Tiny Transparent Skies for Zesterer's Volumetric Clouds

Zesterer's Volumetric Cloud & Mist Shader for OpenMW is a must-have for me, but it requires either using its built-in "Replace Skybox" setting -- which gets rid of all sky textures, including the night sky -- or custom-made blank textures to avoid having duplicate clouds (i.e. original MW flat, texture clouds behind the shader's dynamic, volumetric clouds).

This is a pluginless texture replacer that overrides all of vanilla Morrowind's weather-specific skies with super-tiny (4x4 pixels, 136B) wholly transparent textures. You get to keep the stars and constellations while avoiding flat, texture clouds cluttering the sky.

And also? Improved FPS from the super-tiny textures. On my IdeaPad 3 it was a significant performance gain :-)

There are two other mods that I know of that do this:

• []"Skies for Clouds Shader" by a fellow known as PopeRigby over at GitLab, who made the very puzzling choice of having all the blank textures be 4K(!!). This implies a heavy performance hit for no reason. I've long used them, but felt that they didn't need to be so big at all. I finally put the effort on making my own and figured out the smallest possible size that works :-)

  []"Cloudless Sky Textures for Zesterer's Volumetric Clouds Shader (OpenMW)" by NexusMods user pandastic4. I haven't checked that mod personally, but the per-texture filesizes are very similar to PopeRigby's, so they might be 4K too.

The visual effect is exactly the same.

Also provided is an optional download to get rid of the sun using the same technique for the tiny transparent skies, for use with the shader's Better Sun.

INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS

Read the OpenMW docs. Make sure this mod's data path loads after the vanilla assets and any other sky texture replacers, if any.

CREDITS

• []Zesterer, for creating such a wonderful shader.

  []PopeRigby, for being the first person (AFAIK) to have made public his version of blank sky textures for zesterer's volumetric clouds and mist.

  []The OpenMW team and contributors, for a wonderful FOSS engine reimplementation.

  []Ivan Kutskir, for giving Photopea (https://www.photopea.com/) to the world, a fully-featured free online image editor that rivals the likes of GIMP and Photoshop. It was used to create my version of these textures (no assets from PopeRigby or pandastic4 were used or modified for this mod in any way, shape or form).

  A few more details are in the included readme inside the archive :-)