Smooth Terrain

There are a lot of great mods for Skyrim that make vanilla meshes higher quality. These can be things like mountains, dirtcliffs, etc. This is possible because all of those objects resolve from a mesh file (NIF file) that can be modified. Unfortunately, this is not the case for terrain. The terrain mesh is instead generated by the game at runtime based on the vertices in LAND records in plugins, which is pretty coarse. Therefore, historically it was not possible to make a higher-poly mesh for terrain. This is the problem this mod strives to solve.

Smooth Terrain is an open-source SKSE plugin which makes terrain appear smoother by subdividing landscape meshes and fitting new vertices to an interpolated curve. This results in more vertices in each terrain quad mesh. The quality and therefore the performance hit can be controlled via the included INI file. This mod can be installed/uninstalled at any point during a save.

COMPATIBILITY

Game versions 1. 7. 104, 1. 6. 1170, 1. 5. 97 and 1. 4. 15. 0 (VR) are supported. Other version are offered at a "best effort" capacity as time permits.

Compatible with every mod (Including CS and ENB). Feel free to make a post if you find this to not be the case and I can look into it.

PERFORMANCE

Any performance degradation should only be noticeable in GPU-bound scenarios as this does not add any draw calls. Increasing the iSubdivisions INI value will increase tris/verts exponentially and will affect performance more. The default subdivision value is 2.

Thanks to Ungeziefi for providing benchmarks for Smooth Terrain! These benchmarks measure different subdivision settings. All other settings are left default. The benchmarks were done in version 0. 4. 0.

For more benchmarks and comparison screenshots, please visit the ModdingLinked website.

TECHNICAL DETAILS

By default each LAND record stores a 33x33 grid of vertices. This gets split into 4 quads by the engine when rendering. The goal of Smooth Terrain is to increase that vertex count WITHOUT requiring any changes to the vanilla plugin system, therefore, an interpolation method is needed to calculate new vertices to use in the new subdivision