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About this mod
The terrain blending shader makes your Skyrim landscapes look more natural by smoothing out those awkward, obvious lines where different terrain types meet. Instead of seeing harsh borders where grass suddenly turns to dirt or where a cliff meets the ground, you'll experience gentle, realistic transitions that blend one surface into another.
- Requirements
- Permissions and credits
- Changelogs
WARNING, this shader is unsupported by the CS team. Do not seek help from them if something goes wrong. Use at your own risk.
THIS IS A BETA PRODUCT AND MAY RESULT IN GAME BREAKING BUGS.
Have you ever been exploring Skyrim's beautiful wilderness and noticed those jarring, straight lines where different terrains meet? Those places where desert abruptly becomes grass, or where a rocky cliff meets the ground with an unnaturally sharp edge? This terrain blending shader attempts to fix exactly that problem, making the world feel more natural and immersive.
What You'll Notice With this shader active:
Terrain in Skyrim often has "seams" that break immersion - straight lines you'd never see in nature where textures or angles suddenly change. These visual interruptions could pull you out of the game experience, especially in VR.
After installing the shader, these transitions become more subtle and natural. The desert gradually fades into grassland. Riverbeds blend naturally with their banks. Rocky outcroppings merge smoothly with the terrain around them. Even small hills look more natural.
How It Helps Your Game
The shader works automatically in the background without requiring any configuration. It simply analyzes the terrain as you play and creates realistic blending where needed. The result is a more cohesive, believable environment that enhances your immersion in the game world.
This shader is designed to be lightweight and efficient. It focuses specifically on terrain transitions without unnecessary bells and whistles that could impact performance.
What Makes This Different
Most texture blending only considers the surface appearance - essentially painting one texture over another. This approach actually respects the physical shape of the terrain, looking at how surfaces connect in three dimensions. The result is terrain that not only looks better but feels like it makes physical sense.
Known problems
Settings
To edit this shader's settings directly; open ~\Terrain Blending\Shaders\TerrainBlending\DepthBlend.hlsl in the text editor of your choice. After editing, clear your overwrite folder of your compiled shaders to let them recompile, next launch.
Adjust any of the values in these lines to alter the shader for your desired outcome.
static const float PARALLEL_HEIGHT_THRESHOLD = 0.02; // Height difference threshold for parallel surfaces
static const float ANGLE_BLEND_THRESHOLD = 0.5; // cos(60°) = 0.5 for angle blending (increase this to apply the blend to more angles)
static const float BLEND_SMOOTHNESS = 0.15; // Controls transition smoothness
static const float Z_FIGHTING_BIAS = 0.00005; // Small z-fighting prevention bias (increase this if you get textures flickering)
Thanks to the CS team for Community Shaders and then forgetting about register t55 :D
I added this shader because the one in the CS dev branch looked to have been abandoned. If I'm stepping on anyone's toes that was working on it, please let me know and I'll take this down.
I was told that I needed to add a note about this being GPL. Though, I'm not entirely sure what is needed beyond stating that since CS is GPL3, then this shader is also GPL3. Edit it however you like, its not rocket science. All the magic happens because of the work the CS team put into replacing the rendering pipeline that shipped with skyrim. This is just a glorified text file that passes some instructions to directx.
THIS IS A BETA PRODUCT AND MAY RESULT IN GAME BREAKING BUGS.
Have you ever been exploring Skyrim's beautiful wilderness and noticed those jarring, straight lines where different terrains meet? Those places where desert abruptly becomes grass, or where a rocky cliff meets the ground with an unnaturally sharp edge? This terrain blending shader attempts to fix exactly that problem, making the world feel more natural and immersive.
What You'll Notice With this shader active:
- Smoother transitions between different terrain types (fewer obvious lines between grass and dirt)
- More natural-looking connections where cliffs meet flatter ground
- Believable terrain blending around hills, mountains, and valleys
- Fewer distracting visual "pops" or flickering where different surfaces meet
Terrain in Skyrim often has "seams" that break immersion - straight lines you'd never see in nature where textures or angles suddenly change. These visual interruptions could pull you out of the game experience, especially in VR.
After installing the shader, these transitions become more subtle and natural. The desert gradually fades into grassland. Riverbeds blend naturally with their banks. Rocky outcroppings merge smoothly with the terrain around them. Even small hills look more natural.
How It Helps Your Game
The shader works automatically in the background without requiring any configuration. It simply analyzes the terrain as you play and creates realistic blending where needed. The result is a more cohesive, believable environment that enhances your immersion in the game world.
This shader is designed to be lightweight and efficient. It focuses specifically on terrain transitions without unnecessary bells and whistles that could impact performance.
What Makes This Different
Most texture blending only considers the surface appearance - essentially painting one texture over another. This approach actually respects the physical shape of the terrain, looking at how surfaces connect in three dimensions. The result is terrain that not only looks better but feels like it makes physical sense.
Known problems
- Some transitions can still be rather harsh. This is usually caused by a mismatch between the normal and another part of the texture, as this shader uses the normals to calculate the intersecting angles to blend. If the diffuse doesn't match then it doesn't blend (or more specifically it can blend in an unseen area). Keep an eye peeled for Gav Whitaker's modpage for an upcoming tool that may help address this https://next.nexusmods.com/profile/gavwhittaker?gameId=1704
- Because we are also blending parallel surfaces, this can interact negatively with snow masking mods if the snow crosses a boundary that overlaps intersecting terrain meshes.
- There is a small artifact that makes the blending effect more pronounced and obvious when the wetness effects shader is applied.
- There is a report of the effect conflicting with a sky mod "Picta Series - Improved Sky Meshes".
Settings
To edit this shader's settings directly; open ~\Terrain Blending\Shaders\TerrainBlending\DepthBlend.hlsl in the text editor of your choice. After editing, clear your overwrite folder of your compiled shaders to let them recompile, next launch.
Adjust any of the values in these lines to alter the shader for your desired outcome.
static const float PARALLEL_HEIGHT_THRESHOLD = 0.02; // Height difference threshold for parallel surfaces
static const float ANGLE_BLEND_THRESHOLD = 0.5; // cos(60°) = 0.5 for angle blending (increase this to apply the blend to more angles)
static const float BLEND_SMOOTHNESS = 0.15; // Controls transition smoothness
static const float Z_FIGHTING_BIAS = 0.00005; // Small z-fighting prevention bias (increase this if you get textures flickering)
Thanks to the CS team for Community Shaders and then forgetting about register t55 :D
I added this shader because the one in the CS dev branch looked to have been abandoned. If I'm stepping on anyone's toes that was working on it, please let me know and I'll take this down.
I was told that I needed to add a note about this being GPL. Though, I'm not entirely sure what is needed beyond stating that since CS is GPL3, then this shader is also GPL3. Edit it however you like, its not rocket science. All the magic happens because of the work the CS team put into replacing the rendering pipeline that shipped with skyrim. This is just a glorified text file that passes some instructions to directx.