[Skyrim] Visible end of skybox

[GODzilla]

Maybe we, maybe you should call on the modding community. I feel like this would make an impact since everyone values your work. You gave them so much, I think it's time they give something back.

The request should be to fix this problem in the CK, in the world editor. There must be something that can be done about this UGLY horizon. ^^

[ENBSeries]

No, it's very hard to fix, only helps to create new very huge geometry which visible only on far distances and then water or any other objects will fade in fog smoothly to that object fog. Also fog distance must be adjusted and level of detail in general to increase visibility distance. And forget about community, nobody care about other mods.

[GODzilla]

What about fog...can it be placed or can the surface on which it is placed by the game be defined? In the vanilla games these places are "high mountains" and the game automatically places fog there when you increase the fog distance.

Maybe it would be enough to...

a) Define the far ends of the flat horizon structure to be recognized as high mountains, so that the game places fog there.

b) actually CREATE mountain-LOD there, slightly under the "waterline" of that horizon, make it invisible via LOD-texture with all alpha painted over them, then the game creates the fog.

c) Or, if possible, simply hand-place fog there.

What I noticed btw is that the vanilla game does not fully hide the horizon. One can clearly see the edge of the horizon from High Hrothgar even with vanilla.

What it does though is to hide the EDGES, making it appear rounded and thus not artificial. So it may suffice to use any of the above mentioned methods on the edges of the horizon, to minimize performance impact.

All that said...I'm not near as experienced with the CK to pull that of. I merely changed some numbers around here and there, but never been in the actual world editor...

[Bronze316]

Hello Boris,

I greatly appreciate the time you spent looking into that issue for us, and I completely understand your reasons on why a fix cannot be implemented at this time. I know it's not your fault, the game engine has limitations.

There is some good news, somehow I've managed to configure the ENB to minimize this problem, although it's not a 100% guaranteed fix. Here's the screenshot:





@GODzilla,

This is from my new WIP that I've been talking about, and I see you've had some good ideas. I still believe that the modding community would be able to get rid of this problem 100% with the use of the Creation Kit. (your option C - simply hand-place fog there)

[GODzilla]

Actually I consider option c) to possibly be the worst option, for various reasons.

For instance, if you used the hint on page 1, changing the SkyrimPrefs.ini settings so that the game places fog on distant mountains, you'd agree that the game does a pretty good job in creating beautiful fog, which tehn results in screenshots like this:

http://s7.directupload.net/images/user/ ... fcgvpt.jpg

or this:

http://s1.directupload.net/images/user/ ... ku5br5.jpg

Another advantage of this automatically placed fog is that it disappears when you get closer (or, in case of that mountains, is getting replaced by more detailed fog). You'd never know how manually placed fog would look like once you stand directly at the waterfront. And, if it looks bad, you'd have to figure out a method to make it look better or vanish or whatever...

The automatic fog does everything, well, automatically. *g*

[Bronze316]

I should've been more specific when I agreed to option C. I know that manually placing fog volumes would be too tedious and time consuming, but what I really meant is that someone would use the Creation Kit to create a mod that would modify certain functions of the fog rendering code. So in essence, the mod would actually be "hand-painting" the fog along the horizon.....hmmm.

Hey, could we get Bob Ross over here?! We need a little happy cloud here, and some happy fog there....

Ok, seriously. The way I have it tweaked right now works for at least 50% of in-game scenarios, but when you are on a high elevation and have clear skies, the horizon edge will show no matter what. BTW, on pic #2 how the heck did you get your character all the way up there?! That's a pretty cool shot

Anyways, here is a screenshot of the worst case scenario even with all of my tweaks and settings. These scenarios are too few and far in between. That's the good news!

[ENBSeries]

The problem is different, you folk didn't understood. Fog is distante fog, which is applied everywhere only as fading factor, not volumetric fog, so it's not possible manually to place it somewhere, you can only increase/decrease it's fade distance and few other parameters in weather in CK. Distance fog color is same as color of background which is visible below horizon. Distance fog completely fade out object to it's color only at specific distance, if object is not rendered(simply smaller) at such distance, then fog factor is less than 1 and you see ugly line. For mountains i said how to fix, for water simply place more water surfaces far away. Simpler to write script which automatically reduce fog fade range according to limits of world and camera position, but i don't think this is possible with CK.

[GODzilla]

Please pardon our primitive optimism, master! *g* :mrgreen:

But we wont give up. Success...or death (meaning the uninstallation of Skyrim of course )

[dpeasant]

This lower end of skybox is actually a 28-th layer of clouds. In CK you can minimize it by setting 28-th cloud layer = to horizon colour. Look here for an example:


[more]


Also, if the water has green color, for example, it will also ruin the horizon as skyrim is almost surrounded by water. And water reflects the "sky lower" colour in far, so it looks "cut out" of the horizon.
Look here, i made it green to illustrate the problem:




So, in my weather mod for my enb preset ive fixed this, except for the water.

[Bronze316]

Thanks Boris, I understand what you're saying and now it makes more sense to me. I also agree that it's better to simply reduce the fog range, than to add more water surfaces. I'm just not sure what the next step is, but it looks like dpeasant has posted some new info.

@GODzilla,

We learn something new everyday, it's no problem really.

@dpeasant,

That is very useful, thanks for posting this. I wanted to try using the Creation Kit, but it would take some time for me to learn how to use it properly. You've explained that part of it very well. It seems that if the lowest part of the "skybox" is a color that is a mixture of the water color and the color of the 28-th layer of clouds, then it might improve the transition from horizon to water a little bit more. Am I on the right track?

If not, then I would like to still try the method you've shown here, along with my ENB settings. Either way it will be an improvement!