DrJacopo's - 3D Snow Berries

Description

This mod replaces the 2D snow berry plants of Skyrim with a 3D model. The vanilla plant is clearly based off of Winterberry holly, Ilex, (and not the real world snow berry plant) which I think was a good aesthetic choice on part of Bethesda, so I therefore based these snowberry plants off the same plants as Bethesda did. Each leaf of each plant model is unique due to randomly assigned vertex colors and several leaf variations within the diffuse. Vertex smoothing is done within the model itself so that normal maps are not necessary. There are two model variants (large bush and small bush) and four texture variants (Green, Snowy Green, Variegated, and Snowy Variegated). In the default version, the large bushes (commonly found in nature) are green and the smaller bushes (commonly found in residential areas) are variegated.

On Performance

I had originally planned on using the berries from Sufficiently Optimized Snow Berries (SOSB) by WankingSkeever, however, performance testing of various models of berries revealed massive performance gains by reducing the number of UV islands (from 32 UV islands in SOSB to 1 single UV island per berry in this mod). Performance testing revealed that the best predictor of performance was the data size of the nif or a crude summation of triangle and vertex counts. Ultimately, I was able to make the berries higher poly and also save considerable performance. These optimizations will likely not be noticed however, because there are only ~2000 snow berry plants across the entire map, so raising their geometric complexity (within reason) essentially cannot affect performance (ie if you drop a glass or barrel of water into the sea, which will raise the sea level more?). Testing was done on a laptop, and FPS loss could not be measured until vertex counts were well over several hundred thousand, which is many many times greater than this mod (or any other snowberry mod). For perspective, the small bush is 3178 triangles+2701 vertices (about twice the data size as vanilla, and 1/5th the data size of SOSB) and the large bush is 9752 triangles+8335 vertices (about 6x the data size as vanilla, and 1/4th the data size of SOSB). As many of you know, creating highly optimized and performance friendly mods is an obsession of mine and fundamental to the Cathedral Series, and this mod offers the best visuals to performance ratio possible.

Recommendations

Cathedral Snowberries - Inventory - Wreath - Hearthfires Planter by WankingSkeever

Cathedral Series

Credits

-Please see the above Permissions & Credits drop down for texture source and licensing.

-Massive thanks to WankingS