The game engine uses normal maps to shadow the landscape terrain. Afaik, there is no way that real shadows can be included. Therefore, the hills and mountains are not drawing shadows on the surrounding terrain.

In my opinion, this is irritating. Why, e.g., the bottom of a deep valley should be bright, although no sun is shining onto its surface (because the surrounding terrain/mountains hides the sun). But the game engine calculates the brightness only based on the normal map, which uses only the local slope, not the overall terrain structure.

Here are 3 examples, taken in the morming, at noon, and in the evening:
http://imageshack.us/f/213/b08v.png/
http://imageshack.us/f/841/b13vl.png/
http://imageshack.us/f/256/b18v.png/

What I mean... One can look to the saddle between the mountains. They look 2 dimensional.

A different example (out of many already in this single viewpoint): at 18 o'clock (the sun is coming from west), the way up to Bruma is illuminated, but is should be in the shadow of the hill.

What I tried is to fake the normal maps such, that the shadows of the surrounding landscape is taken into account. Here is the result:
http://imageshack.us/f/192/b08n4.png/
http://imageshack.us/f/171/b13n4.png/
http://imageshack.us/f/831/b18n4.png/

(one has to see the screenshots fullscreen to really make a judgement on the imrovement)

It is a subtle effect, I agree. But I hope it can make the landscape looking more "3-dimensional".

Has somebody tried already such a work?

PS: The Vanilla version is 512x512, the new normal maps 2048x2048, therefore the comparision is maybe not 100% fair....Nontheless, a better resolution will not make it much different.

Well thanks for pointing this out....NOT! Now I will notice this everywhere I go! I was happy not knowing, ignorance being bliss after all. So now you are obligated to produce a fix

I am looking forward to something soon I hope?

Some of the old masters (those who created Landscape LOD texture packs in ye olden days) knew the secret of producing highly detailed distance views. For a long time I ran one such pack, and still use bits and pieces of it. Far mountains looked utterly magnificent. Mid-distance was much improved too. http://i307.photobucket.com/albums/nn303/Decrepit_Waste/ESIV%20Oblivion/ImpIslePanorama1.jpg. Sadly, mist partially obscures distant mountains, making it hard to see their rich detail. Mid-distance improvement shines forth loud and clear, as seen in the hills surrounding Lake Rumare to the immediate north. These are 4096x4096 for both normal and color maps, btw.

The weakness of these high-res manipulated textures is that they can look sort of crappy at the far-to-near-view transition. (The author himself mentions this in the provided documentation.) And of course being generic they can't reflect alterations added to the landscape by mods. I eventually all but abandoned them for both reasons. Still, in a view like the above that doesn't suffer from either weakness they're hard to beat. I'd love to know how they were made.

Half a year ago I did a bit of experimenting on my own. I of course never came remotely close to matching the quality seen above. But I think I was on the right track. http://i307.photobucket.com/albums/nn303/Decrepit_Waste/TES%20IV%20Oblivion%20Landscape%20LODs/RRRwithTexturedLandscape1.jpg gives the barest hint of richer and more detailed scenery at mid-distance. It has its share of issues, bad coloring being foremost. Alas, I abandoned the project soon afterward. CS / CSE became finicky and refused to generate base textures with which to experiment. In the interim I misplaced whatever notes I took and no longer recall what GIMP or Paint.net filters I used to achieve my meager results, or whether they were applied to normals, colors, or a mixture thereof. A week or two ago I attempted to revive the project, to no avail. The textures I produced were embarrassingly horrific, utterly unusable.

-Decrepit-

Hi gruftikus,
Thanks for your contribution to Oblivion LOD.
It makes sense to improve landscape shadows, however, I think enhancing landscape textures would be very limited to improve LOD looking.
Mountains in Skyrim are made of objects instead of landscape meshes, so Skyrim mountains have independent meshes from landscape and have beautiful textures which are not bound to landscape.
I my opinion, it's would be a great improvement to Oblivion LOD by adding independent meshes and textures to cover the mountains.
Hope someone could do that.

Yes, I have noticed that... For Oblivion this it is done partly by the UL team (e.g. for the Cliffs of Anvil or http://www.oblivionmodwiki.com/index.php/Unique_Landscapes:_Colovian_Highlands).

Btw, this would not remove the problem.
(@Peter ID: do not open the spoiler :excl:)


This pack uses heavy overdrawing, in order to compensate the weakness of the normal map influence. I your picture, in my opinion, this scaling is too strong. It looks like using the normal map as noise replacer.

What I try do to is to instead of this is to rotate the normal map vector.

But thank you for pointing to this effect. I will look carefully to the near-to-far transition in my tests.

You know, that message COMPELLED me to open the spoiler tag!

Looking forward to some solutions and keeping Oblivion alive.

I have now added fake shadows to the normal maps for dawn, noon and dusk. So I consider 3 shadows from 3 different directions. I addition, I still keep the old local normal maps, and merge everything. Due to the fact, that a normal map has only 2 degree of freedoms (the 2 angles of the normal vector), one has to keep in mind that the result is therefore based on compromises.

I'm personally convinced with the result, though. For a work of one week or so it is really a nice improvement, in my opinion.

Here are some new impressions (the screenshots are very large):
Look down to Cheydinhal at noon:
http://img856.imageshack.us/img856/9563/bcheydinhal.png
and in the morning
http://img192.imageshack.us/img192/7707/bcheydinhal2.png
IC:
http://img6.imageshack.us/img6/8454/bicl.png
Look from my usual view point:
http://img854.imageshack.us/img854/8083/bviewpoint.png

This are 2 series from morning to evening, always the same view (7, 9, 13, 16 and 18 o'clock) from the university tower, both 2048x2048, to allow for a fair comparison

"Vanilla" style (just the normal map):

http://img6.imageshack.us/img6/4048/s107n1.png
http://img687.imageshack.us/img687/7109/s109n1.png
http://img819.imageshack.us/img819/1254/s113n1.png
http://img703.imageshack.us/img703/5435/s116n1.png
http://img811.imageshack.us/img811/7619/s118n1.png

..and the same with the terrain shadow

http://img97.imageshack.us/img97/2146/s107s.png
http://img809.imageshack.us/img809/5527/s109s.png
http://img59.imageshack.us/img59/8532/s113s.png
http://img705.imageshack.us/img705/4383/s116s.png
http://img215.imageshack.us/img215/2748/s118s.png

I tried to do some split comparison pictures, but it is really hard to get it on a picture.

Anyhow, here a 2 comparison plots (with shadow on top)
http://img51.imageshack.us/img51/5061/s113scomp.png
http://img528.imageshack.us/img528/8912/s107scomp.png

The best, to see the effect is to load 2 pictures taken at the same time (e.g. in 2 tabs of the browser), and flip between them.

I have uploaded my normal maps on tesnexus:

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=41243

Welcome in my land of bright and darkness, and enjoy the new scenery...