ACCEPTED aMidianBorn Caves and Mines (by CaBaL)

[exploiteddna]

yep is indeed pretty difficult to get even close to memory limit in interiors... files look fine anyway with 2k-1k uncompressed... no reason to upload also a 4k...improvement is not worth the download size...probably i'll add parallax in future...file could get big.

eventually will be released  a 2k with 2k  uncompressed normal ...depends on frozen caves, i kinda suspect those ones will give me some headaches.

thanks!

Great work man, this is definitely one of my more favorite releases of yours.

 

So you mentioned frozen caves!?!? I can't wait to see that.. as far as i know there is only one noteworthy texture pack that touches the frozen caves and that's Snow and Rocks. Will be nice to finally have another option to consider :) Plus, I often feel the frozen caves turn out with too much blue.. an unrealistic amount of blue. So, I can't wait to see what you do with them :D

[TechAngel85]

..and then I deleted the Beauty of Skyrim thread by mistake. Techangel apparently moved thelastwon's OP from the Hectrol thread to the Beauty of Skyrim thread, which made it the OP instead of mine for some reason, so I attempted to delete by deleting the false OP - which deleted the whole thread again for some reason.

 

Techangel, check to see if the post you are trying to move was made before the OP of the new thread - if it is, it will just screw up the ordering of the new thread.

I won't know until an Admin Admin restores it again. You may need to PM Z. That's what I did when I goofed. There needs to be a better way of copying, moving, and merging individual posts if you and I, whom have some experience, is messing it up. lol! My original intent was to copy the threads with the compares from Hectrol to Beauty, move the poll if possible (which I don't think is.) and finally mark Beauty as "Accepted" until the compares for this mod are done. This seems like it should be a fairly simply and straightforward task, but it's not because you can't simply say "copy these" and "paste them" here. Then when you do get it, timestamps are an issue. Tools that would allow you to "move post to hear within thread" or "make post OP" would be greatly helpful. The whole "if OP is deleted then whole thread is deleted" seems like a fairly big limitation as well and pretty big "oh damn, that sucks!" moment when you discover the limitation on your own as you and I have both done. Hopefully the new forum software will allow for more flexibility in this type of stuff, but until then we're just going to have a few "oops" from time to time.

 

EDIT:

Speaking of compares, I'm going to try to do them this weekend since I did the compares for Beauty of Skyrim - Caves and Mines and still have the save locations. It's Tax Free weekend here which means my job is going to be hell for the next few days, but I'll still try to get those compares pushed out.

[exploiteddna]

techangel85 Wrote

 

 It's Tax Free weekend here which means my job is going to be hell for the next few days, but I'll still try to get those compares pushed out.

yeah, im finished with my final exams as of a few hours ago, but i still have another paper and a half to finish writing and get turned in. but as soon as im finished i promise ill be back in full swing. ill have about 3 weeks of 'break' before fall term begins and will be able to do a lot more during that time :D

[phazer11]

techangel85 Wrote

 

 It's Tax Free weekend here which means my job is going to be hell for the next few days, but I'll still try to get those compares pushed out.

yeah, im finished with my final exams as of a few hours ago, but i still have another paper and a half to finish writing and get turned in. but as soon as im finished i promise ill be back in full swing. ill have about 3 weeks of 'break' before fall term begins and will be able to do a lot more during that time :D

About the same here except my classes and also my documentary won't be done until around August 12 and then classes start again around the 28th. Plus I have woderful mother nature shitting on me (or pissing tbh) every day for the last week (hard too and lightning and power issues...).

 

Anyways if I don't pass out after doing the fish compares I'll try to do some of these.

[exploiteddna]

 

techangel85 Wrote

 

 It's Tax Free weekend here which means my job is going to be hell for the next few days, but I'll still try to get those compares pushed out.

yeah, im finished with my final exams as of a few hours ago, but i still have another paper and a half to finish writing and get turned in. but as soon as im finished i promise ill be back in full swing. ill have about 3 weeks of 'break' before fall term begins and will be able to do a lot more during that time :D

About the same here except my classes and also my documentary won't be done until around August 12 and then classes start again around the 28th. Plus I have woderful mother nature shitting on me (or pissing tbh) every day for the last week (hard too and lightning and power issues...).

 

Anyways if I don't pass out after doing the fish compares I'll try to do some of these.

fish? what feesh do you speak of, daniel san? 

[rootsrat]

These fish I believe ;)

[exploiteddna]

not exactly sure what changes CaBaL made for the recent update, but im really liking these textures. At first I thought maybe the color maps were little bit blurry (which was more than likely a product of, or exacerbated by, the poor UV mapping that runs rampant in a lot of places around skyrim). Nonetheless, Ive been playing my character with these textures for the past week or so and im very impressed. I really think we've got a winner here. IMO it adds more life to the caves than BoS does, but its not too far over the top like the Hectrol caves were. I think these still provide a good flow and they seem to fit in well with the rest of skyrim/STEP

[TechAngel85]

I'll be doing these compares later this evening (time permitting).

[TechAngel85]

As promised, here are the compares:

 

STEP  >>  Beauty of Skyrim  >>  aMidianBorn Caves 2K

 

 

[TechAngel85]

Vanilla >> STEP  >>  Beauty of Skyrim  >>  aMidianBorn Caves 2K

 

 

[WilliamImm]

I'm loving it. The only things that I don't like are the rocks in the 4th compare, Beauty of Skyrim looks the best (not streched and horrible), and the jarring looking (to me) unchanged cave rock - it juts out. Then again, we can use Beauty's mesh and textures that fix the horrible stretching for the rocks, and ask CaBaL to cover that untouched cave texture.

[TechAngel85]

My personal review is this:

 

Beauty of Skyrim still wins over current STEP for me (Snow and Rocks HD). When comparing Beauty and aMidianborn, the difference is night and day. I don't care too much for aMidianborn to be completely honest. The direction of the mod is great; however, that's where it ends for me. aMidianborn makes for good screenshots, but while playing in-game the textures appear to be "grainy" and "speckled" while moving about and not in a good way. The other thing is the "pits" of the textures. I'd expect caves to be a little more smooth and this pitted effect also adds to the grainy look; making it worse. These pits are very visible in the last three shots on the ground texture that I took and was the main reason for those shots. I don't know much about textures, but is it the normals that causes these "pits"? If this was toned down a bit, it would fit much better into the game in my opinion.

 

Finally, I feel the coloring of aMidianborn is accurate as far as realism; however, it's too far away from vanilla to be considered for Core. All-in-all, it's still Beauty of Skyrim for me; however, let the people decide (this is a democracy). Vote!

 

EDIT:

Here are two of the issues I think:

Here you can see all the scattered pieces on the ground that looks like gold. It's everything and it's reflecting light (I think) and it's makes the ground look grainy (not in a good way). In-game, it looks like the ground texture has been put through a noise filter to add noise. I just want to load in into Photoshop to despeckle it. Haha!

 

Here is all the "glowing green stuff" on the walls. This is present in Beauty (I checked) but not anyway near the extent as it is in aMidianborn. This is also reflecting light (I think) and making the walls like grainy as you walk (not to mention the pitting (tiny little dimples everywhere) I mentioned above).

[Guest]

I did have a look at these not long ago Tech and I'm sorry to say to Cabal, but I noticed exactly what you just said in your post. I once talked to a guy who used to work at Bizarre Creations (poor guy got made redundant) and he told me you should iron out all specular in your diffuse and let the normal map do all the work. It's okay for games like World of Warcraft, but modern games using normal maps shouldn't have it baked in. The reason is quite obvious why - it just looks fake because it generally is. 

 

And, yes I would expect caves to be more gunge-like and smooth. I think the more normal map specular sheen, the better in caves. Slimy! :) Alright maybe not that much. ;)

[CaBaL]

i'd keep a deep breath before talking of moon and sun...and a zen pause...

anyway...

https://www.cepolina.com/photo/nature/mountains/cave/b/cave-stone.jpg

 

primary caves are grainy ,unless we're talking about limestone caves  (secondary) https://i612.photobucket.com/albums/tt206/Monduccio/GrotteSBarbara6.jpg where anyway shapes are way more intricate than bethcrap

and they will still be this way.

on side note...repeateble pattern...does not mean you have to see it repeated ingame.

 

 

frozen caves available!!

that was the reason of the visit :)

[Guest]

i'd keep a deep breath before talking of moon and sun...and a zen pause...

anyway...

frozen caves available

I'm not sure I understand at all.