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About this mod
Retexture of Solstheim landscapes using real images of pyroclastic ash flows. Made in memorial for a friend who died.
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This is a retexture of 10 different Solstheim tiled landscape files using real images of pyroclastic ash flows from The Petrified Forest in Calistoga, CA. The site where these photos were taken sits seven miles from Mt. St. Helena, which exploded 3.4 million years ago and dumped ash flows for many miles around. Thus, it is similar to the location of Solstheim in juxtaposition to The Red Mountain.
I made this mod as a Memorial for my friend Amara, who died on June 29th, 2022 after a long hard fight with Triple Negative Breast Cancer.
This past winter was the last time I got to see them, and together we went on an adventure to The Petrified Forest, which was just a few miles from where they were living at the time. That adventure was the best part of the trip; it was such a gift to be fully in our element together combing through rocks on the ground and soaking in the glorious wonders of the wild world.
Below is a picture of Amara doing their thing, making themself at home curled up in an ancient pyroclastic ash flow, nbd.
As you can see, the actual pyroclastic flow looks quite a bit different from the in-game images. In order to make sure that they'd blend well as extended tiled landscapes, and with all of the adjacent vanilla textures, I overlaid upscaled vanilla ash textures at 30-35% opacity over the top of the ash flow images. This makes them more uniform and more similar in color and shading to the vanilla files, but with far more detail and structure. I also thought this would be more lore-friendly, with ash laying over the top of the original hardened pyroclastic flow.
I always found the original Solstheim landscape textures to be excessively flat and boring, to the point where I don't even want to spend time there. My hope with this mod was to give them a more dynamic appearance while providing a massive improvement to the visual quality.
After doing all of the ash-strewn landscape textures there were three more vanilla files that just looked terrible and didn't mesh well with the new high resolution dynamic textures, so I utilized similar methods (blending pyroclastic ash flows and powdered ash) with overlaid images from Quixel Megascans to create those.
I've included a patch for Shaders of Solstheim, which I strongly recommend using with this mod. Without both that mod and the patch, you may end up with some shaders that have rock textures instead of ash textures.
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I made this mod as a Memorial for my friend Amara, who died on June 29th, 2022 after a long hard fight with Triple Negative Breast Cancer.
This past winter was the last time I got to see them, and together we went on an adventure to The Petrified Forest, which was just a few miles from where they were living at the time. That adventure was the best part of the trip; it was such a gift to be fully in our element together combing through rocks on the ground and soaking in the glorious wonders of the wild world.
Below is a picture of Amara doing their thing, making themself at home curled up in an ancient pyroclastic ash flow, nbd.
As you can see, the actual pyroclastic flow looks quite a bit different from the in-game images. In order to make sure that they'd blend well as extended tiled landscapes, and with all of the adjacent vanilla textures, I overlaid upscaled vanilla ash textures at 30-35% opacity over the top of the ash flow images. This makes them more uniform and more similar in color and shading to the vanilla files, but with far more detail and structure. I also thought this would be more lore-friendly, with ash laying over the top of the original hardened pyroclastic flow.
I always found the original Solstheim landscape textures to be excessively flat and boring, to the point where I don't even want to spend time there. My hope with this mod was to give them a more dynamic appearance while providing a massive improvement to the visual quality.
After doing all of the ash-strewn landscape textures there were three more vanilla files that just looked terrible and didn't mesh well with the new high resolution dynamic textures, so I utilized similar methods (blending pyroclastic ash flows and powdered ash) with overlaid images from Quixel Megascans to create those.
I've included a patch for Shaders of Solstheim, which I strongly recommend using with this mod. Without both that mod and the patch, you may end up with some shaders that have rock textures instead of ash textures.