TES Skyrim SE 0.484

[speaker-60]

Sort of but not really, rocks are used in all kinds of ways in vanilla and in mods and not always pointing down and not all at the same height some rocks might be lower in the terrain or higher somewhere else
You would effectively have to make a custom model for each rock individually placed in the game or adjust the position of each ect
Base object swapper could be used to some degree but then how would you know what rock model to swap with based on the location its in ect, you would still need to revise each individually placed rock or landscape mesh and set the adjustments manually even as a BOS ini

Actually - all rock meshes are made to be used one certain side down. They're one-sided meshes that are open from below. And not all rock meshes need this adjustment. Of course, it would still take time to make this kind of mod. (I started one a while ago, adding grass and stuff around some rocks, but I've been busy and haven't worked much on this.)
As for the rocks being lower or higher in terrain, the debris and grass must have some universal height.

I'm not claiming it's easy and fast way, but without any viable alternatives it may be the only way.

Rocks could and iv seen mods do this be put on there side agents a wall or upside down for something like an overhang even in vanilla there are cased of this(solitude for example), also this couldn't be done for everything for example the skull picture i posted. Grass would work better then debris but then grass cant be used everywhere, like if one of these rocks was placed in the middle over other rocks then you dont want grass growing out the middle of a rock formation or if a rock is upside down or on a mountain side. Theres too many manual variations and situations that would add tones of manual adjustments, where as a shader doing a blend effect would just work on any mesh and any situation with no mesh edits needed. Thats why i say its the better way of doing it if it was possible.

I just wanted to know if a shader could be made to do this or the parallax could be altered abit to force the effect if not then never mind as the alternatives in my view are not good enough of an effect to account for all the work and effort it would take to make not to mention it basically not being compatible with any location mod without a patch. Not to stop anyone else using that method but i wouldn't want to.

This new parallax almost dose the blend effect it seems to blend depending on the height changes of the parallax texture itself, which is obviously a side effect and wasnt the point but thats what lead me to ask . Like what could we do to kinda force this effect more, for example if all parallax textures had there black colors lightened then all parallax textures would force an upwards height effect across the whole texture potentially putting this blend effect everywhere.

Here in this example https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/ ... /image.png where one is blended and one isnt its probably due to the parallax texture having alot of height in the texture where the blended rock is and very little or no height on the texture where the other rock is. So what im theorizing is if all parallax textures add a base level of height offset then the chances are all objects receive more of this blend as all landscape textures would atleast move upwards say by 5cm or something like that as a standard. Its not really the best method for blending but it might by are only method that dosnt need to take a long time to achieve, opening all textures up and lightning them all up a bit in batch is easily done in photoshop.

But it dose also look like view angle is also a factor, the none blended rock looks like the terrain is more sloped then the blended one. The parallax effect being view angle based i wonder if we could have some settings to play around with this so we might find a sweet spot where it gets the blend effect to happened in more situations and wider view angles.

So thats it can a new shader be made to do a blend properly or what can we do to better utilize the coincidental blend we currently have with parallax, sounds like a blend specific shader isnt possible so using parallax is probably the only way to remotely achieve blending(given that it already dose)

But yer if it wasn't for complex parallax almost achieve the the effect then yes the mesh edit method would be the only valid way of doing it

[Anubis]

There are many new mods with complex parallax covering all ground textures - even the one's that surround the rocks in a block (several rocks in a piece of land in ome mesh). Just need to find the right ones and try them all out.

I'm using a mixture of such mods and I need to check this over, but I think that with my load order there are no such sharp lines between the land and the rocks anymore. There used to be at first with some complex parallax mods, but not anymore. I'll check this when I get the time and if it's true, I can give a list of the mods I'm using for the landscape.

[speaker-60]

There are many new mods with complex parallax covering all ground textures - even the one's that surround the rocks in a block (several rocks in a piece of land in ome mesh). Just need to find the right ones and try them all out.

I'm using a mixture of such mods and I need to check this over, but I think that with my load order there are no such sharp lines between the land and the rocks anymore. There used to be at first with some complex parallax mods, but not anymore. I'll check this when I get the time and if it's true, I can give a list of the mods I'm using for the landscape.

Right, that was the main drive to the question and theory is can we get parallax to just do the effect, as i say i recon its simply to do with how much height the texture adds to weather it blends
Id be interested to know your list as it would be a good stating point for testing and tweaking

[Anubis]

I did a quick check for some places I knew would be problematic and indeed I found some weird behavior.
Here is a comparison ENB off vs ENB on - as you can see, half of the large rock gets blended in, but the left side does not. Instead the blending happens on the next seam between land textures:
(Right-click on the images and open in new tab, then click on them to see the full sise sharp images)




And here is another example where only half of the stone gets blended:



In both cases it's different textures against the rocks where it blends and where it does not blend. (On the second set of these pictures there is a road texture and the road edge texture - road texture does not blend in this case)

From this it seems it has to do with the compatibility between textures. (In my images it's the same looking texture on both cases where it does not blend with rocks. But then there is the same looking texture on other meshes and there it blends. Seems to be some kind of combination. That's the thing to sort out.)

[speaker-60]

I did a quick check for some places I knew would be problematic and indeed I found some weird behavior.
Here is a comparison ENB off vs ENB on - as you can see, half of the large rock gets blended in, but the left side does not. Instead the blending happens on the next seam between land textures:
(Right-click on the images and open in new tab, then click on them to see the full sise sharp images)




And here is another example where only half of the stone gets blended:



In both cases it's different textures against the rocks where it blends and where it does not blend. (On the second set of these pictures there is a road texture and the road edge texture - road texture does not blend in this case)

From this it seems it has to do with the compatibility between textures. (In my images it's the same looking texture on both cases where it does not blend with rocks. But then there is the same looking texture on other meshes and there it blends. Seems to be some kind of combination. That's the thing to sort out.)

The first example looks like its one of those rocks that has the rock then a lower dirt section to the rock mesh
The second are you using blended roads? that mod removes the dirt part of roads so that the real dirt texture is revealed
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecial ... /mods/8834

It might be in these cases any mesh that has these fake/bad transition parts to the mesh are best removed, which is just a alpha mask added to the texture to remove part of that mesh
So if you look at this mesh example it has the dirt section this linked mods tryins to match that texture with the terrain its on as vanilla didnt do this
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecial ... mods/60762

My suggestion is to use alpha mask to remove that dirt altogether, i know some rocks have them

Theres always a possibility that the edges we see is due to a texture not actually having a compatible parallax texture as there in no full game replacer for complex parallax just separate packs for different parts ect

If the info here is still relevant https://www.reddit.com/r/skyrimmods/com ... _parallax/
Meshes need the parallax shader type on them?
I never messed with parallax before as i never thought it looked that good to bother but thats obviously changed now

Edit:https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecial ... mods/50027 So yes some meshes might not be using parallax like roads

[ENBSeries]

If something not get blended with terrain blending enabled, it means rendered after terrain. Why? Nobody knows. Alpha test objects could be such, but not the only reason.

[speaker-60]

If something not get blended with terrain blending enabled, it means rendered after terrain. Why? Nobody knows. Alpha test objects could be such, but not the only reason.

Right yer render order anything rendered after its done the parallax

As i edited maybe some meshes in various screenshots arent setup to use parallax properly
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecial ... mods/50027

Its a possible reason unless anubus is using this already or had meshes with it enabled, just guessing as a possible cause

@Boris is view angle important? Could some view angles just simply be outside of the effect range, thats probably worded wrong i dont know how parallax specifically works so just try and take away a general meaning behind it. I only ask as it looks to me like some of the none blended examples are at a larger angle to the 'mesh' face of the terrain(so terrain is not really parallel to the z axis)

[ENBSeries]

Angle is important. As i said this is done by technique same as soft particles. It means objects virtually moved to have distance between them and such distance is a factor of how much blending is happening. What you see as parallax bumps have different blending is just cause they are look like that under such angle, but if you change it to perpendicular to surface, will be not any close, just usual blending.

[Anubis]

speaker-60

Meshes are not important on complex parallax. This is all done in textures.

Parallax that uses meshes, needs additional textures with _p.dds at the end, but with the new complex parallax these are not required, height map is the alpha channel over the diffuse.
Open up some of these new parallax terrain mods and you will see there are no meshes included.

[ENBSeries]

Version updated, download again
Restored fix for transparent hairs in water reflections which looks green there. Fixed size of complex particles when sky mesh is scaled. Removed shader caching functionality as it not works because of some skse plugin or mod manager which replaces file access functions. Applied minor cpu performance optimizations.