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About this mod
Fixes lighting on water effects, smoke particles, cloud meshes, and more!
- Requirements
- Permissions and credits
- Changelogs
CS Particle Patch
Allows effect meshes and particles to be lit with direct light from any source. Additionally, shadows cast by the environment finally affect both effect meshes and particles, with shadowed regions receiving the same ambient light as any other mesh. Smoke & steam particles now also react to the wind, as do some other particles where it makes sense.
Requirements
- Community Shaders (hard requirement)
- Light Limit Fix (hard requirement)
- Terrain Shadows (soft requirement, for shadows on distant effects)
- EVLaS (soft requirement, for lighting to make sense - just use it)
Installation
- Install the required mods as outlined above.
- Download and install this mod with your preferred mod manager. Let these meshes win any conflicts. Manual installation is not supported.
- If you use any PBR overhauls, you will need to re-run PGPatcher. If you don't know what that is, you can skip this step.
Recommended
- NAT.CS III - The peak weather mod for Skyrim, its liberal use of clouds around distant mountains provide for some spectacular sunrises and sunsets. Bottle has my permission to include the cloud meshes in NAT.CS, hence why if you're already using this you may see this effect on your distant clouds even without this mod.
- Cloud Shadows - Greatly enhances the distant clouds with subtle shading depending on the current weather's cloud textures.
- Ambient Clouds - The new lighting detail makes these clouds sing. Alongside the mountain fogs from NAT.CS, you really feel like you are high up in the clouds.
- Mists of Tamriel - Much like ambient clouds, early morning fogs can look incredible when the sun is casting nice long shadows.
Compatibility
They're just meshes, so should be compatible with pretty much everything, except other mods that make changes to these same meshes and/or particles. Note that this already includes the same fixes as Water Effects Brightness and Reflection Fix and Rudy fix for Smoke, rendering their use with this mod redundant (you should endorse them anyway). Particle Patch can still be used if you wish, just load it before this mod; bear in mind Particle Patch was designed for use with ENB and this is designed for use with Community Shaders, so your mileage may vary.
Patches are available in the fomod for the following mods:
Patches are complete for the following mods, and will be released once I have permission:
Patching
Making patches yourself is also rather simple, if not laborious. The short answer & general rule is:
if Effect_Light is set to 1, set Uniform_Scale to 1, set External_Emittance to 0 and finally increase the Lighting Influence to 255.
The long answer/technical details:
For an effect mesh (or particle system) to receive shadows it must have the Uniform_Scale flag set. Most of these effects meshes also have the External_Emittance flag set, which essentially overrides the incoming lighting with whatever the effect lighting colour is set to, causing meshes to glow if their surroundings are not equal to or brighter than the emissive value. There is one more optional element to making the effects/particles look good, and that is lighting influence. This is the factor by which the final lighting colour is lerped from the effect colour set by the weather, to the actual 'lighting' colour. Generally I set this to the maximum (255) for the most pronounced effect, but sometimes this can stray far from the artistic vision that an effect may be used in, so it is worth playing around with this value. It is worth noting though that this can make some effects much less visible (such as the steam coming from cracks in the ground in the volcanic tundra, or ground fog/mist inside really dark interiors. This is presumably why the developers had originally set these meshes/particles to emissive, as it is the easiest way to get the colour you want.
Credits
Thanks to mindflux, Brumbek, wSkeever, Captain Cockerel, Clofas for the permission to modify their assets. Thanks to Bottle & Exist for the help in creating and inspiring this work. If I have missed anyone, feel free to remind me and I'll amend this list.