Idk why but whatever is added on top of the rocks is purple for me. Rocks beneath have textures, just the shader on top seems to be missing. Mod doesen't have any conflicts in mm. Texture in nifskope seems completely fine. Any idead what could be the issue? I don't use parralax either. Very weird. Also I'm pretty sure it only occurs in winter (seasons), as I hadn't noticed it before at all.
The only way that could happen (apart from a random Bethesda special) is if your game simply doesn't have textures\landscape\CoastBeach01.dds to refer to. Though I don't think its likely, as that file is included in the base game, but make sure you can find that somewhere either loose or inside a .BSA.
I hunted for some rocks and those are the results: Majority of them work completely fine
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However, at least for now, one specific model have the issue I posted about:
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One thing that i noticed is that in the broken model the name is spelt Beatch01 instead of Beach01 at the end, but I'm unsure if it is by any means important, perhaps that's just the name the game uses or something.
Well there goes my diagnosis out the window :D I'm gonna be real brother, I have no idea what I'm looking at with the purple thing. It's like the "underside" of the decal normal got purple, I've never seen anything like that and the fact it's inconsistent across models is really confusing.
I'm going to experiment with seasons and see if there's anything there, but I kinda doubt it. Super interesting case nonetheless!
Yeah I'm used to skyrim doing stuff like that. Amazing that in such an old game you can still discover bugs nobody had seen in 14 years. To be fair it is not that big of a deal though, just a couple of miscolored rocks. And I bet that problem will disappear by itself at some point too. I appreciate the help nonetheless, and if I ever stumble upon a solution, I'll let you know! Cheers!
You don't understand how emotionally invested I am in this, I don't like it when my mods are broken beyond my comprehension. I have a busy couple weeks coming up but I'll try my best to recreate the bug and see at least what's causing it.
:DD No worries my dude, this is the type of puzzly problem solving which makes skyrim modding fun. Even if it's an engine bug I want to know how it triggers and behaves. I'll come back to you if my investigations end up cooking something.
I investigated further into what could be causing the problem and I found the culprit (one of possibly). It seems that mountaintrim01wet.nif included in Majestic Mountains - More Accurate Collision (the main one or the one in subfolder snow) is broken. When I replaced the model with a different one the problem disappeared.
There's also this line in main majestic mountains description:
Known Issues: the moss and the projected snow sometimes tend to create stripes. This is an engine limitation of the projection system. I could work around this issue pretty good. But there is no way to fix it completely.
Perhaps what I'm experiencing are the "stripes", it could also explain my edit at the bottom.
I'm unsure whether the issue is some incompatibility between majestic mountains and your mod, or if that specific model there is broken, but I narrowed it down to that specific file, so if you want to take a look what is going on there I hope I managed to save you some time. (I tried to compare regual mountaintrim01wet.nif with the one from majestic mountains in nifskope, but I didn't really notice anything remarkable, maybe there's something wrong in xedit) Problem is resolved now for me at least, so thanks again for your previous support.
edit. I just started to notice the exact same shader issues with other completely unrelated things, like random logs scattered across the map. I think im going crazy. Either that or my game will turn purple altogether. I'll rerun dyndolod, community shaders cache and update.
edit2. Disabling the moss plugin from majestic mountains apparently disables the purple stripes too. It seems it was an engine bug in the end.
Btw all your mods are amazing. Wanted to mention that.
But unfortunately it does appear to be an engine bug that I don't really have the knowledge to do anything about. I think it procs when seasons tries to put a - what I assume is - single-pass shader on top of the multipass shader I use here. Now the same static model should not be able to even have two shaders, the record literally only has room for one so that's interesting.
But it does seem to have a mesh factor to it - like you said it doesn't trigger on all models and I experienced the same yet I couldn't isolate the conditions yet. However, what I think is really dope is that when I added parallax to the model that was buggy, it fixes the issue;
Spoiler:
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Well, "fixes" the issue. There's no purple at least.
I'm going to investigate this more and see what are the exact conditions that trigger this. Being able to put more than one shader on a static could be lucrative for general modding purposes, given the other shader doesn't bug out.
Well, yes and no. Without a patch you'll either get 3D rocks without the shader or normal rocks with the shader. I cooked up a patch real quick to get best of both worlds, but in my opinion it looks a little silly. I can upload it if you want though.
Okay thanks. Follow-up questions about a couple of conflicts if you don't mind:
Icy Mesh Remaster - Ice Glaciers - LOD - other fixes (https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/73381), specifically IcyFixesLite.esl conflict on records EE3A3 and 0EE3A1
Embers XD (https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/37085) conflicts on record 07F8AB.
Embers seems like a simple patch in the ESP but for Icy Mesh Remaster I was thinking I should let that mod win the conflict with this mod to keep ice consistent. Thoughts?
In principle, I can't download all 133387 mods on nexus currently to check compatibilities and consistency. My mod replaces NULL shaders with the sand shader, if a conflicting mod has a NULL material object, feel free to resolve it, if the conflicting mod does something with the material object, it probably has it's own implementation of similar nature and it's up to your taste to load the plugins in an order that best suits you.
Simply put, BDA replaces an existing shader and expands it to places with ash, my mod creates a new shader and makes sandy objects refer to it. The mods don't conflict as they do a completely different thing, albeit using the same mechanic.
Thanks for the answer, I installed both and at first glance Better Dynamic Ash seems to cover additional objects with ash that are not covered by your mod.
That's just a consistency patch for one model, you can run any texture you want. Even those patches aren't required, just nice to have. It'll look same to similar without
The shader is applied to any landscape model that refers to sand, so as those chunks are on sand, they have sand on them. In a way it is intended, whether or not it looks good is another thing. The glacier surface normal texture also plays a big role in how it ends up looking. Personally I dont mind it.
It's rather trivial to disable those models (remove records with "ice" in the editorid, there's probably like 2 or 3 of them total) from receiving the shader, but I'm hestitant to release too many versions of the same mod to avoid the paradox of choice.
Thanks for the answer! About the ice-disabler version, as you prefer, I was just surprised to find those chunks as I wasn't expecting it. They don't look bad at all.
Haha yeah, naming the mod Sand on [STAT] landscape objects with references to CoastBeach01.dds either from the mesh itself of inherited through a texture set - Dynamic San Shader would've caused VFS issues with mod managers. But glad you like them, thanks! :)
Mountains already have snow shaders I'm afraid. I have one that I use myself but releasing it would require an ungodly amount of patching or included snow textures
That's not quite how it works. There are three things in motion here;
1. The shader - a [MATO/MATerial Object] record in a plugin that defines how a texture is projected on a model. There are surprisingly few knobs to turn here, and a mod like Simplicity of Snow covers basically it all in a great way.
2. The texture that gets projected - A snow texture in this case, and usually it's supposed to be the same as the snow in other parts of the game, to prevent mismatching colours. This is a tricky bit, as only the diffuse (color) gets projected, not the normal (shadows, if you will), making the projection look stale often.
3. The model the shader with the texture gets projected on - note that the projection is calculated from the normal on the model, not the topology of the model. This means that the normal texture of the model largely defines how the texture gets projected, the "smoother" the mountain texture, the smoother the projection and vice versa.
All in all, the shader is just one part of the end result and not too much responsibility can be given to it. I'd say the biggest factor is the normal on the model the shader gets applied on. It's perhaps best to play around with different rock mods out there and see what would suit your vision the best.
Hi, I got a technical question :) How did you find this, that there could have been a sand shader? Did you find some code or something? It could be interesting, I try to do something for snow...
The technical implementation is no different from normal dynamic snow shader like simplicity of snow - in fact there are no limits to what gets projected, ask Todd if you don't believe me. The idea came from the RockShelf02.nif model where BGS tried to encapsulate the rocks in sand (I think), but the implementation was ass, as you can see from image 7 on this modpage. So I replaced the weird sand with a projected one and extended the idea further by having all models that refer to CoastBeach01 use that shader.
Similarly, most other landscape elements can be used for dynamic projection, but most make no sense or the drawbacks (the normal doesn't get projected) make it look ass. That's why most moss shaders tend to look more like shrek-cum than moss, in which case adding an alpha layer with moss on top of the object usually yields better results, while of course being much more labour-intensive and the layer doesn't "align" itself with the underlying rock texture.
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JumpMajority of them work completely fine
However, at least for now, one specific model have the issue I posted about:
One thing that i noticed is that in the broken model the name is spelt Beatch01 instead of Beach01 at the end, but I'm unsure if it is by any means important, perhaps that's just the name the game uses or something.
I appreciate the help!
I'm going to experiment with seasons and see if there's anything there, but I kinda doubt it. Super interesting case nonetheless!
There's also this line in main majestic mountains description:
Perhaps what I'm experiencing are the "stripes", it could also explain my edit at the bottom.
I'm unsure whether the issue is some incompatibility between majestic mountains and your mod, or if that specific model there is broken, but I narrowed it down to that specific file, so if you want to take a look what is going on there I hope I managed to save you some time.(I tried to compare regual mountaintrim01wet.nif with the one from majestic mountains in nifskope, but I didn't really notice anything remarkable, maybe there's something wrong in xedit) Problem is resolved now for me at least, so thanks again for your previous support.
edit. I just started to notice the exact same shader issues with other completely unrelated things, like random logs scattered across the map. I think im going crazy. Either that or my game will turn purple altogether. I'll rerun dyndolod, community shaders cache and update.
edit2. Disabling the moss plugin from majestic mountains apparently disables the purple stripes too. It seems it was an engine bug in the end.
Btw all your mods are amazing. Wanted to mention that.
But unfortunately it does appear to be an engine bug that I don't really have the knowledge to do anything about. I think it procs when seasons tries to put a - what I assume is - single-pass shader on top of the multipass shader I use here. Now the same static model should not be able to even have two shaders, the record literally only has room for one so that's interesting.
But it does seem to have a mesh factor to it - like you said it doesn't trigger on all models and I experienced the same yet I couldn't isolate the conditions yet. However, what I think is really dope is that when I added parallax to the model that was buggy, it fixes the issue;
Well, "fixes" the issue. There's no purple at least.
I'm going to investigate this more and see what are the exact conditions that trigger this. Being able to put more than one shader on a static could be lucrative for general modding purposes, given the other shader doesn't bug out.
Thanks so much my man, much appreciated!
Icy Mesh Remaster - Ice Glaciers - LOD - other fixes (https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/73381), specifically IcyFixesLite.esl conflict on records EE3A3 and 0EE3A1
Embers XD (https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/37085) conflicts on record 07F8AB.
Embers seems like a simple patch in the ESP but for Icy Mesh Remaster I was thinking I should let that mod win the conflict with this mod to keep ice consistent. Thoughts?
I've found some ice chunks in the beaches covered by this sand shader. Is it intended? It's a bit weird but not unpleasant.
It's rather trivial to disable those models (remove records with "ice" in the editorid, there's probably like 2 or 3 of them total) from receiving the shader, but I'm hestitant to release too many versions of the same mod to avoid the paradox of choice.
1. The shader - a [MATO/MATerial Object] record in a plugin that defines how a texture is projected on a model. There are surprisingly few knobs to turn here, and a mod like Simplicity of Snow covers basically it all in a great way.
2. The texture that gets projected - A snow texture in this case, and usually it's supposed to be the same as the snow in other parts of the game, to prevent mismatching colours. This is a tricky bit, as only the diffuse (color) gets projected, not the normal (shadows, if you will), making the projection look stale often.
3. The model the shader with the texture gets projected on - note that the projection is calculated from the normal on the model, not the topology of the model. This means that the normal texture of the model largely defines how the texture gets projected, the "smoother" the mountain texture, the smoother the projection and vice versa.
All in all, the shader is just one part of the end result and not too much responsibility can be given to it. I'd say the biggest factor is the normal on the model the shader gets applied on. It's perhaps best to play around with different rock mods out there and see what would suit your vision the best.
I got a technical question :) How did you find this, that there could have been a sand shader? Did you find some code or something? It could be interesting, I try to do something for snow...
Similarly, most other landscape elements can be used for dynamic projection, but most make no sense or the drawbacks (the normal doesn't get projected) make it look ass. That's why most moss shaders tend to look more like shrek-cum than moss, in which case adding an alpha layer with moss on top of the object usually yields better results, while of course being much more labour-intensive and the layer doesn't "align" itself with the underlying rock texture.
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