Onyx - VR Weathers

Mod DescriptionThis weather mod has been a long time in the making. It was started by Prog and SGSRules. I helped to do some final tweaks, polishing, and to prepare this mod for release.

Weather in Skyrim is tricky. There are many oddities, like grass and ground being lit in completely different ways, and it's often a balancing act to try to get things to look consistent. This is especially difficult in VR where some aspects of weather act differently, or are disabled completely, such as volumetric lighting. Onyx - VR Weathers is a mod based on Obsidian Weathers with adjustments made to weather colors using a custom script. The main goal of this mod was for the foliage to look correct and have a nice dark night time that felt natural.

Onyx includes five levels of night time darkness. 100% is kept the same as obsidian, which is a relatively bright night. 20% is almost pitch black. Most "Dark Nights" mods make things darker by editing the imagespaces. This works, but unfortunately, this darkens everything, including light sources like torches, lanterns, and campfires. This mod uses a different technique, where half of the darkness is set by the imagespace, and the other half is done by darkening the weather colors themselves. The result is that even with pitch black nights, light sources actually light up the night in a more natural way.

A side effect of darkening the night sky this way is that the normal rain textures can look like bright noise or TV static at night. That is why Onyx Weathers also includes carefully made rain particles that strike a balance between being visible during the day  and not overwhelmingly bright at night. Please note that rain and snow texture replacers may not work well without adjustments.

Onyx weathers also includes an ENB version. This version of the mod "flattens" all of the weather colors so that the enb can be in complete control of the colors and lighting. Included in the optional files is SGS's custom ENB for Onyx Weathers specially made for the ENB version of Onyx.

Onyx weathers is also built with SkyVRaan compatibility. No Water Weather patch needed!

Cresty's Distant Mists is another mod which looks great in VR. Included in the fomod installer is a version of Onyx compatible with Cresty's mists. Just load Onyx Weathers after Cresty's Diststant Mists. No further patching required!

All screenshots have been taken in VR

Storm Lightning SE and VR

SkyVRaan - Shimmering Waters

Cresty's Distant Mists

Solveig - Cinematic Sunglare (oldrim mod, but works fine)

Smooth Sky Mesh SSE

SGSRules Night Sky (included in optional files)