Skyrim ENB Parallax

[ENBSeries]

There are no shaders for terrain which use alpha, it's ignored. If game have some special mode similar to oblivion or fallout 3 for drawing terrain in multiple passes, then i can't make parallax for such scenario and it's probably falls in to generic parallax.
Lod textures of terrain are not used in parallax, they are just for transition. Their alpha is used by shaders as i remember, but not used by terrain parallax fix.

[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.

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.

You have in fact proved my point...

The following textures are used in both terrain and in landscape nifs. If they do not contain transparency in the alpha channel of the diffuse, it causes the nifs to look wrong, but if they do, it causes terrain parallax to look wrong. Does ENB not know the filename of the diffuse texture being used and can just load filename_p.dds by default instead of using the alpha channel?

dirt02.dds
rock01.dds
riverbededge01.dds
tundra01.dds
tundrarocks01.dds
volcanictundradirt01.dds
volcanictundrarocks01.dds
volacanictundragravel01.dds
snowrocks01.dds
coastbeach01.dds
reachmoss01.dds
reachmossyrocks01.dds
fallforestgrass01.dds
fallforestleaves01.dds

*there may be others that I have not noticed in nifs yet.

[ENBSeries]

There are few terrain shaders and whatever you do, terrain will not be drawed with another shaders and with another textures, this is physically impossible.

[Electrocutor]

So to translate: the ENB wrapper is only able to intercept the shader data, and that data doesn't contain the filename for the texture being shaded, so there is no way for you to know which texture is being shaded, thus all you have to work with is the RGBA, so it's alpha channel or nothing?

(sorry for being so slow)

[ENBSeries]

Yes. And even using file names will not change anything, because

physically impossible

to add more textures to terrain shaders.

[Electrocutor]

Thanks for responding so much, I believe I understand it now. Interestingly enough, upon opening any of the vanilla or dlc textures as well as many of the texture pack textures, their normals almost all have a blue channel max of 128 and min of 128 :-/; a quick test shows me that in game, if I can generate height maps for these textures to replace the blue channel, the difference is astounding when paired with even a slight parallax.

[ENBSeries]

You or i can't use blue channel from normal maps for anything, except normal maps. It's standard of engine textures and math applied. Texture compression formats are also incompatible with such things.

[Electrocutor]

Sorry, I wasn't clear. My meaning wasn't to use blue channel for anything new, just to actually give it heightmap data for use in-game: the difference is astounding. I can't believe that they would just leave it at a fixed 128 for all normal maps.

[ENBSeries]

It do not contain fixed value, it's normal map specific and required.

[Electrocutor]

I have a conundrum:
Two textures: one is a road and one is dirt; both are set for heightmap rendering with parallax enabled. Both have a _p grayscale parallax map set to a flat 127, and both have a diffuse alpha channel set to a flat 127. Yet, when rendered in game, the dirt floats significantly above the road via parallax (when strafing around a spot, you can see 'under' the dirt).

Does the parallax effect also take into account the normal map or something when decided what virtual height to set it at?