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Improved Vanilla Reach Trees - WIP

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ICFur

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I'm taking another stab at Reach Trees. My original Better Reach Trees mod made the reach trees look more alive, but this time I decided to improve the dead-looking vanilla reach tree aesthetic.

This is still a work in progress, but is very near completion. I hope to have it up by the end of the week. Just a few more meshes to make and it should be done.

This mod gives reach trees all new textures and uses a slightly modified vanilla mesh. Therefore, the meshes retain the same poly count as vanilla and should be performance friendly. Since the keep the vanilla shape, you also should not experience moss hanging in mid-air unless it was like that in vanilla or you have another mod that moves the moss. They also shouldn't stand out too much in snowy regions, since they don't have any leaves.

These will have both non-parallax and complex parallax options, hybrid tree meshes for ultra tree LOD generation with DynDOLOD, and an optional ESL-flagged ESP that will revert the reach tree meshes back to the vanilla file path if you are using a tree mod that alters the path or renames the reach tree mesh. There will be two ESP options, convert all the reach trees back to the vanilla path, or only convert ReachTree01 & ReachTree02 and keep the Reach cliff trees from your current tree mod.  If your tree mod doesn't change the file path or name of the mesh, then you can simply delete/hide any meshes that you don't want to use.

If you would like to see more images, check out my Patreon post for these (no subscription required).

7 comments

  1. TheSchroedingercat
    TheSchroedingercat
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    Cannot wait! I love your reach trees to pieces and these look fantastic too!
  2. omena007
    omena007
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    I would love to see a version of the vanilla trees with less jagged hard shapes + more round natural curves especially in the angles of the branches bc that's imo the reason the vanilla trees look so poor quality and unnatural.
    1. ICFur
      ICFur
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      It's all a trade off. Meshes can be subdivided and smoothed fairly easily in Blender, the only problem is that it also dramatically increases the poly count on the mesh which can cause bottlenecks in-game. The problem then becomes trying to decimate or dissolve the mesh to reduce the poly count which is a destructive process and can have undesired effects.

      There are things that can be done with low poly meshes, such as smoothing the normals to make hard edges less noticable. You can also move around some of the harder angles in the branches to make the curves a little less dramatic.

      All that said, there are actually trees in nature that grow at strange angles that you wouldn't think where possible. They typically occur in very windy areas or have some kind of mutation or disease. Cases in point: Strangely Shaped Tree and Crooked Trees
    2. omena007
      omena007
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      I totally understand if you want to consider people with older computers! I used to have to calculate everything to keep my game in 25 frames. I think in modern day under 20,000 poly is considered a low poly, so that gives me a quite a lot of polys to play with. I maybe a too much of a flora enthusiast and also it's just a matter of taste of course what is a natural tree. These are fantasy trees so they can look however!
    3. ICFur
      ICFur
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      I totally get where you're coming from. I had a phase where I used lots of high poly meshes. Then I got tired of frame drops in random places, which has led me to experimenting with vanilla meshes to see if I can use textures and minor modifications to the mesh to improve them.

      In fact, I kind of enjoy working within the limitations of the vanilla meshes. It's helped me learn a lot about meshes that I might have just glossed over if I just started increasing the poly count.
    4. omena007
      omena007
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      Yeah and it's not like high poly automatically means better looking. I was also in the sims modding scene and I once saw a very popular modded item that on closer look had 300,000 absolutely useless polys and the author didn't even think to warn about it. I personally think 3d skills are really measured when it comes to making assets that look good and have small or decent poly counts when it comes to games.
  3. April89
    April89
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    Looks promising!
    To this day, I haven't found a replacer that I am fully satisfied with.
    Imo Reach Trees Enhanced is still doing the best job.