Snow functioning

[Poellafrire]

Hello

 

Today, I ran into a problem I never had to deal with. I installed NAT weather mod and now I have snow in Solitude. I find this very cool but the ground looks ugly (see the screenshots) because the ground meshes of Solitude were not designed to get snow.

So I came here in search of knowledge about the functionning of the snow in Skyrim.

 

 

This first screenshot shows the problem. The two areas delimited by the seam cannot blend because they are two different meshes with different textures.

This issue would be less visible if the moss around the mesh was snowy, which leads me to my first question : How does the game controls which part of a mesh will be covered by snow ?

I think I have a part ot the answer in this second screenshot :

 

 

It seems that the game use in part navmesh because the more snowy areas seems to match the navmesh shape, in particular the prefered path (which is not very logical as the more used ways should be the less snowy).

The blending between stones and moss is also very ugly and one more time it is due to the fact that they are two differents overlapping meshes.

 

For now, I can only see one way to get rid of these issues, it is to merge all the meshes is one mesh with a specific texture. The problem will be that the base textures will no longer be used and the specific texture will have to be redone for each texture mod.

 

That being said, if someone already found a way to fix these issues, feel free to tell me !

 

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EDIT : I made some little progress in my research.

Snow coverage has nothing to do with navmesh. The reason why there are parts less covered by snow in the screenshots above is because snow cannot cover moss and the area not covered are the ones with moss.

I think the game engine cannot apply snow on the moss because it uses the decals shader and it must not be compatible with the snow shader... Or maybe it is just some settings to adjust on the moss nif mesh. That is the question.

Here is a screenshot with moss removed :

 

 

With no moss, ground coverage is full. With snow, it blends better with the grass island in the middle but it blends much less well without the snow as the moss ensure the transition between grass and road.

Edited August 23, 2023 by Poellafrire