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Complete HighRes Retexture Project


Shaikoten

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Personally, I didn't think the "Skyrim HD 2k texture" pack was good, it was nowhere near the quality of Chris2012's work - he changed way too much and broke the art style completely.

 

I also think that it's better to have 100 texture mods for individual sections of the world than 1 texture mod which affects everything. For example, this way, I can pick the plant mod which I think looks best, the water mod which I like the most, the rock/terrain mod which looks the most natural and avoid changing the snow texture altogether (because all current snow mods look like s***).

 

If you lump in too many together, it's hard to pick out the ones that look good (ie. identical to the vanilla but higher resolution) and avoid the ones that look bad (different design or tint).

 

It depends really how you look at it. If there's common art design idea then it is way better to have one proper texture pack than tons of them. One reason would be to track every update, second - some overlapping textures. Which leads to the main and most important reason imho: in many packs textures don't blend correctly, almost every single texture pack have different colour scheme or mood. I have to admit that "Skyrim HD 2k texture" is very bad in that - it's not even internally consistent.

 

Other thing is that "better" textures don't always mean "bigger". Some authors tend to enlarge original textures to 2048x2048, apply some sharpening, emboss, denoise. Others just slap some new photo found on web, very often without even thinking to make it seamless. What's even worst - many don't even think about mip-maps, colour fading, alpha blending or norm+spec.

They probably don't even consider that there's often no need for 2048 - quality loss happens because of compression or too low resolution of normal or specular map and not because diffuse is 1024.

 

With HQ pack made under one banner by people who actually know what they're doing there's huge chance for consistent and error free experience. That means there will be no need for you to pick up anything.

Also - I wouldn't be so stubborn about "identical to vanilla". Seriously - some vanilla textures are just wrong when it comes to tiling/blending...

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I'd agree with you if such a “proper” texture pack existed. Most of the time, the internal QC of a texture pack turns out to be shoddy or the author's style changes over time as he's working on the project. But we'll have to wait and see how this turns out before we can decide on that matter further.

 

The reasoning behind my ideology was that if every texture pack sticked to vanilla, there would be no consistency issues that are not present in vanilla, but everything would be more detailed.

 

I agree that simply resizing and filtering doesn't work (unless you're using very advanced algorithms like spline64/warpsharp and know what you're doing), but the extra diffuse resolution does make a difference (normal map is just as important, of course) - when you view something up close, it's the diffuse map that counts - and the most annoying things about vanilla textures is how blurry they get up close.

 

The ideal solution I proposed earlier was to have one project under the same art direction and project management, made by skilled artists - but have this project split up into modular components, so you can choose to either download the entire pack, or just download the city components but leave the world terrain intact (performance?), etc.

 

Ps. Examples of vanilla textures you think are “just wrong”?

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I definitely support this! I currently have a retexturing-project of mine (Tobes Highres Textures) that I'm willing to contribute with, if there is anything you like :) It handles clutter and furniture, with all brand new textures including normalmaps and specularmaps. I'm trying to keep the same style as the original textures, with a few minor exceptions on details that just didnt feel logical by Bethesda.

 

I currently have a first public release, but I'm releasing an update tonight within 12 hours that adds a lot more textures, and some tweaks to the old ones. Currently I have 19 new textures here, plus just as many normalmaps, and I will probably find time to add a few more before the update :) Most furniture have 2048* sized textures, while minor clutter has a maximum of 1024*, depending on how big the objects are.

 

I'll return with a bunch of new up-to-date screenshots in a few hours.

 

http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=1123

 

 

Some more or less WIP-screens from upcoming 1.1;

 

 

 

http://i166.photobucket.com/albums/u96/Da__Tobb/c09.jpg

http://i166.photobucket.com/albums/u96/Da__Tobb/c11.jpg

http://i166.photobucket.com/albums/u96/Da__Tobb/c10.jpg

 

 

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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.

Edited by Shaikoten
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Ps. Examples of vanilla textures you think are "just wrong"?

Some furniture, with visible seams for one. I wasn't checking nif files yet in that matter - just what I can see in game.

But biggest offenders imho are:

mossdirtpile01 - blending and alpha quality

detailovergrowth01 - same as above

fieldgrass02 - radioactive daisies and tiling

fieldgrass01 - shoddy blending and awful tiling visible

wrfieldgrass01 - eye hurting orange/yellow tint

various road textures and how they are layered/implemented

and of course snow overlay with just terrible blending...

 

I'm experimenting with those (which includes altering many other textures - mostly alpha layer) to achieve best results.

The problem is, I don't have a clue how terrain/alpha blending shader is set up. What I suspect though Bethesda "borrowed" an idea (or even pieces of code) from Oblivion Detailed Terrain but I have no clue so far what value is used for actual D3D alpha blending.

I imagine though that there might be some possibility to set up blending bias from ini/console command. I'll post my findings asap, but I would be most grateful if anyone with better shader programming knowledge than mine could look into shader files.

I also suspect that there's a connection between used blending method and Adaptive AA problems with ATI cards. Because (except of disappearing helmets etc) when I have it on - decal textures blend almost perfect...

Anyway - I think it's great idea to create one proper HQ texture pack would it be one big download or module-based. Way to go!

 

edit:

@Mystikhybrid - these plants are great man!

Edited by Witcher79
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The gamebryo SDK actually has a blend map shader, Not sure how close it is to that one, as the blend map itself could control the alpha blend of 4 maps, one for each channel RGBA. Also a vertex color blend shader, which I think could only do 3 based on the vertex color. Neither were used in beths past games though.. unfortunately,.
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Maybe there is a method to make textures not look all equally.. it looks weird from a distance like 20 squares of texture put together.. isnt there some blurr or what do i know more textures?

 

 

 

 

http://s1.directupload.net/images/111127/qsoiwqxr.jpg

 

 

 

Maybe the grass could also be blurred a little so it wont stick out sharp from blurred ground...

Edited by Doktorfrost
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Maybe there is a method to make textures not look all equally.. it looks weird from a distance like 20 squares of texture put together.. isnt there some blurr or what do i know more textures?

http://s1.directuplo...27/qsoiwqxr.jpg

Maybe the grass could also be blurred a little so it wont stick out sharp from blurred ground...

 

Yeah. It's pretty common issue - not only with vanilla textures, but even more often with high res terrain packs. Natural "blurring" comes from mip-maps. It's also possible to drop some colour mip-map fades into, to even further improve how distant terrain looks or to achieve certain effect. Unfortunately many (even very skilled) authors tend to not include mip-maps to get fake "crispier" look.

 

I did some stuff with mip-maps colour fading, I might upload some pics when I'll get back from work to illustrate the idea. I won't be releasing anything yet though as it's very WIP/experimental and also includes some bits and pieces from other people work (as I'm doing it mostly for my own use). It might end up as a contribution to "one retex to rule them all" if folks decide it's good enough.

@Ghogiel

Yeah man I know. That's why I'm even more surprised seeing ekhm.. "brand new" engine displaying so crappy transitions. What buggers me is that some ground textures blends properly (same with face/body decals) but damn moss texture can't. Same with mud/grass/dirt patches or snow. Not to mention roads. Seriously, I can't figure out how alpha channel is handled and why even 8888ARGB looks like DXT1 in many cases...

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