TES Skyrim SE 0.390

[Locater16]

Figuring out a way to get the solid fog to become exponential height fog would be very cool, IMO.

Lowering the fog contribution the higher in altitude the worldspace position of a pixel is would do it, exponential heightfog is in common use today.

That being said technically the weird "fade to gray fog" thing instead of fading into the skybox itself is also wrong for an actual planet. Like, what is the weird infinite plane of nether fog you always see supposed to be?



As you can see in a real world picture, the world fades smoothly into the sky into the distance, instead of the weird separate planes they are on.



Only other things I could think of are UE4's convolution bloom: https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/Eng ... index.html

cool custom bloom texture; making grass plants wobble when hit by an object (vertex animation go!), blending objects that hit the terrain into the terrain texture. Those last two I can only imagine as tricky though, how would you detect objects and get the right textures/etc.?

Though parallax mapping on cloud textures would be cool, making clouds more 3d. Or whatever, awesome work Boris!

[ENBSeries]

Fog can't be done, because it will not work with transparent objects, i did a lot of code to make this work okay in old skyrim, but not gonna do it in sse.
Bloom can be programmed in external shaders, so i don't see any point to touch it.

[Anubis]

Locater16 - I use Dynavision mod to blend the land with the sky. (static dof option)
Not the ideal solution, but better than without it.

[Pfuscher]

Hi, I wanted to talk about you about a imo nice light effect for skyrim.

Screens first, explanation follows.





As we can see light from windows is produced on the interrior and pretty bright in the real image.
Skyrim can do the same with some texture or mesh changes.
There are some files called "int" that are only used for interiors.
Normally they have a specular map according to normal skyrim settings like:
Metal: Bright grey
stone: very dark grey
wood: nearly black

If we make the usual wood and stone INT files a lot brighter, that effect is created.
That leaves the other textures that are used for interiors. In those cases the spec map shall not be touched, but the spec setting in the interior mesh.

I noticed, that there are parts on the wood, that has nearly no specular. That's because of the contrast on the spec map, maybe normal map, too.
So I set 50% as min value for spec and ended with this. I only changed the wood texture.


Still very unrealistic as the light is too on - off

So I set the spec map to be completely 60% grey and ended up with this.
Considering the light is still wrong. It has to be the normal maps fault. It has too much contrast.

Next step would be making the normal map with less contrast. An interior wood be a lot more smooth anyway. My skyrim is unimmersive here.
Also got an idea for enb.
But as enb has interior and exterior settings, I'm sure Boris has a much better solution in his head.

[ENBSeries]

I don't know if glosiness is passed to shaders from material/mesh properties or it's based on the light setting (parameter is alpha channel of SpecularColor), but what you asking (if i understood correctly) is glosiness/power control of specular.

[mcmull500]

Hey boris, volumetric fog is not lit by volumetric rays. Will you ever fix this?

[ja231c]

Regarding the specular power I don't think that changing the glosiness on a per mesh basis is a good idea since it would require editing a lot of meshes.
Changing it globally isn't really good either since there is often a plenty of things that would look completely wrong if it was changed.
There are also no empty channels in maps that are typically loaded that could be used for specular power.

I think that physically based rendering using the normal map alpha channel as glosiness (since the vanilla specular intensity maps are quite similar to glosiness maps anyway) and the green channel of the environment mask as metalness (if I remember correctly the vanilla game uses the red channel for environment masks), if no environment mask is present then just assume the object is fully dielectric.

When it comes to the specular intensity, specular color and glosiness paremeters inside the mesh they would most probably have to be ignored albeit I think that wouldn't be much of a problem.

I don't really know how hard it would be to implement altough I'm fairly certain many people would appreciate it.

[ENBSeries]

mcmull500
I don't know how to fix, it's difficult cause transparent object and rays applied after it will do more harm than now applied before.

ja231c
Yeah, both cases not good. But from your words it seems specular power is only in meshes, not in the light properties, right? If it somewhere hidden in lights as multiplier to mesh specular, that could be a fix.

[Pfuscher]

Tested it with a reasonable and better normal map. (new texture on top). Looks quite more realistic.
The strength of the effect of course would need to be adjusted in my personal enb/texture. Probably too strong right now.
Now the other interior textures would need a change.
With elfx some windows even get fake rays, would be a nice addition.

Would it be possible to seperate architecture interior from everything else? That way not thousands of meshes and textures would need to be changed.

new

old

[ja231c]

Boris
There doesn't seem to be a parameter for specular power in light properties, to my knowledge (and probably everyone elses knowledge) it is only present in meshes.

Altough even if there was such a paremeter adjusting specular power on per-light basis would still cause some objects illuminated by the adjusted light to look completely wrong (metals for example, altough even on them the default specular power looks wrong).

I think it would be possible to interpolate between the vanilla specular power and the globally adjusted one using one of the unused channels of the environment mask map for blending. This would probably solve the problem altough it would still look visually lacking (still better than vanilla though). I don't think this would be hard to implement, altough I may be wrong.

That being said physically based rendering would both solve the problem and make the game look a lot better, altough it would probably require more work.

Also it would be really nice to be able to put the textures made in substance painter (or some other program) directly into skyrim and have it look good without spending hours adjusting them only to find out that no matter what you do they still look just as bad in game as they did before spending all those hours editing them.

Pfuscher
Too glossy altough it looks better than vanilla altough probably only because it's this glossy.
Also, I don't think it would be possible to seperate interior architecture from everything else since it uses the same combinations of shaders as everything else (mostly also with the exact same paremeters as everything else).