PELTAPALOOZA - Pelts of Skyrim Expansion

SHORT STORY - PELTAPALOOZA is an expansion on my earlier mod Pelts of Skyrim. This increases the number of pelts used by the game from the default 3, to 9. Skyrim's pelts are controlled by three sets of (3) meshes: wall pelts, bed pelts, and floor pelts. I've assigned new textures to all three sets to allow 9 pelts to be used. There is also a Lite version that uses the same set for both the walls and beds, and a separate set for the floors, so only 6 pelts are used. This is for people with low-end PCs who can't handle the extra texture load. Wall and bed pelt textures are 1024x2048, and the floor pelt textures are 2048x2048.

VERSION 1. 2 revises the brown floor pelt to better match the appearance of the other floor pelts. Some people objected to the style of the previous brown floor pelt. All should be harmonious now.

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LONG STORY - PELTAPALOOZA  grew out of my Pelts of Skyrim mod, which I made originally because I disliked the default Bethesda pelt textures. They were too bland and generic looking, even at the hi-res pack size. So, I designed 4 sets of the three pelt textures to give people options in decorating their game. I always thought of the pelts as the "artwork" of the inns and taverns. My aim was to create pelts that were both attractive and distinctive.

One nagging issue remaining was that only one set of (3) pelt textures could be used in the game. It was great to have choice, but the limitation of only being able to use three at a time was annoying. The other issue, was the floor pelts. 1024x2048 was perfectly sufficient for the wall and bed pelts, but the scaling of the floor pelts made them often stretched and blurry looking. What the floors needed was a real 2K texture.

After much experimentation, I discovered that while the wall and bed textures needed to be their original 1x2 (1024x2048) dimension to display properly in game, the floor textures did not. The meshes allowed the textures to be in the normal 1X1 dimensions. This was important, because I wanted to expand the pelts used by the game in the most performance friendly fashion as possible. Pelt textures are double layer to begin with, so there's a significant VRAM savings having 2048x2048 textures instead of 2048x4096 textures. I also determined that since my original textures were designed to work with the default normal maps, that I could eliminate one set of normals, by having the walls and beds share the same normal maps. That eliminated adding an extra set of 1024x2048 textures. As with all my mods, performance is always a major consideration. I want my mods to be useable for as many people as possible.

Another thing that bothered me was the default normal maps we