Myrkvior - The Flora Of Skyrim - Trees

LE | SSE | Discord | MyMods | Install | Files Guide | Load Order

I've worked as a professional horticulturist for the last 30 years and during that time I have thoroughly observed flora in a multitude of environments and lighting setups, including plant hunting expeditions to the Himalayas where some of the vistas are incredibly reminiscent of Skyrim. I’ve combined my experience with the Skyrim resources available and made a new tree mod, which takes into account, lore, climate, aspects, and environment. It covers the whole of Skyrim.

Myrkvior comprises updated tree models, updated textures, new ultra-lods, new billboards and improved animations. I also made matching terrain LOD and matching grass textures. Together they comprise a series of mods I'm working on called "The Flora of Skyrim", or TFoS and they are intended to be used together. The effect is an immersive landscape without transition whose blended colours result in an uninterrupted vista, something not easily achieved with a bright ENB like NLA.

The updated trees replace the vanilla trees, and at the same time I've introduced large lush pine trees within the vanilla mix. This covers green pines, snow pines (heavy and light) , dead pines, aspen trees, reach trees and more. It's been done sparingly as I wanted to retain sightlines through the trees, which makes my stealth archer very happy.

In addition, a massive amount of work was done balancing the texture colours, editing vertex colours etc, to ensure all the various tones and hues flow naturally and are homogenous. This major effort means all the trees in the game, from loaded model through to 3D Ultra Lods, Billboard2 and beyond receive light accurately and realistically.

The new ultralods and their associated textures have also been tweaked and updated throughout.  New ultralods solved many odd lighting issues and were further optimized to reduce Vram usage.

I've also utilised an advanced billboard feature for DynDOLOD called Billboard2.  They incorporate the addition of a normal map which improves how they react to natural light. I employed 4 point lighting capture in Nifskope to produce new normals which have spherical normal vectors with bi/tangents, unlike the vanilla style billboards. This means they react to sunlight and cloud shadows in real time.

The grass is an edited version of Verdant, chosen because of Preeums excellent plant choices. His work is what you would likely find in a Northern climate like Skyrim. The terrain meshes and textures from The Flora of Skyrim were created using xLo