What texture mods do you use?

[Fredas]

Yeah.  So I finally bought the game, and am now in the baby steps of installing the first few mods.  Since there are so many texture options, I thought it'd be prudent to see some of the solutions folks have come up with.

 

My goal: The absolute best textures possible that do not depart significantly from the vanilla look.  (I'll worry about performance if/when that becomes an issue.)  What do I mean by departing from the vanilla look?  To answer that, let's take a look at the Skyrim Ultra HD Texture Pack.  In this pack, many of the replacement textures do a truly fantastic job of staying true to the vanilla look:

 

 

But in the same pack, there are examples where creative license has taken over and the spirit of the original is lost.  Sometimes it's too bright, sometimes it's too dark, and often the pattern is just needlessly different, as with several of these mushrooms:

 

 

(The first, second and sixth specimens, as well as the one in the lower-right.)  So if I use this pack (likely), I'll have to go through and pick and choose which to keep and which to leave to a different texture pack.  Point of all this is to stress the importance of finding packs which don't depart from the vanilla look too much.

 

Second concern: The load order.  I have it in mind to make use of the official Skyrim HD Texture Pack because I have a suspicion that it includes at least some texture upgrades that are not covered by any unofficial pack.  Is this a valid concern?  I am thinking, for example, of the dragon textures, and how the Unofficial High Resolution Patch fixes some anomalies with said textures.

 

You get an idea of the unexpectedly complicated nature of this problem, and why I suspect I can learn a lot just by seeing some load orders from folks who have long since arranged things the way they like.

 

[gaggedgirl123]

Well, as for as texture-only mods go, I have little knowledge. I use aMidianborn Book of Silence for armor textures, while it doesn'T do them all, they look fantastic and very similar to the original in terms of patterns. They have options for variants, but you can just turn that off. I had one for shields for I seem to have lost the ESP do I can't really tell you which name.

 

Also, one thing that will incredibly improve the look of objects in the world, while being compatible with most texture mods, is SMIM. What it does is fix the piss-poor IV mappig of the original game, so most stuff looks high-rez without replacing the textures. Now of course, it does a lot more than that, but that's the most obvious one to me. Definitely adds to the look of the game, and doesn'T detract in any way from what the developpers designed, although it does replace a few meshes with more detailled ones.

[Guest Ragna_Rok]

i play on a regular screen on my desk. i dont run the highest resolution, which also has benefits for framerate. anyhow, im pretty happy with the original textures. the only texture i ever replaced was the one from the orcish armor (one that makes stuff a little bit more green to match the weapons).

 

when i mod new stuff i take the regular textures from the game, and until now i always was satisfied.

[Koko.Hekmatyar]

Anything texture related that doesn't pertain to the PC itself I use CaBaL120's Book of Silence and his other mods that haven't been added to BoS yet. I also you Skyrim Floral Overhaul and WATER.

[Guest Ragna_Rok]

i guess "cookies of skyrim" is not really a graphic overhaul, though every homes dining table looks way better with a couple of cookies on them... COOKIE-BAKING FOR THE WIN!

[Fredas]

Some good suggestions here.  The mesh overhaul is a particularly exciting revelation.

 

Yeah, adding things to the game (cookies ;p ) that aren't already part of the game does break my sense of what the true experience ought to be.  I'm a fairly stringent adherent to the canonical experience.  The biggest exception I'm willing to make is with my own character, and I'm fine with that since I feel I should be free to express my character's origins to my liking.

 

I guess what I could really use is quite literally some texture mod load orders (or heck, complete load orders, since I have always learned about a ton of stuff with those), particularly from anyone who has made a point of beautifying their in-game world.

 

[Guest Ragna_Rok]

the cookie-thing was a joke... but i loved the idea of this mod, so i have it, just not active anymore ... maybe youre question got already answered here, there are tons of posts with graphic overhauls here (and their load orders)

 

did you check around already?

[Fredas]

did you check around already?

 

I'll take a peek.  Was mainly after something 2014-current.  I recently discovered on my own that all of the normal maps packaged with the "Skyrim HD" 2k texture mod are completely hosed.  And I mean completely.  (They are bizarre hybrids of the vanilla normal maps and what should have been the mod's own normal maps.  No clue at all how that happened.)

[chuckdm]

If you're serious about sticking with the nearly-totally-default look, you can try what I do.

 

1) The official High-Res DLC.  Kinda obvious but this is literally EXACTLY the default look.

2) The Unofficial Skyrim Patch for said DLC (and you really should be running the other Unofficial Skyrim Patch(s) as well.)

3) Static Mesh Improvement Mod, or SMIM.  In my experience, decent-to-good textures look awful-to-decent if the meshes are bad, and when it isn't a character model, MANY meshes in Skyrim didn't get much love, from Bethesda nor most modders.  SMIM replaces almost no textures at all, but is a major mesh overhaul of nearly ALL the clutter objects in the game.  You'll be amazed how good many of the existing textures look when you put them on a better model.

4) Skyrim Flora Overhaul - This has 2 versions, one being the lore-friendly one maintains the original color palette almost completely.  It makes grass, trees, and generally anything that's growing look better.  Basically SMIM for plants.

 

You can find all of the above (except the official DLC, obviously) on the Nexus.  (Eh, what can I say?  If it gets me the mod I want, I really don't care where it comes from.)  If you can't search them yourself let me know and I'll pull you some links.

 

Aside from these, I run no other texture mods, and my game basically looks like an improved vanilla Skyrim.  I'm running around 40 mods right now, but after you pick out the character model mods, 2 custom armors, better skyforge steel weapons, about 15 spell mods, etc, this is basically what's left.  And as far as I'm concerned, it's beautiful.  I'd take you a screenshot but all the .bmp files Skyrim makes show as "corrupted" when I try to open them.

[Fredas]

3) Static Mesh Improvement Mod, or SMIM.  In my experience, decent-to-good textures look awful-to-decent if the meshes are bad, and when it isn't a character model, MANY meshes in Skyrim didn't get much love, from Bethesda nor most modders.  SMIM replaces almost no textures at all, but is a major mesh overhaul of nearly ALL the clutter objects in the game.  You'll be amazed how good many of the existing textures look when you put them on a better model.

 

I'm doing more or less what you're doing, as it happens.  SMIM is one of the mods I'll be vetting today.  I like most of it, but I generally don't like it when visual upgrade mods take artistic license needlessly.  Chains converted from flat specimens to proper links?  That's fine.  Lanterns having their entire look modified?  No deal.

 

I keep what I like and discard the rest.

 

Aside from these, I run no other texture mods, and my game basically looks like an improved vanilla Skyrim.

 

I am neck deep in the texture mod vetting process right now.  Each mod aimed at improving the look of the game is worth investigating, in my opinion.  So far, I have discovered:

 

Skyrim HD 2K Textures - Despite being the only truly legit visual upgrade package I've thus far seen, almost all of it was ruined by an inexplicable, catastrophic problem with the normal maps.

 

Skyrim Ultra HD Texture Pack - For the most part, they simply took vanilla textures, upscaled them, and then brutally embossed them with this or that pattern.  Gives an artificial result that's also almost always much darker than the original (because of the embossing).

 

Skyrim Realistic Overhaul - For the most part, they simply took vanilla textures, upscaled them, and then applied a sharpening effect which, while it did alter the blurry look of the upscaled images, also crushed the heck out of details, often to the point of being no longer recognizable.

 

In the end, I've kept a couple hundred megs of textures from each, and I'll be basically packaging everything I keep into a single, personalized "mod".  Today I'll be focusing on the piecemeal texture upgrades, of which there are a lot.

[hryh23k9823u]

The main texture overhaul and generally considered the better, is Skyrim HD, also the older and most updated. For armors and weapons I use Cabal's, he tends to make stuff darker than vanilla, but its the best, most complete and updated. For clothing, Improved NPC Clothing. Very vanilla, I think.

 

In any case, you'll need to run most texture mods through Texture Optimizer or DDSopt, because most of them are incorrectly compressed and don't include minimaps and other stuff and that will ruin your game performance / stability.

[Fredas]

The main texture overhaul and generally considered the better, is Skyrim HD, also the older and most updated. 

 

Yeah, this is the one with the normal map issue that basically scuttles almost the entire project, sadly.

 

For armors and weapons I use Cabal's, he tends to make stuff darker than vanilla, but its the best, most complete and updated. For clothing, Improved NPC Clothing. Very vanilla, I think.

 

Nice.  More textures to comb through, heh.  Starting to wonder if I'll ever be done. ;p

 

In any case, you'll need to run most texture mods through Texture Optimizer or DDSopt, because most of them are incorrectly compressed and don't include minimaps and other stuff and that will ruin your game performance / stability.

 

First I heard of this.  A very much appreciated heads up.

[hryh23k9823u]

Can you describe the normal maps problem with Skyrim HD, or include a pic...? Cause that is the one I use and looks good I think. Maybe is something fixed with DDSOpt / Texture Optimizer, etc. For the texture optimization thingy, some texture packs are already analyzed in the S.T.E.P. project site (basically a guide to mod skyrim), some are very required, other not so much (though recommendable). I personally run everything through DDSopt, fighting for each fps I can get in my getto computer. For example, officials Hi Res Packs are like 90% correctly optimized (to name one mod that its well done), Skyrim HD is like 20% or so. I even uncompress the bsa's from the vanilla game, and from the unofficial patches, and optimize them, just in case there's some textures not overwritten by any hd pack. I just create an empty mod with a 'texture' folder, place under the main mod with the name, example 'Skyrim HD Landscape optimized' under the main mod. That's with Mod Organizer, my trick to have it 'organized'.

[hryh23k9823u]

Also you can't forget about Automatic Variants. Like any other SkyProc mod, it's awesome.

[Fredas]

Can you describe the normal maps problem with Skyrim HD, or include a pic...? Cause that is the one I use and looks good I think.

 

Well, like I said, Skyrim HD 2K Textures is the only comprehensive texture replacer I've found which isn't almost entirely just upscaled vanilla textures (and which also isn't just a series of different-looking meshes at the same resolution as vanilla, which is the case with a lot of "HD" packs I've tested today).

 

So has it come to this?  Anyone willing to extract the vanilla textures and the 2K HD textures and compare them for themselves can see what I've seen, but I'll go ahead and give an example.

 

Caution: This is your last chance to continue being blissfully unaware of this problem!

 

Stonewall01.dds vanilla:

 

 

 

Stonewall01_n.dds vanilla:

 

 

 

So far so good.  The author of the normal map here did a respectable job of differentiating between where the sides of the rocks face, on a rock-by-rock basis, as well as providing some detail in the alpha channel for certain rock surfaces to reflect light.

 

Here is HD2K's stonewall01.dds:

 

 

 

Note that while it is more or less an acceptably similar pattern and color scheme to the vanilla originals, the actual layout of the rocks is comprehensively different.  That is of course not a problem.

 

This is:

 

 

 

This is HD2K's stonewall01_n.dds.  I myself did a double-take when I started thumbing threw HD2K's textures and noticed this unique anomaly.  What is going on here?  I had to scrutinize the textures from within GIMP before I at least knew what I was looking at.

 

Right away, you will no doubt recognize that HD2K's stonewall01 normal map bears more resemblance to the vanilla stonewall01 textures than it does to its own parent texture.  That is no illusion.  As it turns out, to the best of my ability to decipher with GIMP, this normal map uses the alpha (yes, the reflective) and the red channel from the vanilla normal.  The blue channel seems to properly correspond to HD2K's parent texture.  The green channel seems to be some sort of marriage between the HD2K parent texture and the vanilla normal.

 

I patiently confirmed this result with a couple of other textures from within GIMP.  After that, for the rest of the textures in the entire pack, merely glancing at HD2K's normals and noting how they bore a hybridized resemblance to vanilla's textures was adequate confirmation for me.

 

As a normal map, a result like the above is not merely useless; it is corruptive.  Shadows play and lights reflect brightly off surfaces that don't exist, and surfaces that do exist enjoy the same confused mishmash as the rest of the texture.  It is literally a better idea to do without such normal maps, and with that being the case, it is also therefore better to do without all so-afflicted textures.

 

I did keep a few (136MB) which were useful and evidently not corrupted in this fashion.

[hryh23k9823u]

Oh well, yes is crap. I haven't used it a lot to be honest, more than 512 I dont usually care. Mostly check un-check them in MO for when I want to just take screenshots or just play. I think I'll stick with Cabal's entirely.

[Hitom]

http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/4955/?

 

This one looks pretty close to the original, i use them myself with realvision enb.

[Guest corespore]

lighting can have a massive effect on how textures are rendered. With only 2 exceptions (rocks and water) i kept all my textures vanilla. But when i tried ELFx lighting mod it was like a completely different game. The colors that a good lighting mod can bring to the game can give somewhat bland textures a whole new life. If your going to redo the textures i would also recommend trying out a lighting mod to enhance those new shiny textures 

Here's what i use and i would recommend as well. 

ELFx----->http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/27043/?

Superior rocks(1K)------>http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/37256/?

Water----->http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/13268/?

 

 

 

ELFx spoiler

 

 

[Fredas]

Thanks for the suggestions, folks.  I've since vetted a ton of texture mods - probably the majority of what's available.  In about half of all cases, I have kept at least some of the textures.  Here's a bit of what I've noticed:

 

1: About half of all mods seem to be about 90% upscale-with-filter efforts and about 10% genuinely new textures attempting to serve as replacements for vanilla.

 

2: About 20% of the texture mods I examined were - despite any assurances to the contrary, such as "HD" in the name - nothing more than retextures.  Usually the same resolution as vanilla, and always different merely for the sake of being different.  Amidianborn being a good example of this.

 

3: Almost invariably, whenever a new texture (ie, not a 100% copy of vanilla) incorporates elements from vanilla, said elements are of notably and inexplicably lower quality, generally by way of apparently having had discernible resolution cut in half.

 

4: It is fairly rare to find a mod with reasonably decent normal maps.  Sometimes they just use upscaled vanilla.  Most of the time they've produced single-vector maps of their own new textures (which is literally better than nothing).  It's uncommon to see attempts at providing custom three-dimensional definition.  This severely limits the usefulness of such mods.  A replacement texture with a lazy normal map can look like a basically flat surface regardless of circumstances.  Here's an example of a new texture with a well-done normal map:

 

 

(That said, the above texture replaces what is supposed to be a snowy stone road.  A bit too arbitrary, regardless of how nice it looks.)

 

One texture mod stood out from the crowd: Serious HD Retexture.  Most (not all) of this pack is amazing work.  Could easily have stood in as an official ultra-HD patch from Bethesda.  The normal maps are fantastic - generally, I would say, better than even Bethesda's efforts.

 

Oh yes, my thoughts on DDSopt.  It seems that the goal of this app is the optimization of textures (to better fit VRAM and possibly improve the framerate) at the expense of visual quality.  It's not a trivial concern.  Compressing a texture that already has compression artifacts is more than simply doubling-down on the artifacts.  Sure, using DXT3 instead of DXT5 would probably have made better sense in many instances, but that's only if you get to start with the uncompressed texture in either case.  Since you don't, it's really better to just leave it alone.

 

With only 2 exceptions (rocks and water) i kept all my textures vanilla.

 

I'm with you on this.  Because the normals are generally so blah, right?  I am pretty happy that I went ahead and examined every single texture personally.

 

But when i tried ELFx lighting mod it was like a completely different game.

 

I was checking out lighting options about a week ago.  For reasons I do not now recall, I decided to give ELFX a pass and go with Relighting Skyrim.  Possibly because I intend to make use of Realvision ENB and had concerns over either visual conflicts or performance.  Or it could just be that ELFX is, at the end of the day, a non-canonical mod that seems to be aiming to make interiors much darker in general, and make all fire-lit scenes crushingly orange. ;p  It's like a re-texture, except for lighting.  Still, some of those shots really are great.

 

Superior rocks(1K)------>http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/37256/?

 

Two things about this.  First, why 1K?  For me, the main point of using different textures is to provide more detail, so that the blurriness inherent in seeing the textures too up-close is minimized.  Second, I could not help but notice that this pack (like many, many others) borrows the vanilla normals for itself.  They are not a match for the new textures, sadly. ;p

 

[Guest Spikes]

I've basically reached the same conclusion with you Fredas, tested empirically literally hundreds of texture mods/overhauls and ended up dismissing most of them. They kinda look flat in my eyes. Especially obvious is on flora and environment with enb dof off.

 

Thank you for the DSSopt analysis, never thought it could affect textures at such a degree.

 

I'd love to see your end results and suggestions. and yes, i ended up choosing Relighting Skyrim instead of ELFX too, although i really enjoyed ELFX for screenshots. Reason was it changes too much in game cells  and makes areas much darker in an artificial looking way.(in my opinion ofc)

[Guest corespore]

I only use the 1K rocks version because that's all my PC can handle without noticeable performance loss. There are 2k and 4k versions of the mod with several color choices as well. If you want a better textures overall you would have to most likely go with something that improves the underlying meshes that the textures are applied to such as SMIM. Afterall, if the mesh models are poorly done in the first place all the textures, diffuse maps, and normal maps in the world aren't going to do much to improve them.

And your correct on your assumptions about ELFx, it was built around removing most if not all the ambient light that seems to come from nowhere that the game devs made very liberal use of. There is a sharp contrast between lighting sources being sunlight is far more white and fire/candlelight is a deep hue of orange, a bit more than IRL but i enjoy the contrast none-the-less. The end result of ELFx is far darker dungeons sparsely illuminated by the few light sources placed inside.

Going back to your point concerning normal maps, if you use a photo program such as photoshop or Gimp it is possible to custom make your own normal maps instead of relying on the mod authors use of the vanilla ones, However, they most likely used the original ones because the extreme level of detail needed to tell a custom normal from a vanilla is very difficult to render ingame. The vast majority of extremely detailed screenshots that you tend to see are something of a false showing. More often than not people will temporarily activate 4K texture replacers and ENB's for the express purpose of taking a few screenshots and once they accomplish that they will revert back to 1.5k or 2k textures for actual gameplay.

Anyways, custom normal maps can be generated in gimp using the .dds that comes with the mod. Just goto layer/transparency/remove alpha channel. Then filter/map/normal map. I find it easiest to use the 3D preview to gauge what depth one wants to set the color distribution throughout the the new alpha channel that will be generated later. If you really want custom made normals for each texture making them yourself is most likely going to be the only option.   

[Fredas]

I only use the 1K rocks version because that's all my PC can handle without noticeable performance loss.

 

Gotcha.  That's something I'll be keeping an eye on myself, especially when it comes to the all-important mountain textures since they can be predominant in a given scene.  (There were far more mods for mountain textures available than for any other textures in the game, but the one I finally settled upon was the Serious HD Retexture Light Mountains.)

 

If you want a better textures overall you would have to most likely go with something that improves the underlying meshes that the textures are applied to such as SMIM.

 

SMIM, definitely.  (Though I haven't yet vetted everything it seeks to change.  The lamps, for example, will have to go, because I'm not looking for a new mesh when there was nothing wrong with the old mesh.)  The only other mesh modifying mod I've seen that has the goal of improving vanilla is one called No Stretching, which seeks to counter some of the dubious results of a hastily-done landscaping effort.

 

There is a sharp contrast between lighting sources being sunlight is far more white and fire/candlelight is a deep hue of orange, a bit more than IRL but i enjoy the contrast none-the-less.

 

Yeah that's the problem.  Truthfully, I can't knock the realism since a room lit only by flames is going to be pretty much as orange as those screenshots.  But it just kills all the other colors, which the artificial ambient light, to its credit, does not.  So I guess my complaint is that you're getting realism at the sacrifice of considerable detail.  If there existed a version of the mod that found a happy balance (sort of like how Face Light isn't strictly realistic but it is nonetheless an improvement), I'd most likely favor such a lighting solution.  As it stands, I may end up swapping back and forth between ELFX and Relighting Skyrim.

 

More often than not people will temporarily activate 4K texture replacers and ENB's for the express purpose of taking a few screenshots and once they accomplish that they will revert back to 1.5k or 2k textures for actual gameplay.

 

The ironic observation here is that I was fully intending to make use of the biggest textures I could find, to put my 290X to work, and it turned out that there just weren't very many truly usable textures out there.  Sure, if you don't mind replacing your textures with literally nothing more than upscaled, destructively-sharpened (or grain-embossed) versions of the vanilla originals, that's an option.  But I daresay you could get pretty much the same artificial result with vanilla textures and the right ENB, if that truly floats your boat. ;p  I roughly estimate that I'll end up replacing only about 1000 (out of the 30k+) vanilla textures.

 

Anyways, custom normal maps can be generated in gimp using the .dds that comes with the mod. 

 

True enough.  A 20-second effort in GIMP yields a better result than literally just using the vanilla original, simply because what you produce with said method is, if nothing else, a match for what you started with.  But it is a quick and dirty process which uses lightness / darkness cues from the starting texture to produce a faux 3d result.  If you take a look at what was done with the vanilla normals, somebody went through the painstaking effort of handcrafting 3d elements.  Rocks strewn about in leaf litter stand out prominently.  Individual rocks in a wall have their undersides shaded one vector, their tops another, and certain corners are given special attention for the reflective channel.  Sometimes it is blatantly clear that whatever normapmap app was used for the process enables literal 3d polygons to be assigned.  It's not easy to justify abandoning such results.

[hryh23k9823u]

Uhm nope. DDSopt ins't about reducing quality to gain performance. It doesn't add artifacts to textures. It simply puts uncorrect mods into correct compression formats, strips unused information layer, like white alpha channels, black color channels, incorrect-excesive minimaps levels, grey-scale not greye-scaled stuff, and most importantly (imo) adds missing minimaps. All of that can result in a considerable performance gaining, and most importantly, stability (the far you get from the 3.2gb usage cap skyrim has, the better). Also, the re-compression formats allows non lossy outputs (not that i can see the difference between 888 and 565 rgb anyways).

[Guest su1234]

thanks