[LE] Does Parallax works in Skyrim ?

[maxarturo]

My line of work consists mainly in creating photorealistic renderings of buildings, so i'm more than familiar with all those "add height / depth" technics.

But i'm having some really weird results (in game) with the meshs that i add Parallax in Skyrim. With "some of them" over certain angles of the camera (FOV) and over certain angles of how the light source hits the mesh, the texture's height / depth parallax added appears to be moving and distorted.

Am i missing something ?...

My texture set up :

Diffuse map : DXT1 no Alpha

Normal map : DXT5 interpolated Alpha

with a freehanded normal map and its Alpha chanel

(as all my normal maps are made, no quick generation tools).

* and some normals are : 8.8.8.8 ARGB

Parallax map : DXT1 no Alpha

with a big range of greyscale to avoid any distortion.

But nothing that i've tried seems to work...

If anyone has an answear to this, i would be very grateful !... cause it's causing me some serious headaches !. :wallbash:

* The meshes that this weird issue does not affect have a really... Really nice realistic result, but... i can't have the same textures in one mesh with Parallax and in an other one not (they are both part of the same architecture style). Plus is way too late to change them, i've already put so much work into them.

Edited October 4, 2019 by maxarturo

[NexusComa]

Well the games view will change how you see an object depending on how you have that set up (just a guess).

 

I know from moving things around myself via script .. Skyrim seems to have move statements and also location statements.

As in you can move something but it still will relate it's in the same spot until you also tell the object it's new location.

Edited October 4, 2019 by NexusComa

[maxarturo]

Ok, it took me 5 days, but i figure it out !.

Skyrim Parallax doesn't work the same way like the majority of games and applications, one simple example is that Skyrim Parallax map doesn't use the Alpha channel of either the diffuse or the normal's map, it doesn't use Alpha channel at all.

To narrow it down, is a combination of three things to make it work correctly, with the most important been the map itself.

1) Parallax maps can't have a big range in its grayscale (this does not apply for landscape/terrain in worldspace construction, exterior cells, is just for meshes).

It should be from : RGB 110 to maximun 140 (127, 127, 127 is 0, no depth).

2) Meshes need to have the correct flags and not just enable the Parallax flag.

The SLSF1_Vertex_Alpha also appears to have a good influence on the Parallax.

3) The use of ENB is necessary with the "Fix Parallax Bugs = true" in your ENB settings, if you intend to exceed those RGB values in order to have / apply more height / depth in the mesh (if you aim for extreme depth).

If you just want to boost more your normal maps by using Parallax, and have a more realistic mesh height / depth FX result, then making a parallax map within those RGB values won't required the use of ENB, although using it will boost even further the end result of the applied maps, in this case it's recommended to make a normal map with high height / depth values (this needs to be made freehanded for better results).

I hope this might help anyone interested in Parallax.

Edited October 5, 2019 by maxarturo