RUGNAROK - Special Edition

RUGNAROK is my attempt to do for rugs what my PELTAPALOOZA mod did for pelts. Rugs aren't merely clutter items in Skyrim, despite their classification. They also serve as artwork in the game, and in some locations such as Dragonsreach, they have a very large visual presence.

UPDATE: Version 1. 1 corrects one rug mesh which had the wrong normal map texture assigned to it. That is the only change.

The short version: RUGNAROK retextures and expands on the rugs in Skyrim. The vanilla game has 15 rectangular rug meshes, but only 8 designs. The game has 4 round rug meshes, but only 2 round rug designs. There are also 8 rolled up rug meshes, but only 4 rolled rug designs, so there are many repeats. This mod has a unique rug design for each rug mesh, greatly expanding the variety of rugs seen in game. Each rug also has it's own normal map, unlike the vanilla game with shares them.

The long version: The vanilla rug textures are not only low-res, but they are poorly designed. The fringed rugs actually use a separate set of rug textures just for the fringe. This is not only a waste of VRAM, but a poor solution, since the fringe only occupies a small part of the original textures.

Fortunately, raiserfx already addressed this issue with his excellent and immensely popular Detailed Rugs mod. He replaced the secondary rug textures with a new and more detailed fringe texture, as well as revising the meshes to use the new fringes. It's a much better solution than what Bethesda came up with. It seemed obvious that any new overhaul should incorporate raiserfx's quality fixes. I'm was pleased that he graciously granted me permission to use his fringes and mesh edits for this mod.

With RUGNAROK, I wanted to go beyond the default rug textures. While some of the Bethesda rug designs were OK to begin with, there was no point in duplicating what raiserfx did with Detailed Rugs. He created a truly hi-res lore-friendly retexture of the vanilla rug designs. I wanted to go further with a redesign of the rugs. Many of the vanilla rugs never appealed to me from a design standpoint. Not only were many of the designs uninteresting, but there was no overall design esthetic that I could discern. While I could well imagine that a number of the rugs might be imported, and not of Nord design, I still thought that most of them would be. And if they were of Nord design, they should have some shared motifs. That's what I endeavored to do.

The rugs of Dragonsreach looked too bland and washed out, so I gave them a bolder an