Since i wasn’t impressed by any texture improvement up till now, i decided to start my own texture overhaul for the terrain, just like i did with Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas, i love the entire look of the game, Bethesda really did a good job on most of the textures, except for the terrain, most of it looks bland and washed out, even though they decided in all their wisdom to make the textures 2048px.
Also, most of the other texturemods use the old DXT1 or DXT 5 compression for normal maps and no specular maps at all, this means the game will use the default specular map from the BSA file, which is wrong, cause the textures from the BSA file are different.
So i made entirely new textures, diffuse textures are in DXT5 format and i used alpha’s where the original game textures also used alpha’s, if a original gametexture uses a white alpha i removed it, so the textures will also bring a slight improvement in VRam usage, although not very much, but still.
I compressed the normal maps in ATI’s 3Dc format, which is vastly superior to DXT1 and DXT5, it literally has no artifacts when you look at them up close, aside from the normal being very deep at some textures, i chose for some deep normals at some textures otherwise you get a flat look often.
Specular/gloss maps are also in 3Dc format like the textures from the BSA file, i chose for dark specular and dark gloss to make sure the specular isn’t overdone and the ground does not shine too much, after all, dirt usually doesn’t shine, also chose dark gloss cause ground doesn’t reflect sharp like metal does.
This is a WIP, i will be adding new textures on a daily base from now on, probably 3 to 4 a day, or maybe 8 in two days, depending on the progress i make. When the terrain is entirely done, i expect it to be done in a week, i will move on to the grass and trees.
There are currently 11 textures done in two days, so this is going to be the pace i’m working in, the entire ground textures folder has roughly 60 textures in it, so you can do the math.
To install these textures, unpack the zipped file and copy the TEXTURES directory (make sure it’s not textures/textures/ textures !!) into your fallout installdirectory INSIDE the DATA folder !!.
Usually in your “”steam/steamapps/common/fallout4/ folder.
Also make sure you have your “Fallout.ini” file modified by changing the line “sResourceDataDirsFinal=STRINGS\”into “sResourceDataDirsFinal=STRINGS\, TEXTURES\” (that is if you only play with modded textures ofcourse), you can find the “Fallout.ini” file in your My”Documents/My Games/ Fallout 4/”folder.
Have fun and enjoy the game with upgraded terrain textures.
