HD Reflective Ebony Armor and Weapons

This started as just another texture upscale project for my own personal use. I was using Cathedral Armory, which I learned uses the meshes and textures from MTichenor's SkyRealism - Shiny. Which are great mods but the textures are BC3 and there are problems with a few meshes, especially after porting them to SSE. I was gradually upscaling and tweaking the textures, testing different variants of the armor meshes, etc. when I got permission to upload the whole thing, both textures and meshes. So this mod is effectively standalone, doesn't require anything else. I actually redid all the meshes from the vanilla SSE meshes, replicating the mesh fixes from USSEP. This avoids some mesh problems in Cathedral Armory, like meshes in the LE format or meshes with missing player models, orphaned nodes etc.

The base version is already compatible with LeanWolf's better-shaped weapons. There will be a patch for jg1's Slimmer/Believable weapon meshes on their mod pages and on this page there's a special patch for rudy102's arrows with ENB particle lights which uses LeanWolf's arrow proportions but keeps the glow and ENB light. Now there's also an optional file with new unique meshes and textures for the Ebony Mail, so it will match the material of the regular ebony armor but still stand out with its chainmail and blue cloth. So this way you can wear a full ebony set with the ebony mail and have it all match even better than in vanilla. This mod is based on meshes & textures that are in Cathedral Armory and SkyRealism - Shiny but it doesn't require either mod. If you use Cathedral Armory too, just overwrite it with this.

As usual, the process was removing BC1 compression from all the textures with ESRGAN, then upscaling the diffuse maps and some of the normal maps. Then using photoshop to make more specific changes, some of which you can see in the pictures above. If you want to know more about that process or how to do it yourself, there's more information and links in the descriptions for some of my previous mods. In terms of meshes I also deviated a bit from the Cathedral/SkyRealism versions, just to try to get the reflectiveness consistent on every item. Harder than you'd think since the metallic maps are all over the map in terms of brightness... no pun intended.

I've included a lot of different comparison shots in the images section. Some are just comparisons to Cathedral Armory, others are comparisons to vanilla and there are even comparisons to aMidianborn ebony armor by CaBaL120. I just included those since there aren't many ebony retextures out there and I'm sure people will be wondering if these are "better" than Cabal's.

The reason I bothered with these rather than upscaling the aMidianborn ebony armor is a bit complicated. The aMidianborn ebony armor is really good. It's not as reflective and for me the engravings don't look as realistic as the vanilla engravings, but it's still really good. The