World: Distant Landscape 1.2

If you are not already familiar with how textures work, or have questions about the information presented here, you may want to read the Textures FAQ.

NOISE EFFECT FILTERS

vanilla Oblivion 1.1

The 1.2 patch does not help to resolve the mid-range landscape tiling (you still need QTP3 or some other landscape replacer to fix that problem), but it does dramatically smooth the transition to distant landscape and helps to distract you from noticing the flaws in the vanilla distant landscape textures.

Nevertheless, there's still plenty of room for improvement. This guide will attempt to reveal some of the possibilities.

One of the most common choices for improving the LanscapeLOD is to add Better Tiling 2048 LOD Textures (Table 1, Column 2), which replaces the color maps for distant landscape. This is an especially good choice if you're using one of Qarl's Texture Packs (QTP2 or QTP3) since the colors in the vanilla LandscapeLOD textures do not match up very well with Qarl's close-range landscape textures. The Better Tiling LandscapeLOD textures also add significant details to the distant landscape -- for example, allowing you to actually see where a road goes in the distance, as well as many other details absent from the vanilla LandscapeLOD textures.

However, if your system is struggling to keep up with high-res texture packs, you may instead want to consider just replacing the noise filter. Without adding any overhead at all, you can use Koldorn's LOD Noise Replacer along with the default vanilla LandscapeLOD textures to get an amazingly good effect (Table 1, Column 3). In fact, it's roughly as good as using CaptnKill's 4096 LOD textures, but without any of the considerable overhead from using CaptnKill's textures.

If you prefer a cleaner distant landscape with Better Tiling, but you don't like the the strong "pepper" effect of the vanilla noise filter, then you should consider HTF's Noise Replacer (Table 1, Column 4). It adds minimal overhead and produces a nice, subtle effect.

LOD Comparison Table 1 -- Noise Replacers (Oblivion 1.2)

Vanilla LOD, Vanilla Noise	BT2048 LOD, Vanilla Noise	Vanilla LOD, Koldorn Medium Noise	BT2048 LOD, HTF-1 Noise

If you like both of these approaches, then combine them! Using the Better Tiling textures along with one of Koldorn's more dramatic noise filters will give you the best of both worlds with minimal performance impact.

Experiment with different combinations of these effects to find the one you like best. Table 2 (below) shows the dramatic effect possible when combining Better Tiling with Koldorn's various noise replacer options, as well as the subtler effect of combining Better Tiling with the HTF-2 noise filter.

LOD Comparison Table 2 -- Noise Replacers (Oblivion 1.2)

BT2048 LOD, Koldorn Light Noise	BT2048 LOD, Koldorn Medium Noise	BT2048 LOD, Koldorn Strong Noise	BT2048 LOD, HTF-2 Noise

All of these comparisons were done using QTP3 for close-range landscape textures, but the transition from mid-range landscape to distant landscape will be very similar with QTP2 as well.

If you use some other landscape texture replacer for close-range landscape, or you've decided to keep the vanilla landscape textures, then you'll probably want to pick a distant landscape package that works well with it. For example, many of the other LandscapeLOD texture packs released so far (Zacharot, buhay) are similar in appearance to the Better Tiling LandscapeLOD textures, but some of them will blend better with the vanilla landscape textures (and other replacers based on the vanilla landscape color scheme). Zacharot has the widest selection of styles, but the differences among them are not dramatic. HTF's Diverse Grasses mod has its own compatible distant landscape package.

The Optimised Distant Land MAX mesh replacer can also give you some increased performance with very little loss of detail in the distant landscape meshes. It works fine with all of the distant landscape texture replacers described here and also has a Reduced (vanilla) Distant Land Textures option you can use to match the vanilla landscape textures. 

See the main World Textures page for download links and mirror sites.

TEXTURE RESOLUTION

The size of the textures you choose will have a dramatic impact on the VRAM consumed by distant landscape. Using larger textures will improve the appearance of the distant landscape, but it can also push your video card over the edge if it runs out of VRAM. This means it is critical to pick a quality/performance tradeoff that works for you.

The following comparisons attempt to help with this decision process by revealing some of the differences in visual quality between various texture sizes.

Color Maps

Using a radical noise effect filter such as Koldorn's provides good results even with very low-resolution color maps and normal maps. The Reduced LandscapeLOD Textures mod provides multiple resolution options for the Better Tiling LOD color maps. This makes it possible to make a full comparison of color map resolutions ranging from 512 x 512 (the same size as the vanilla LOD textures) all the way up to the extreme detail (and extreme VRAM usage) 4096 x 4096 color maps (see Table 3, below).

LOD Comparison Table 3 -- Color Map Resolution (Oblivion 1.2)

BT 512 x 512, Koldorn Medium Noise	BT 1024 x 1024, Koldorn Medium Noise	BT 2048 x 2048, Koldorn Medium Noise	BT 4096 x 4096, Koldorn Medium Noise

Even without any normal map replacers, the Koldorn Noise Filters produce a very nice effect near dusk and dawn. This seems to indicate that mods designed to smooth out the compression artifacts in the vanilla normal maps are no longer as important as they were in the past. The two shots below were taken using just the BT1024 color maps and the Koldorn Medium Noise filter (i.e., no "fixed" normal maps):

Normal Maps

As with the color maps, using a radical noise effect filter provides good results even with very low-resolution normal maps. Compression artifacts also become much less obvious.

Just like all normal maps, landscape normal maps produce much less pronounced shadows near mid-day, when the sun is overhead. The shadows become much deeper and more dramatic near dusk or dawn, when the sun is low in the sky. Prior to the 1.2 patch, this is when compression artifacts would appear in the distant landscape, causing parts of it to appear very blocky or pixelated. After the patch, this problem is significantly reduced, especially with a dramatic noise filter such as Koldorn's. This is true even when using very bumpy normal maps, even Qarl's Compressed 4096 LOD Normal Maps.

Qarl's Compressed 4096 LOD Normal Maps adds a dramatic amount of additional detail to the distant landscape, especially when viewed near dusk or dawn. You can see this clearly in the QN4096 column of Table 4, below. However, some people do not like this added detail because it can seem overdone compared to the smoothness of the mid-range landscape. The Reduced LandscapeLOD Textures mod helps with this issue since it provides multiple resolution options for Qarl's LOD normal maps -- the smaller texture sizes are smoother and less pronounced (pictured in the QN1024 and QN2048 columns of Table 4, below).

LOD Comparison Table 4 -- Normal Map Resolution (mid-day and at dusk)

BT1024, vanilla normals, Koldorn Medium Noise	BT1024, QN1024, Koldorn Medium Noise	BT1024, QN2048, Koldorn Medium Noise	BT1024, QN4096, Koldorn Medium Noise

The Reduced LandscapeLOD Textures package includes the option to use 512 x 512 normal maps, but these are almost indistinguishable from the vanilla normal maps, so it is not pictured above.

SUMMARY

The key to selecting the right combination of color maps and normal maps for distant landscape is to pick texture sets that look good to you and do not exceed the VRAM capacity of your video card. The file sizes of each replacer set varies widely, ranging from as little as 2Mb for each set at 512 x 512 all the way up to 138Mb for each set at 4096 x 4096. This means you would need to allocate 276Mb worth of precious VRAM just for distant landscape if you use both the 4096 color maps and the 4096 normal maps together.

Using just the 1024 x 1024 color maps and normal maps together (Table 4, Column 2) probably gives the best mid-range tradeoff, providing a very nice improvement in quality while consuming only 17Mb of VRAM total for both sets combined. If you want to go one step up from this in detail, you can upgrade the normal maps to 2048 while leaving the color maps at 1024 (Table 4, Column 3), which results in a combined VRAM usage of 43Mb.

Table 5 shows the file sizes for each of the possible options and the total size when they are combined.

LOD Comparison Table 5 -- VRAM Consumed (estimate)

* Same size as vanilla default textures.

Your actual VRAM consumption when using these combinations will vary and probably will not match the actual filesizes shown here. There's also some dispute over the accuracy of VRAM consumption numbers reported by the Oblivion game engine (Rivatuner reports much lower usage numbers, for example), but the basic premise of the comparison is to give some overall perspective to the impact of these textures on system performance.

Everyone wants their game to look as good as possible, and if you have VRAM to burn, then go for the highest resolution that looks good to you. Most users don't have this luxury, especially when running large texture replacers like QTP3. The important question to ask yourself is whether it is really worth using the larger textures to make the distant landscape look near perfect, or will you be happier with smoother performance and slightly less detail. You'll have to decide for yourself.

You can find some additional thoughts on this subject in the Textures FAQ.

Installation

Installation for LandscapeLOD textures, normal maps, and noise filters doesn't have to be done in any particular order, so you don't have to worry about overwriting any other textures when you install them.