RUSTIC MOUNTAINS - Special Edition

RUSTIC MOUNTAINS - Special Edition is a RUSTIC enhancement of the original mountain textures for Skyrim Special Edition.

I took care to preserve the original design and colors of Bethesda's textures, only adding more detail to make them worthy of their new 4K texture size. There are more cracks, crevices, and crannies to the mountains now. Overall there's a greater sense of "rockiness" for lack of a better word. Not much point in doubling the mountain texture size if you're just going to do a lazy upscale. But hey, that's how Bethesda rolls.

Since I am unable to run Skyrim SE on my setup, I enlisted the help of my mod users to contribute screenshots. The user gallery is full of many nice examples. I picked just a few to add to the main gallery so it wouldn't look so bare.

UPDATE 3. 0:  Has BC7 normal maps and mountain masks which provide near uncompressed quality without increasing the file size. Version 2. 0 used the SRBG version of BC7 which doesn't work well with SSE. Version 3. 0 should fix the issues that people were having.

Do to the fact that the mountains are the largest objects in the game, and therefore are prone to distort textures even at 4K size, I decided to update the normal maps to the newer BC7 compression. This format doesn't produce the artifacts that are inherent in DXT5 normal map compression. This isn't a problem for diffuse (color) textures, but it is for normals. The BC7 compression achieves similar quality to uncompressed normals, but the file size remains the same as DXT5 textures. That makes it a clear improvement for this application. Better visuals without any performance cost.