Why do I get the feeling that your textures are better than those that bethesda could still give us?

Thanks for the wonderful comment! Appreciate it!
Indeed there are great textures in the game, it's very hard to come up with textures that can match them haha. It's been a long time since I had a challenge

Minecraft was no challenge for you?

Looks great, I look forward to using the full package

This is more up my Alley, While Minecraft was max 512x512, here it could be up to 4096x or more. So I have to make sure that minor flaws are corrected and I must use more techniques to make it look realistic and detailed.

I love your work! It's awesome! Can't wait to use it. BUT... I'm just not loving the birch tree (and I'm probably the only one, so don't shoot me, please )... Can't it look more like this:

http://www.axisstudiosdesign.com/white-birch-trees-381768-sw.jpg

Bethesda won't give us anything..there is nothing to give.

No, you're not.

EXACTLY what I had in mind!

Hey man, nice to see you here. I remember you from the Minecraft Forums. I expect great textures, and the screenshots provided thus far only help to enforce that.

I know this is a WIP, but I'm curious about what people ITT think of the direction the art style is headed. I think Skyrim's vanilla art style looks great as do many gamers and the journalists who reviewed it. I also know OP has put a lot of work into this so far, but the reason I'm asking is because I am personally not a fan of their art style. That's just my opinion, I'm not trying to be a jerk. Because most of these console ports have lower-res textures, many PC gamers flock to high-res texture mods and speak highly of them. Obviously the artists don't have access to the original assets and have to make due with what they have, but in almost every single case the art style changes.

Example, FO3 high-res textures that got super good ratings over on the nexus shows off before/after comparison with Megaton in front of the bomb. The replacement high-res textures on the bomb were missing the metallic look, had bland specular highlights, no weathering, no details, and no atomic logo. This was the image the author chose to show off their mod and many of the comments said "wow, looks great! what a difference" which didn't make sense to me. Did that many people have bad taste, or was it just me? Do gamers care more about the resolution of the texture than the actual artwork? I get the impression that many of them do. They would sacrifice the game artists' intended look, including all the details, just so they weren't looking at big pixels up close. I hope that I'm wrong. I hope such gamers are actually using 16x AF and have the highest quality texture filtering selected in their driver with texture optimizations disabled. Just reading from these forums, the average gamer doesn't know the difference between anisotropic texture optimization and anisotropic filtering so maybe they aren't even using them (one makes the vasoline-looking ground in the distance look high-res and the other is a driver optimization which uses different filtering when it can, potentially increasing performance with minor image quality loss.. just in case you were wondering).

Sometimes the intention is to change the look of the game. I get that. Modders get nothing for their work, they do it for free and I appreciate it. I also appreciate the time that OP is putting into this out of their own kindness when they owe us nothing. I don't mean any offense, this is just my opinion. Obviously I am in the minority here, but I am not alone:

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=451616&page=64

The praise ITT and over at the nexus could either be gamers like the above ones who want high-res at the expsenve of art, or they are just being nice. I'm sure somebody will be offended by this, but it is important in life to tell the truth and give constructive feedback even if it is critical. The designer will take it into consideration and try to improve things. Part of the reason the Star Wars prequels were horrible is because nobody was afraid to give Lucas constructive criticism and just kissed his rear throughout the whole production.

@moshemoshe
Modders are going to use their own stylistic approach no matter what. I think Aageon has shown that he enjoys the original game's colors and tones, and it seems as though in a lot of places he has gone out of his way to reconstruct his textures to look very similar to the vanilla game's. In other places, it is my opinion that he has improved upon the game's original style (that bridge WIP looks great!). Realize that such a thing is subjective; "bad taste" doesn't exist objectively, so it's no use trying to rationalize that so many people "have bad taste", you just end up sounding elitist which I think you realize.

Few people realize, but Skyrim's texture style is not particularly photorealistic; it has a slightly hand drawn edge to it (which sometimes makes it remind me of http://img213.imageshack.us/img213/874/powerlines.jpg) Some people will prefer this to the hyper realism in Aageon's textures and there's no problem with that. Other people will want the game to look as photo-realistic as possible. Even with Aegeon's textures, I don't think the overall feel of the game is significantly impacted. So much of the game's style is imparted by the shape and angularity of the game's meshes, and Aageon is replacing none of those.

@Aageon
I live in a region with many many birch trees and so far your birch texture doesn't really look quite right. Part of me thinks it might be your normals. Birch trees look smooth like paper, not bumpy like 'normal' bark. Vurt captured birch tree bark rather perfectly in http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Mods.Detail&id=9037 [http://pnmedia.gamespy.com/planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/fms/images/mods/9037/1299157562_fullres.jpg] if you're interested in taking a look.

Amen brother. Amen.

I think what we care about is quality. Now, Skyrim has some pretty quality textures by default, but it seems like some were chosen at random and compressed poorly to smaller sizes. This will inevitably lead to some of us replacing all of the textures to achieve a sort of consistency.

I do my best to find textures that mirror the feel of default textures and don't change things up too much, but sometimes you either can't find something that enhances the guidelines already laid out, and sometimes the guidelines already laid out look poor.

What I don't understand is this: Why would you come into AaGeOn's thread and kick up dust? Couldn't you just as well make your own thread where you might discuss this with others? It's rude to steer a mod's thread in this direction when the thread is clearly intended to discuss the quality of the mod and not the overall legitimacy of the type of mod. (At that, I'll not respond to you anymore in this thread if you're not talking about the mod itself. Create your own topic if you want another response.)

agree

@Skyrim Seeker, owob, Shin Akuma:
Hold your horses It'll look smoother. New screens later on with paper smooth bark
Like I said it still needed some editing, I'm just showing texture progress here.... It's not like I'm pasting a birch picture to it, it's hand crafted in the end it will look like a birch.

@moshemoshe : not going to bother with this post..

updated the OP that the given screens now aren't final and are just progress pictures.

Honestly; the art style of Skyrim is pretty damn generic. There's very little that's actually genuinely 'artistic' about it, so I can't really do much but totally disagree with your posts, moshemoshe. It also isn't up to a single other person to decide what a modder does; it is entirely, and I do mean entirely their choice what they do with textures, and anything else in the game; constructive criticism is of course sometimes warranted, but it must be remembered modders do this out of their own free time, we merely reap the rewards. /rant over

I have to say I quite like the textures so far.

I was also looking for something like this - basically hi-res textures, but not different textures - I would like to have the same textures that bethesda made but in a much higher resolution. I wonder if they have them originally in higher resolution ...hm ...

Anyway Aageon, kudos, I am looking forward to your finished product.

Well I try to keep as close to the original as I can with my take on the texture ofcourse and thank you for the comment.

I`m looking forward to it... Hope it will be out soon.

Progress Update: 18/11 (More Screens to come):

http://i148.photobucket.com/albums/s5/AaGeOn/barkev3.jpg
http://i148.photobucket.com/albums/s5/AaGeOn/barkev3-close.png

Constructive critisism is good. Lets see what AaGeOn produces in game before we can pass final judgement. Composition is really important, sometimes a texture which may differ slightly in singular may look great when taken in with the entire texture pack installed.

I think he's doing great work. The fact he's actually showing the layers in the rock formations in several of those screenshots is an attribution to his attention to detail. Bethesda doesn't do that. Then again, I appreciate geological formations anyways.

Im curious as to how you create your normal maps. Bethesda seems to use a different method. I sure havent been able to reproduce their results with any of the settings.

Oh improvment off another tree I stop playing this game now just to wait for the patch from beth and for your texture pack.

When those Two things are out I will faceplant my ingame face on every texture just for fun!