Enhanced Rocks and Mountains
Want a highly detailed and enhanced rock and mountain mod that you can just install and forget about? Well, I made it anyway.
Geometry Enhanced
Rocks now look more three-dimensional, which gives them a more realistic presence in the game world. The mod also improves the way light and shadows interact with the rocks, adding more depth and realism to the game's lighting effects.
Blending Enhanced
One of the standout features of this mod is the additional and upgraded mountain rock rubble, which expertly hides hard texture borders and makes the rocks and terrain look much more natural, blended, and lifelike.
Wet rocks also blend in better with their surroundings. They have been very carefully lightened to not look too overly dark compared to their drier counterparts.
Terrain Enhanced
A lot of rock assets have terrain built straight into them. Other mods simply keep the borders of the rock angular on these files so they don't have to rework the terrain. ERM totally rebuilds most of the dirt, snow, grass and other walkable terrain pieces contained in these assets. This means everything looks much more consistently detailed.
Perfomance EnhancedHuh? Is this mod going to increase my frames? Not technically, but all of my mods have performance in mind. There's a thing called going too far after all! The models are painstakingly checked for any errors before export, geometry is eye-balled to check to see if it's just about smooth enough, and detail is optimised to remove any extra polygons where they aren't really needed.
Collision EnhancedMountains are large overbearing objects, so collision has been totally regenerated for such assets. Plant your feet down and take a few strides knowing that the huge slab of rock you are walking on is more accurate to your steps while also still being performant.
Shading EnhancedSay goodbye to fakery! ERM removes any colours directly painted onto the model, so you know your textures will look as they should. On top of this, ambient shadowing has been raytraced straight onto each rock surface offline to give a bit more punch and realism to crevices.
Note: This will make the rocks a bit lighter than the base game, but this is easily solved by grabbing a slightly darker rock retexture, like the optional ERM rock texture pack.
Compatibility Enhanced
Compatible with any texture mod that uses a square texture like the vanilla game. Examples: 2048x2048 (2K), 4096x4096 (4K), 8096x8096 (8K). Just install with a mod manager and forget about it! Simple.
Parallax Enhanced
ERM has special designated areas to remove the snow where the new material blending feature (see Blending Enhanced above) is seen. By default, you wouldn't be able to see the blending on parallax-enabled rocks without these areas if they have a coat of snow. The mod goes above and beyond to make sure the visuals are consistent, whether you are using parallax or not.
Questions and Answers
Can you provide distant LOD files?
The file is externally hosted here by STEP Modifications to support their guide and wiki.
Why don't you include X assets with this mod? Other mods include X assets.
Other similar mods sometimes don't include geometric edits in a number of their files. This means many of their included models can still contain untouched vanilla geometry. ERM is different in that it makes some sort of meaningful edit to every file it includes. This in turn means more work and time spent on each model. The goal with ERM was to focus on the rocks in most abundance.
Compatibility
Majestic Mountains (MM) - Not compatible. I do not wish for any patches to be made for MM, and the old, outdated, MM Beta patch has been hidden. I just feel that ERM shouldn't be seen as a patch for another popular mod. It should stand alone on its own merits. The two mods go about things differently, and I'm really happy with ERM's compatibility and feature set.
Realistic Water Two (RWT) - For now, overwrite RWT. I work on RWT, so I will be updating RWT soon with a patch.
Static Mesh Improvement Mod (SMIM) - Overwrite.
Unofficial Skyrim Patch - No action required. Just install ERM, and you'll have the best of both mods.
Fix mods - Geometry in ERM has been rebuilt, so any bugs fixed by other mods are of no relevance. Not because ERM is simply better, but because any bugs would be stamped out by the rebuilding process itself. So... overwrite them with ERM.
General texture/DDS replacers - You can use any texture packs and general retexture mods with my files. Landscape, water, sexy sex-time ect. ERM doesn't discriminate.
General model/NIF replacer mods - The rule of thumb is to overwrite any mods that have any conflicts with any files in ERM. ERM has a vanilla game structure inside every model file, and this means it's as compatible as any vanilla asset too.
Collison mods - Improved and optimised collision is now included as standard.
Double-sided lighting mods - Already included for the largest mountains, and that's all that's needed to stop the sun piercing through them.
When in doubt just test it out. With a mod manager, it's as easy as ever to get back to where you started. If there's nothing to overwrite, then you should always be golden.
Installation
A mod manager like Vortex is recommened, but you may simply open the archive with 7zip and drag the Data folder to your Skyrim installation folder for a manual install. Overwrite any conflicts. Uninstall is the same, but in reverse.
