skyrim SSE parallax _p vs _m?

[Soulmancer]

Hello, I was looking at Majestic Landscape in how it handles complex parallax and it seems more advanced than what I'm accustom to.

"A lot of other Parallax mods used the wrong Shader Type for Parallax Mapping via Enb. And this wrong Shader Material has issues with Single Pass Snow. While real Enb Parallax uses the Environment Mapping material to add Parallax. And this works with Single Pass Snow. And more important: Single Pass Snow + Enb Parallax doesn't float."

" I had to use different textures for the mesh parts. Because Enb uses Environment Mapping for POM. And I created a white Alpha channel while I set the decal layers to blending. This ensures that the meshes will look correct with other, compatible packs too. I decided to use the real Enb Parallax via the Environment Mapping and chose single Pass Snow + Projected diffuse to get really smooth snow cover transitions."

This was copied and pasted from Majestic Landscape page... It's kinda going over my head. I know a lot of his terrain textures that are linked through meshes are pathed to either an _m texture, or a _p texture, and sometimes both. The _m looks like an inverted version of the _p texture.

Could anyone help break this down a bit? Thanks

[ENBSeries]

It's probably because envmap material is complex material feature used while regular game with _p maps is standard parallax and complex parallax.

[Soulmancer]

Interesting, I'd like to do more testing in game after I get a few more details from T4... two things I don't fully understand is the _m height map looks slightly different from the _p height map... it's a bit brighter?



Also his meshes are pathing both to _m and to _p for parallax in many cases... I don't see how that'd work having two height maps pathed?

[ENBSeries]

Brightness should be the same for them. Only difference is that alpha channel of _M map should not be white in the center, cause it means no parallax. Not remember, probably not black too, which is another trigger condition. There is a guide on nexus and in the first post here on forum to the version which have complex materials first introduced, you can find there how maps works. And there is a big chance different brigtness of parallax maps on both screenshots caused by wrong setting of photoshop color profiles.

[Soulmancer]

Thanks. I'll experiment with it myself later and look deeper into T4's mechanism as well as the thread on complex material. I can see in the mesh the skyrim shader type is changed from parallax to environment map. I guess the only thing that doesn't make sense is some of his meshes still use a _p parallax texture attached to the parallax array and an _m alpha parallax texture attached to the environment map array on the same mesh... any idea why?

[ENBSeries]

Cause it's mistake.

[Soulmancer]

I see, so should be one or the other. If using the environmental material shader for a BSTextureSet then the parallax texture should be slotted to the environmental mask array, and the parallax array should be left blank?

[mindflux]

I don't think the game engine uses height/parallax texture when environment map shader is defined.

I'm guessing the parallax texture assignments are simply a leftover from times when there was no complex material support and I doubt they do any harm.

[Soulmancer]

That'd make sense, so I'd only need to worry about ensuring a height map is pathed to the environmental mask array if the environmental map shader is selected. I plan to do some trials in the next couple days using T4's meshes. Also trying to help Spongeman131 with gathering information needed for a Nif Batch Processor script.

[Soulmancer]

Btw, are either of these possible thru ENB?

Terrain blending on a mesh where the mesh uses a terrain texture?

Excluding a terrain texture from terrain parallax via an INI exclusion list?

The reason for one of the other is a lot of terrain textures are used by meshes and replacing the alpha transparency with a height map results in very noticeable seams on these meshes.

Thx,