MultiLayer Parallax Soul Gems

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Author: MadCat221 (MadCat221@gmail.com)

May 4, 2015

1. Introduction 2. Installation 3. Credits 4. Version History

=============== 1. INTRODUCTION ===============

With the advent of NIFSkope 2. 0 by Jonwd7, we now have the ability to quickly verify how something will render in-game via its new WYSIWYG functionality.  To that end, I made use of the Multilayer Parallaxing effect shader on the Soul Gems.  I also color-coded them up the visible spectrum according to capacity: Petty red, lesser orange, common yellow, greater green, grand blue, black violet.

Multilayer Parallaxing (or MLP for short, yes I know what else that stands for, it stopped being funny in this mod's dev period) is not Parallax Bump Mapping, but a different parallax effect.  To understand what it's doing, you should familiarize yourself with just what parallaxing is (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallax).

Multilayer Parallaxing adds a subsurface texture that appears to be "inside" the geometry, parallaxing back and forth as your viewpoint upon the geometry surface pans about.  Other effects like refracting and scaling are also options within the mesh's material settings.  If you play Dragon Age Inquisition, the frozen lakes and rivers and more prominently the Red Lyrium use a more advanced version of this material shader effect.

It does NOT require ENBSeries to function correctly.  Parallax bump mapping is what is broken and requires ENB correction, not this.  Several meshes in-game already use this material shader effect, like the Frost Atronach and several frozen water body surfaces (like in the Hjallmarch marshes). =============== 2. INSTALLATION ===============

Unpack manually or using the mod manager of your choice into the Skyrim/Data directory.  Activate the accompanying module to enable an extra effect on the filled gems.

========== 3. CREDITS ==========

Jonwd7, for giving NIFSkope a badly needed upgrade in functionality and usability (for Skyrim at least so far). Without it and the showcase on its MLP

================ 3. COMPATIBILITY ================

Obviously, any other mod that alters soul gems in any way (especially appearance) will clash with this mod.

================== 5. VERSION HISTORY ==================

v1: Initial Release.

v1. 0. 1: Fixed bad file path for filled common gem in the module.

v1. 0. 2: Fixed some shader flag issues in the Lesser gem.  Reduced the emissive mult on the glow effects for the filled gems as they were a bit too bright.