Subway Transit Sign 4K Texture

Description

This is a scratch made texture for the subway transit sign that is hanging around at subway station entrances. The vanilla texture resolution is 512 x 512 pixels and the HD DLC doesn't help here because it contains the same low resolution texture. The signs have a proper normal map now so you can see small shadows around the letters. Furthermore, the colour for the Orange Line has been edited so you can now differentiate between the Red and the Orange Line.

Installation and load order

You can install this mod with any mod manager.

If you're new to this, here's a guide.

In the installer, you can select your prefered resolution (1K, 2K and 4K) and your prefered file type (loose files or a packed archive). The dummy plugin for the packed version is an ESL flagged ESP so you can move the mod in your load order but the plugin doesn't count towards your plugin limit.

Some technical stuff

Bethesda used a different approach to create this asset. Instead of creating different textures for each station, they use one texture for all stations. The texture is only black and white. It contains the alphabet and each sign uses links to the needed letters. The colour for the 4 station lines is stored in sepearte tiny 3kb palette texture.

The brightness level of a pixel in the black and white texture determines which colour is picked for it from the palette texture. This whole technique saves a lot of memory (especially with high res textures) but is in my opinion a nightmare to work with.