Murals That Don't Suck

INTRODUCTION

Skyrim's Nordic Pantheon murals should be awesome: full of lore and artistry, and a fitting reward for having made it so far into a key dungeon. Instead, they're offensive eyesores: so low res and distorted that you can barely even see what they're supposed to depict.

Over the past 5 years, the modding community's greatly improved and beautified almost every aspect of Skyrim....except those murals. Sure, a couple of people did an admirable job improving them as much as was possible. But with what little those modders had to work with, they could only fix them so far. And the major texture overhauls like Skyrim HD didn't even touch them.

The only way anyone could fully fix the issues in the vanilla murals would be to redo every single element of those murals from scratch. That would be an incredibly tedious and loooooooong process, and no one would be stupid or crazy enough to go through that.

Until now. 

So, What exactly is this mod?

This is a retexture of the murals you come across in certain key dungeons. It's a work in progress - so far two murals have been completed. Because the vanilla ones are so rubbish, I've had to recreate everything from scratch, which takes a lot of work. I've painstakingly recreated every detail at a much higher level of quality to the originals. Everything is hand-painted (both textures and normals/height maps).

I've tried to stay as lore-friendly as possible and as close to the original designs as possible, and have used all sorts of things for visual reference, including Daedric weapons, scientific illustrations of bear skulls, Rembrandt portraits, and Viking artifacts!

This video submitted by Ultimate Immersion does an excellent job of showing the mod before/after:

CznZBGSBC38

Here are some before/after shots:

Quite a difference, eh? While most of the original files are a paltry 512x512 px, the files in this mod are up to 8192 x 4096 px, which allows for all that detail.

Woooooaaaah - hang on! 8192 x 4096?! Isn't that excessive? Actually, not at all. Let me illustrate with the diagram below.

As you can see, because of the layout of Skyrim's mural files, when you walk up to one of the funeral procession scenes (they appear on every mural), your screen fills up with something that's lower resolution than a facebook avatar. Even after I've increased that file 16 times, to 8192 x 4096, it still isn't quite big enough to give you a 1:1 crisp mural when up close, unless your monitor is below 1080p. But it'