Bellyaches HD Dragon Replacer Pack (SE)

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Not my ENB. Primary screenshots taken with vanilla lighting

Screenshots are welcome, if anyone wants to make a good/new video for SSE I'll replace this one above!

Dragons look pretty ugly in vanilla Skyrim. The models/sculpts are great, but the textures are far too low resolution for such a huge creature (same size texture as a suit of armor in fact) and the meshes had all sorts of corners cut in the name of optimization. I learned from Jonah Lobe (the artist who actually made these things) that the original assets were originally much higher quality (4k textures and better meshes), but things were downgraded a few times due to all the performance issues Bethesda was experiencing on X360 & PS3.

Moving on, Skyrim came out & we all cried at the terrible textures on PC. The HD DLC came out and we cried a little less. Fast forward a few years and Special Edition is here. As far as textures are concerned (AFAIK anyways), Skyrim SE just merges the old HD DLC assets into the base game with no changes. The higher resolution textures in the old HD DLC/Special Edition made most dragons look better than there original incarnations, but by no means great. Skyrim uses the same size textures for its massive dragon models as it does for suits of armor. In all my time playing around with dragons I noticed a lot of minor nit-pick issues with the models & textures. Horns had mismatched colors, the eye textures were atrocious, everything looked too washed out, the details were blurry, there were seam issues all over the place, the translucent files were terribly small, and there is some strange "grease-like" effect applied to several of the meshes.

Ok cool, what does this all mean? Dragons look fine from a distance but fairly awful up close. Bellyache & I wanted to fix that. What started as a re-work of Odahviing turned into a full pass on each of the ten dragon species. The amount of changes on each dragon type varies, with some needing more work than others. Regardless Bellyache & I visually inspected each texture/mesh and corrected as much as we could within a timely manner. At least without completely re-working the entire thing from scratch.

Improvements over Special Edition textures:

Coloring looks more natural and less desaturated than before. Many horns/spines were poorly colored or completely the wrong color.

Fixed/Reduced as many bad texture & mesh seams as possible.

Removed or significantly reduced the 'Grease-like' look on some dragon models, which exacerbated seam issues.

Odahviing's gotten a facelift. He was completely missing an eye texture, coloring was terrible (he was pink), and corrected several seams.

*Blood Dragon was just plain ugly. Fixed the Alpha-channe