know Tobe has a release coming up soon and Ghogiel has at least one more ground texture I haven't added, and Witcher79 is working on things as well. Remember, this is just our first, internal release. Please submit your comments to this thread. Make sure you are constructive, don't trash anyone's work. These people are modding for your pleasure, for free, so keep respectful and help them to do better! A link to the thread will be provided in the readme file. For live updates as to the pack's status, follow me, @Shaikoten on Twitter. As for the name of the pack, I've decided to go with the Skyrim Pretty Pack. I think the term "HD" is kind of a misnomer, and our aim is definitely not to replace every texture with the highest rez possible, just to make the game look better where it needs a little help. So without further Adieu, DOWNLOAD IT HERE: http://www.mediafire.com/?i99unovnrxd9hkh

Very cool. On the organization end I've got the spreadsheet together and I'm still contacting artists to see if they're interested in contributing.

Everything's coming along, shooting off PMs to everyone. I'm hoping we can have our first release sometime this week. Currently confirmed as participating are: Tobe, MystikHybrid, Ghogiel, Witcher79. Waiting on final confirmation: Iskou, NebuLa1. I know not everyone is a fan of NebuLa1's HD pack as a whole, and I agree that some textures do need improvement, but at the same time a lot of the work is quite great. It would be foolish to dismiss it completely, and we can always improve upon it. I'm going to be reposting this thread on Bethsoft forums to make sure all of the texture artists from that community are aware of what we're doing over here.

Awesome to see some more interest! I'll be taking stock of what we currently have and doing some compilation work. I'm still preparing the massive spreadsheet -- it's a busy weekend for me. On the subject of everything being 2048, I completely agree that not everything needs to be that big, but I also think in the long run it's better to have something of that resolution on file for most textures so we can present the option of, say, a downsized1024 and full 2048.