DNAM - Direction Material

[TechAngel85]

Can anyone tell me what the "DNAM - Direction Material" records are and what they're used for? I'm specifically interested in the "Max Angle" record and its purpose/use. For example it is used while applying the snow shader to objects and different object have different angle values. I can't seem to find any information on what this record/value actually does though.

[TechAngel85]

So I had to run over to the FO creation kit page to find this:

Directional Material: Applies a material to this object. In Skyrim, this setting was used to quickly create snow-covered variants of normal objects.

    Max Angle: Controls how much of the object is covered in the material. Values must be between 30 and 120 degrees, inclusive.

 

I'm still not sure how angles covert to how much of the material is covered...shouldn't that be percentage?

[z929669]

On 4/16/2017 at 10:46 PM, TechAngel85 said:

So I had to run over to the FO creation kit page to find this:

I'm still not sure how angles covert to how much of the material is covered...shouldn't that be percentage?

Did you ever learn more about this? I'm trying to guess what the 'Snow' flag does. BDS and Skyrim.esm don't use it, but Update.esm added this. Wondering if I should patch it.

It impacts several records, but maybe nothing of concern (in which case, i will ignore using a modGroup):

[z929669]

So my guess is that the 'snow' flag probably obfuscates what BDS is doing for places that occlude snow like under rooves.

[TechAngel85]

7 hours ago, z929669 said:

So my guess is that the 'snow' flag probably obfuscates what BDS is doing for places that occlude snow like under rooves.

I've never really understood what that setting does, nor have any additional information on it. I have it on my list to test for BDS. Sparrow said it made the object's snow uglier in some way. I've always assumed it is a flag to tell the game the material is snow, and that in turn does something within the engine. What that is, is the mystery. It could disable certain effects, use a special set of values for various effects, disable/enable certain things within the snow shader, tell the engine to apply the material differently...who knows?

Someone like powerofthree, doodlum, aers, or nukem who may be familiar with the code may be able to answer what exactly the flag does. But I haven't ask any of them, yet.

[z929669]

5 hours ago, TechAngel85 said:

I've never really understood what that setting does, nor have any additional information on it. I have it on my list to test for BDS. Sparrow said it made the object's snow uglier in some way. I've always assumed it is a flag to tell the game the material is snow, and that in turn does something within the engine. What that is, is the mystery. It could disable certain effects, use a special set of values for various effects, disable/enable certain things within the snow shader, tell the engine to apply the material differently...who knows?

Someone like powerofthree, doodlum, aers, or nukem who may be familiar with the code may be able to answer what exactly the flag does. But I haven't ask any of them, yet.

Yeah, I'm not going to forward the 'snow' flag unless there's good reason to do so. Thanks for the update.

[DoubleYou]

If I had to guess, the game has several snow related effects that we have opted not to use, such as the so-called Improved Snow shader, snow Sparkles effect, and rim lighting effects. It is possible the effect may not be readily visible unless turning these effects on. The engine might treat the shader differently if the material object is flagged as snow (as typically I would apply a shader via the DNAM IIRC).