Modular Armory - Community Collection

MODULAR ARMORY

Modular Armory is a project to completely overhaul the meshes and textures for all vanilla Skyrim weapons and armors in a consistent fashion that is close to vanilla but higher in quality. Its primary inspiration was Cathedral Armory which essentially does the same thing. However, Modular Armory allows you to pick and choose instead of presenting an all-in-one solution. It also does not cover clothing as I believe that Gamwich's RUSTIC CLOTHING as a full package is the ideal choice.

Just like Cathedral Armory, I have based my tweaks on the fantastic SkyRealism Shiny mod. MTichenor kindly gave me permission to use their assets and I have implemented their cubemaps and environment mapping tweaks as well as many of their retextures.

• [] Modular Armory is fully modular (duh). You can select any set or unique artifact you like in the FOMOD installer and skip the rest.

  [] All meshes are vanilla meshes extracted from the default BSAs except for those covered by the USSEP in which case those were used.

  [] Weapon meshes are from LeanWolf's Better-Shaped Weapons (usually without sheaths).

  [] Numerous meshes had environment mapping enabled and cubemaps / environment maps added if they were missing.

  [] Included various cubemaps from aMidianBorn and SkyRealism Shiny as well as some upscaled vanilla ones.

  [] Patches for Practical Female Armors and Armor Mesh Fix are available.

  Note that the "shiny" effect added by the environment mapping is very difficult to show in screenshots. Light reflections, particularly subtle ones, are most apparent when the object is in motion.

  My texture choices had to fit two criteria: they had to cover all items from the same set so they would all be consistent in style, and they also had to be consistent in quality. Additionally, metalness maps were required for some sets where vanilla does not have any. The reason I did not just use aMidianBorn for everything is because AMB is unfortunately incomplete, often covering only a few pieces of a certain set. In some cases I opted to simply use vanilla upscaled textures from IconicDeath's Project Clarity which, surprise, are honestly not terrible.

  ENVIRONMENT MAPPING

  I've only just started to learn how meshes work. I'm still busy figuring out the basics. Please do take everything I say with an extra grain of salt.

  SkyRealism Shiny utilises environment mapping to add a "shiny" effect to metal parts of armors and weapons. This can be enabled in the respective mesh. The mesh also contains texture file paths which is only the normal (texture_n.dds) and diffuse maps (texture.dds) for most vanilla armors and weapons. Environment mapping also requires a cubemap however (cubemap_e.dds) and can be further improved