Hello there

recently I downloaded a texture replacer for some houses in Riverwood. No esp, bsa or anything, just textures. It had two sizes of textures included, one 1024 and one 512. it shown near you, in about a 5 meter Radius the highres textures and further away the lowres ones. I wanted to ask if there is a way to change the distance in which the highres textures are shown, since that seems to me as if it is a ini tweak you could do somewhere. Any Ideas?

Can you link to the mod? While I guess it might be possible to swap out a texture set for a lower-resolution version via script (not sure if you'd have to reload the 3D somehow), it just sounds like an incredibly ass-backwards kind of mipmapping, which the engine just does automatically.


[EDIT] Nevermind, I just reread and saw that it doesn't have any .esp. So yeah, it does not do that, no matter what the mod says.

I think you got me wrong. The Mod doesnt say it does that. it just happens in game and it sure is annoying. I thougt maybe thats a normal vanilla game behavior or something that can be tweaked in the inis.

Mipmapping does not work the way you described, when textures are provided as replacements for the games originals, they should have mipmaps generated as part of the mod authors process in making them.

Just one down sized image is not enough mipmaps, and mipmaps do not come as separate images, they are included in the same texture they are mipmaps of

Are you sure that the 512 is not just an optional choice size of texture versus the 1024 one ( both of which should have a series of mipmaps generated per texture and included as layers of the textures )

Here is mipmaps explained, read How it works https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mipmap

And here is a texture I just loaded up in GIMP with its mipmap layers on the right

https://i.imgur.com/heVbcHH.jpg

Anyway up, this is not something you can control, the Graphics cards have optimal routines where they interpolate between one mipmap to the next depending upon distance from the point of view

But the routine does not just chop from one mipmap to the next, mipmaps can be seen as stages of reduction that are pre-calculated

In between those stages the graphics card can also do more calculated stages on the fly ( generated interpolations ), and add to those calculated stages with rendering effects such as Anisotropic filtering, Antialiasing, FXAA, SMAA and with newer game engine such effects as Ambient Occlusion ..

.. So you should not be seeing a definite and obvious degradation of texture quality within such a short distance, but rather a gradual deterioration of detail over distance, the quality of which depends upon your hardware ( or how good the mod authors textures are and the quality of its mipmaps ), screen resolution and your graphics card settings / game engine settings.

Its kind of hard to know what you are seeing / explaining without links to mods or images of your screenshots to visually assess what may be going wrong, obviously something does not look like it is right in your opinion enough for it to be annoying, and I dont think when you posted that you fully understand the subject enough to articulate the perceived problem.

If any of my answer has given you insight into what may be wrong then good, if not I think we need more detail.

Will bookmark this topic and see if we can help more, I think there may be ini settings which may make a difference, but usually nobody has to even investigate such a possibility so I am guessing its a mod texture problem, game setup problem, or user error of some / all the above.

I for one have never had a need to search for such a setting, and I am veeeery picky with my graphics ( See signature reference Vanilla Reduced Textures - I spent a couple of years doing that mod just to get my crappy old laptop looking good and being able to play Skyrim ( which it should not have been able to with its limited under spec VRAM ) )

Edit : Just a possibility - Did you install the 512 low res textures AFTER you installed the 1024 higher res ones ?

If so I think you were probably meant to have installed one set ( not both ), and having overwritten the high res set you are now not so impressed with having the textures looking low res, if so, and they are replacer textures ( ie they are designed to replace the games originals ) .. Just re-install the High res ones and forget about the 512 ones.

All of alt3rn1ty's points are good ones and should help you understand what's happening.

You can increase the distance at which the GPU renders with a certain mip level by changing the LOD bias, causing the card to render textures as though they were nearer to (or farther from) the camera than they really are. ENB has a way of doing this, and most graphics card utilities like Nvidia Inspector do as well. I'm not a big fan of changing the LOD bias, but some people like how it looks

For a static item, different textures can be used for different LOD settings.

For example, take the Farmhouse02 item.

The closeup mesh is Architecture\Farmhouse\Farmhouse02.NIF

It uses one LOD mesh for two LOD settings:

1. LOD #0 - LOD\Farmhouse\Farmhouse02_LOD.nif


2. LOD #1 - LOD\Farmhouse\Farmhouse02_LOD.nif

The meshes can then use different textures. The LOD distances are likely set in a game setting.

For actors (like dragons) it is different.

An actor can have an ANAM - far away model, which points to a different armor item to use.

Then there is a setting Far away model distance that determines when it is used.

Ok sorry guys clearly Im an indiot. At the same time I did my INI tweaks and disabled AA for later Enb install and it was just the most obvios with that texture.

Thank you non the less.