Myrkvior – The Flora Of Skyrim – Trees
A new tree mod that includes grass, terrain and other options to create your ideal tree setup.
I’ve worked as a professional horticulturist for the last 30 years and during that time I have thoroughly observed flora in a multitude of environments and lighting setups, including plant hunting expeditions to the Himalayas where some of the vistas are incredibly reminiscent of Skyrim. I’ve combined my experience with the Skyrim resources available and made a new tree mod, which takes into account, lore, climate, aspects, and environment. It covers the whole of Skyrim.
Myrkvior comprises updated tree models, updated textures, new ultra-lods, new billboards and improved animations. I also made matching terrain LOD and matching grass textures. Together they comprise a series of mods I’m working on called “The Flora of Skyrim”, or TFoS and they are intended to be used together. The effect is an immersive landscape without transition whose blended colours result in an uninterrupted vista, something not easily achieved with a bright ENB like NLA.
The updated trees replace the vanilla trees, and at the same time I’ve introduced large lush pine trees within the vanilla mix. This covers green pines, snow pines (heavy and light) , dead pines, aspen trees, reach trees and more. It’s been done sparingly as I wanted to retain sightlines through the trees, which makes my stealth archer very happy.
In addition, a massive amount of work was done balancing the texture colours, editing vertex colours etc, to ensure all the various tones and hues flow naturally and are homogenous. This major effort means all the trees in the game, from loaded model through to 3D Ultra Lods, Billboard2 and beyond receive light accurately and realistically.
The new ultralods and their associated textures have also been tweaked and updated throughout. New ultralods solved many odd lighting issues and were further optimized to reduce Vram usage.
I’ve also utilised an advanced billboard feature for DynDOLOD called Billboard2. They incorporate the addition of a normal map which improves how they react to natural light. I employed 4 point lighting capture in Nifskope to produce new normals which have spherical normal vectors with bi/tangents, unlike the vanilla style billboards. This means they react to sunlight and cloud shadows in real time.
The grass is an edited version of Verdant, chosen because of Preeums excellent plant choices. His work is what you would likely find in a Northern climate like Skyrim. The terrain meshes and textures from The Flora of Skyrim were created using xLodGen. I edited all the tundra landscape textures to better match the grass textures from the above and that work is now complete for Classic. However, the SSE version is still a WIP. I could publish what I have but it’s not up to scratch so until it’s good enough, I recommend SSE users install Verdant for grass and Cathedral for Landscape terrain and textures.
This is based on my own ENB, a personalised derivative of NLA which is as realistic as possible, so it should look good on most set-ups.
FEATURES
The major features are:
Heavy snow trees in the North East have been pushed back to North of the name mountains and away from the NW coast line. Vanilla snow trees cover the remainder of the map, except for the SE Falkreath area where I placed various models from SFO.
Falkreath Forest has huge lush trees and naturally dissipates towards Riverwood and beyond. This has the effect of making the Falkreath Forest feel huge and claustrophobic. That, plus the alternate snow trees makes the whole region feel unique.
Morthal Marsh I’ve kept as vanilla with dead reach trees and dead pine trees. Check out my alternate mod for the marsh called Dilon Vul
For the Reach I’ve changed 25% of the existing dead reach trees to green leafy versions. You can also add some of Vurt Large Junipers.
The forest around Solitude and Dragon Bridge is interspersed with green aspens of various hues. Alternately, replace them with oak trees
The aspens in this mod are green as standard and they are slightly larger than vanilla. There are patches available for Realistic Aspen Trees or Vanilla yellow, in both large and standard sized aspen meshes
Edited grass textures with balanced green hues to match the tree foliage and landscape terrain
New landscape terrain meshes and textures specific to this setup
INSTALLATION
Install using a mod manager normally and enable the plugins you require. Details here
Get the latest DynDOLOD (2.68 plus) and it’s requirements from here.
Open ‘..\DynDOLOD\Edit Scripts\DynDOLOD\DynDOLOD_[GAMEMODE].ini’ in notepad and edit as followS
(Classic – DynDOLOD_TES5.ini)
TreeLOD=0
TreeLODAverageColor=0
TreeLODBackgroundTexture=textures\DynDOLOD\lod\dyndolodbackgroundtreelod.dds
ObjectLODAlphaAverageColor=1
OR
(SSE – DynDOLOD_SSE.ini)
TreeLOD=0
TreeLODAverageColor=1
TreeLODBackgroundTexture=none
ObjectLODAlphaAverageColor=1
Then run DynDOLOD and
select HIGH
Select your worldspaces (select only Tamriel for a trial run)
Double click on the /tree rule at the bottom of the DynDOLOD options window. Doing that, will bring up this window, set it like so.
your edited tree rule should look like that ^
Then choose your remaining options and run DynDOLOD as normal.
COMPATIBILITY AND PATCHES
For the intended effect, nothing should overwrite TFoS, including meshes, textures and plugin records which edit trees.
Mods editing TREE BASE FORMIDs which overwrite TFoS will need to be resolved by forwarding the conflicted records.
You can remove trees by selecting them in console and typing disable, alternatively make a patch and send it to me and i’ll host it here.
RECOMMENDED
BentPines by Vurt and MrNeverLost (improved animations with branches that swing in the wind)
SKGE Water – here or here. I only enable the water fx and set my RGB values as such
