A picture is worth a thousand words: http://i.imgur.com/QQzsg.jpg

That's at the entrance to Haemar's Shame. If you've been to any area with snow on the rocks (i.e. played the game for 10+ minutes), you've seen the same horrible effect of a 'snow' texture overlay'd on a rock texture, with all the finesse and resolution of a tetris game.

I have a simple question: how could I / anyone improve how this looks?

I thought someone already made a re-texture of the snow as others (myself included) think the snow looks rather boring. I'm guessing you'd have to fiddle with the image in Gimp.

the snow retex's i've seen have been either the snowflakes or the ground textures. have you found a mod that fixes or reduces the pixelation seen in the above image?

I'm not seeing the pixelation on my screen. I have a 47" LCD LED with 1920x1080. If you mean that almost ripple or streak effect, it might be out it interacts with the rock texture? If you just want to smooth out the texture, personally I'd try to blur the original snow texture and the layer that gives it the actual texture. Like, older NPC's that are afflicted. Their skin has wrinkles. If you want the wrinkles to go away, you'd swap (or alter) the femalehead_msn.dds as that file gives all the bumps, wrinkle, creases, etc. I'll look for a snow file and see.

Its not the texture, its the alpha layer the game is useing its HORRIBLE. Its the same thing as any hair or grass or tree leaves, thats the issue the texture would prolly be fine if the game rendered alphas as well as Morrowind/Oblivion/FO3/FNV......
But I guess they didnt want nice smooth alphas for this game for some reason. o_O

A quick look and I *think* the file file for this is snowrocks01.dds for the image of the the snow you posted. The file that adds texture to it would be snowrocks01.n.dds. It's hard to say 100%, as there must be over 20 files with just snow in it. But there's 1 for snowstones and one for snowrocks. That looks like snowrocks, but I can't say for sure. In the case of snowrocks01.n.dds, I'd try try blurring the image or selectively altering the areas that produce high spots to create a more uniform or flat appearance. I rarely mess with textures that are thrown into the environment as I typically mess with the NPC's.

Sorry, I was using "texture" interchangeably with the alpha layer. I'm referring to the actual texture of the snow, not the texture image.

I don't think it is the game rendering alphas incorrectly more so as the quality of the default alpha maps themselves are crap (this is probably the case as there are many mods that already 'fix' alpha maps on some textures and they look great).

Another thing you could try if you wanted, is find a rock surface that you like, copy it's alpha layer (the 2nd file that looks like a rainbow of colors) then rename it as the snowrock's alpha layer. Then manually replace. Then, the snow's alpha layer (texture to it) will be like a stone's surface.

glacierslab_n.dds (alpha layer) should produce a smoother look to the snowrock's as it's flatter with less peaks in the color, whereas rocks01_n.dds should produce a bumpier (possible more realistic) snowrock. Something you'd have to play with to get what appeals to you.


EDIT: Any alpha surface that is the same size as the one you want replace can work, so long as it's in a similar category like ground cover, etc. snowstone looks really horrid, whereas riverbottom_n.dds looks way better.

I was lookiooisto , now rocks is just rockswthsom snow painedover , I havent find yet the right textures involved , anyone knows what to edit?

Nope they all have bad frayed edges if you look at them, the maps are smooth and nice in the default textures its just how the game is not set up to make them look like anything but crap. :\

Btw I think the deposit may depend on the normal maps of the specific item , so may be a combination of the normal map for getting the z facing part and the alpha may be for getting the offset , not sure tough , may be improving the alpha map of the normal maps or the texture normals themselves may help ..... but still need to find the texture for the bumps and the texture itself that so far looks pretty flat ...

to me it looks as if the snow overlayer needs a higher resolution (i.e. less blocky interface) coupled with an alpha gradient at the edge so that it blends into the rock underlayer. Unfortunately, I can describe this but I don't really know the image processing to make it happen.

EDIT: or is this what you're talking about Nivea; the actual .dds are setup for just such a thing, but the engine's rendering isn't doing it justice?

Yeah i've been looking for that texture too.

No, it's not snowrocks01.dds.. in fact i've checked every file called snow-something, i made them all bright pink and started the game, the ugly snow on the rocks etc was still there. I also tested many of the "effects" .dds, no luck there either.

I think it's that procedural snow shader that looks like that.. that's why it's so ugly. It's the same with the moss on walls, i changed every file called "moss", still no change..

the alpha used seem a bit alpha and not full gray scale , so it avoids any flickering or issues I guess ... it's the same used for hairs and foliage ...

but the texture I dunno I wish someone finds out ....

What exactly is frayed? If the files are the same size they should be interchangeable. Otherwise, copy and paste over the default, leaving a bit of the defaults edge in place.

Maybe try the frozenmarshdirtice? It has to be one of them. Usually the name dictates the area, but not always.

It's some manner of material shader effect that puts that snow on things. Notice how the normal map affects how it goes on, especially in Windhelm.

Part of the problem IMO is that a lot of the normal maps are of really low-res, and thus the snow looks like crud as a result.

Maybe the streaking in the image the OP posted is a form of this :Textures-> shadertests-> snocaverockwall04.dds It has the streaking in it, but I'm not sure how much of the .dds is actually used when used.

what's that texture .... I can't find it !!!

are you saying that after unpacking the *.BSA's you don't see a snocaverockwall04.dds?

The snow is a dynamic system, it's not a traditional texture. There's probably not a file for it because the game paints this stuff onto already existing objects. I'm not sure how it knows where to put it, but to modify it you'll probably need to tweak the system itself.

Honestly though, I don't see what the big deal is. The system isn't perfect, but it's damn good enough to do what it needs to do. Better than any other game I've seen, because I don't know of any other game that really does that to that extent.

I can't speak for the 'system' as a whole, but when you enter an interior, i.e. the dungeon I referenced in the initial post, I don't believe the wall texture is anything but a static set of textures. To be clear: that set of textures is what appears when you enter Haemar's Shame (an interior zone), and it looks like sh*t. That same effect is all over the game world, and it isn't doing the game justice. I just hope people such at vurt and Nivea can arrive at an understanding of how this composite is generated so that they can improve it.

I missed the part of it being in a Dungeon LOL. I spent an hour trying to find an exterior Mountain's snow texture or rather certain blocks of mountain with that similar low resolution it. I managed to literally change everything but what I was looking for. The actual mountains, and all the snow I found. But there were certain areas that appear to be more like subsections with horrid paint on it. I changed the colors to bright blue or red, or even purple to quickly filter, and there was just this one chunk that remained untouched. But it was only repeated in world map areas on mountains and snow blotched on it. I did see dungeon snow textures elsewhere. I'll see if I can find that wall.

The only thing I've found that helps to stop the snow layer standing out as much is to enable Sparse Grid Supersampling in Nvidia Inspector, it anti aliases the edges of the overlay so the texture doesn't pop out as much, won't help with the streaking though, also it hogs GPU resources.