Skyrim ENB Parallax

[Electrocutor]

Is there a tutorial somewhere about the nuances of using parallax in Skyrim along with ENB?

The reason I ask is because sometimes, it seems to not require an ESP height map, and only requires a _p named identically to the diffuse, other times it seems to require that the alpha channel of the diffuse gets re-purposed, and yet other times it requires a parallax map be specified as a height map within the TextureSet record along with various property settings.

[ENBSeries]

Check parallax mods how they done it, i don't know anything regarding native modding.

[Electrocutor]

Doesn't ENB itself have certain criteria to make parallax work? For example, by enabling the terrain parallax fix in ENB, most normal texture packs' landscape textures will no longer work correctly due to alpha channel conflict.

[ENBSeries]

There is no conflict, because alpha channel is unused for terrain and any attempts to apply it is totally modders fault, things not designed in engine unsupported by it, not by the mod.

Doesn't ENB itself have certain criteria to make parallax work?

In case of terrain, all terain shaders are replaced with modified versions. For other objects game parallax shaders are replaced. So mod never misses and never applies parallax to non parallax objects.

[Electrocutor]

I was able to get a landscape nif to properly show a diffuse + gradient transparency + normal + specular + parallax in game without any issue using a .dds, _n.dds, and _p.dds each with alpha channels. The problem is the non-nif terrain textures... I can't figure out where to set the shader properties since they don't have nifs associated with them. ... and ENB's terrain parallax fix causes the diffuse alpha channel to go crazy, so wherever the shader properties are for terrain stuff, they must be set to something wierd.

[ENBSeries]

There is no parallax at all for landscape, so i don't think anything need to be changed except textures, by adding alpha channel to them with height data.

[Electrocutor]

The Skyrim texture spec is:

Diffuse RGB = Diffuse
Diffuse Alpha = Transparency
Normal RGB = Normal/Height
Normal Alpha = Specular

The rest are their own file, such as parallax, glow, etc.

So the reason we get distortion is because the game uses the alpha of diffuse as transparency, but with ENB terrain fix on, ENB uses the diffuse alpha for heightmap? Why wouldn't you use the normal for that? If a terrain texture has some large rocks or built-in clutter like pine cones, it could still benefit from parallax, but I'm not sure how you'd get parallax assigned to those textures, due to the terrain models being who knows where.

The only issue is terrain, landscape objects will show up with height data and parallax just fine with only using FixParallaxBugs=true.

[ENBSeries]

I've already said, alpha is not used for terrain, it physically impossible with the game engine to apply alpha as opacity to mix terrain textures, there are no shaders for this. Alpha from normals is not used either and the answer why i decided to choose diffuse alpha instead of normals alpha:
1) many vanilla diffuse textures have height map in alpha (unimplemented features?).
2) normal maps may have lower resolution than diffuse maps, but parallax must be as much detailed as possible for best quality, the simplest way to decrease video memory usage at minimal visual impact is to reduce resolution of normal maps.
3) texture formats are more "loyal" by quality vs size to diffuse+height than normal+height.

[Electrocutor]

Do you mean that the terrain textures don't support alpha transparency? Because the landscape textures definitely support transport transparency as soon as you enable the nif models to allow it.

It makes me wonder if the btr files under meshes\terrain are what are used for rendering the terrain; but they use oddly named textures, such as "Tamriel.4.0.0.DDS" which seems like an LOD to me.

[FiftyTifty]

Do you mean that the terrain textures don't support alpha transparency? Because the landscape textures definitely support transport transparency as soon as you enable the nif models to allow it.

It makes me wonder if the btr files under meshes\terrain are what are used for rendering the terrain; but they use oddly named textures, such as "Tamriel.4.0.0.DDS" which seems like an LOD to me.

Read what he's saying, dangnammit.

The engine handles terrain texture transparency, with the textures themselves having their alpha channel unused. Solution? Use the alpha channel for parallax mapping!

.nif Files, on the other hand, do support transparency. For this reason, you have to enable a shader flag in the .nif, add a separate parallax texture, and then add the path to the .nif.

.Btr files are used for LOD, far as I know.