About High Quality Textures in Skyrim (somewhat a rant)

[throttlekitty]

:o

 

could've sworn...

[ecirbaf]

I think we are focusing too much on texture dimensions.

 

In fact the very first thing I noticed after installing the game, were the ugly blotches on the nose of the Imperials. I didn't even reach the character creation screen yet! When I came here and found the No More Blocky Faces mod, and saw the screenshot of the normal map, I couldn't believe it.

 

The texture/normal map size is fine imho. What was unbelievable to me, is that they would have compressed textures so badly, textures that are used on one area that is possibly the most important in any PC games: character faces. You see it 100% of your game time. The only technical reason I can think of, is that they used a batch process to filter all textures with an algorithm that makes them better compressed both in filesize and GPU storage (if I'm not mistaken they can be stored on the graphics card memory in compressed form). It's similar to the Photoshop option to move pixels around a little bit to allow a GIF to compress further. (edit: to be clear my explanation is just speculation. it may be that they are simply optimized for filesize, which is more important for console releases, I suppose for download time, and limited harddrive storage).

 

So on this character face normals, huge freaking JPEG-like compression artefacts that have nothing to do with the texture dimensions.

Some parts, like the normal maps on characters are actually uncompressed, which is awesome. There's no over-compression with .dds textures like you can with .gif, but it does introduce artifacts. The nose issue is simply not enough texture space given to that area of the model, at least I assume, I haven't looked that hard yet. I haven't actually used any character texture mods either though :)

 

Here are side by side DDS screenshots. The original is compressed to 170 ish KB (DXT1).

 

To be fair it does not appear as bad as on the overblown screenshot of the NMBF mod. But it does look bad in game, because those squares are used on an area with a lot of surface variation (pointy part of the nose), and when the light comes on it it's messed up. I play on a 27 inch screen, without anti aliasing for performance, so it's possible that makes it more noticeable. Anwyay enough nitpicking from me, game's awesome :)

 

http://i.minus.com/i16LuDUjF7rUc.jpg