This mod was designed for Next Gen primarily and uses assets exclusive to next gen. I will likely work on an old gen version at some point but no guarantees as to when and how it will look comparatively. I will have to restructure the mod and look into porting assets over from next gen, so it may be a while if I get to it and it may look different. In the meantime you can use my old mod Meadows if you like: https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher3/mods/4757
Update is out! I decided to stick to one version to maintain my desired aesthetic but I changed quite a few things to bring the mod to a fully polished and improved state that I am very happy with. See changelog for details and enjoy :)
I really like most of the mod but idk about removing the yellow and purple flowers in Skellige, in my opinion they added a lot to the vibe of the place
I like the colors, but imo the models look very blocky and out of place and the textures are low quality. When I eventually release my next mod with new textures I may or may not retain the original color palette, I haven’t decided yet.
I join SlashMaster's feedback. I'm more of "improved vanilla thing" rather than a complete replacement. If you could improve those Skelliger plants without removing, that would be great.
Just upscale the textures and improve the models in blender, the foliage used by the game is very simple graphically. The game just copy pastes the same few assets to fake a somewhat diverse environment around the player yet most grass is set to automatically generate in chunks instead of being hand placed. Removing 'unique' stuff like flowers really hurts the games graphics because by default it already has a low variety of flora due to the 2013 and 2014 downgrades.
I didn’t actually remove any of them, I swapped them to another model. Everywhere there was heather previously, there are red flowers now. Still just as diverse. I don’t know much about blender tbh and my understanding is that the game uses an old version of speedtree for the grass rendering so I’m not sure how simple it would actually be to edit the models themselves, not my area of expertise. Upscaling the textures wouldn’t fix the general blocky shape of them. I am experimenting with different textures for my next mod.
I mean sure if you want to go by technicalities you did not remove the 'low growing evergreen shrubs' from the games files yet the average user does not care about what goes on 'behind the scenes' and only that the original flowers are gone. I specifically mentioned both upscaling and editing the mesh because only doing 1 would yield mediocre improvements.
As usual with modding games this old: you will most likely find a bunch of semi-outdated guides from ages ago detailing what to do, editing the actual models would most likely be one of the easier things in that entire workflow. Blender is not really complex anymore unless you want to make very detailed models or effects, giving the vanilla ones a face lift would take a day or two if you had to learn everything from scratch. The actual difficult part would be finding working tools to properly extract and convert the files.
Looks like speedtree cannot be easily edited. Witcher 3 uses a lot of middleware that is closed source, with that being said I wonder if the internal developer version of red kit has the capabilities to work with speedtree directly. Never tested that stuff because.. Well, why would I? Editing foliage is not something I plan on doing anytime soon especially when the software responsible for handling said foliage has not been updated for years and it's formats are difficult to deal with.
I'm confused by some of the before and after screenshots on this. In some I see flowers and lots of colored fauna, and then the after is just flat grass. Is that what this does is take away all fauna and color and replace it with only grass?
Some are from Skelliger and we already send feedback we want those coloured plants back in the nature but improved if possible. The mod looks better on Velen, Novigrad and Toussaint.
I am very grateful to you for your desire to make the Elysium mod perfect, and it just happened!I'm walking on the grass and I can smell it!Thanks for the update and your efforts! Good luck to you!
It seems like such a small thing, but it's everywhere. Using your mod with the current modlist I have really ties it all together. There is such variety of not only the types of flora in fields, but the state they are in. Going past flowing waves of grain to trampled plots of the same flora with a different smattering of grasses around it. It adds so much to the feeling of the world being alive and untamed. Thank you for this.
This mod is amazing, I love how it boosts the fps by 15 in certain areas. Only thing that I dont really like is that in some parts of Toussaint, the grass looked a little too white. Anyways ty for this awesome mod
I think you will be happy to know that alongside the update I will be posting shortly, I will be uploading a version with an alternate Toussaint with darker green grass similar to my other mod Meadows, as well as a version with the darker grass in all regions. Stay tuned :)
104 comments
https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher3/mods/4757
If you could improve those Skelliger plants without removing, that would be great.
As usual with modding games this old: you will most likely find a bunch of semi-outdated guides from ages ago detailing what to do, editing the actual models would most likely be one of the easier things in that entire workflow. Blender is not really complex anymore unless you want to make very detailed models or effects, giving the vanilla ones a face lift would take a day or two if you had to learn everything from scratch. The actual difficult part would be finding working tools to properly extract and convert the files.
Looks like speedtree cannot be easily edited. Witcher 3 uses a lot of middleware that is closed source, with that being said I wonder if the internal developer version of red kit has the capabilities to work with speedtree directly. Never tested that stuff because.. Well, why would I? Editing foliage is not something I plan on doing anytime soon especially when the software responsible for handling said foliage has not been updated for years and it's formats are difficult to deal with.
The mod looks better on Velen, Novigrad and Toussaint.
Amazing to see how even in NextGen grass can be so much improved.