Vignettes

So there was no mid-month update this month? You thought maybe I’d keep you more up to date on what I was doing after that post last month? Well, I will, but this month, there was a reason.

I was working on a secret project.

What that actually means is I abandoned all my things I should be doing in order to do something way different. Something pretty fucking huge, tbh. I mean that in the literal filesize sense. This thing is 8gb compressed, and 20gb in your Skyrim install. It’s massive. There’s a reason for that though.

Okay, so here’s what the heck is actually going on. A while back, I realised that certain programs designed specifically for fancy screenshooting, such as DAZ, had this really kind of disconnected way of working. You take your little screenshooting location, and you take your outfit, and you take your character, and you take 1 or 2 pics of them in this setup, and then you go to a completely different setup, because this is designed to be digital photography, where you have any number of locations, but they’ll small and confined.

I thought “would be kinda cool if we had something like that in Skyrim”. So then I went off and scoured the internet (mostly just Sketchfab) and found kind of a huge pile of free resources to accomplish exactly that goal.

What is “Vignettes”?

So that brings me to the actual mod part of the post. This is vignettes. It’s a mod made up of a huge pile of free assets found online and used (mostly) under creative commons licenses. They are all completely separate. They have no relation to each other, and they most certainly have no relation to Skyrim. The entire point of this mod is provide you with 80 different locations, ranging from downright tiny (literally the corner of a room) to medium sized, that aren’t like anything else, because they were all created by different people. Styles, themes, and quality of assets vary hugely. The only thing any of them have in common is that they made me think “Oh, I like that. I’ll use it.”

The mod is called vignettes because that’s really the whole style of the project. “Small one shot scenes that have no particular relation to anything else and tell a story within themselves”.

The Technical Bit

• 79 unique cells, all presented from 1 hub cell. A museum.
• No relation to Skyrim in any way. Purely for random screenshooting.
• Including 3D scans of real life locations, which are… interesting.
• All interiors, using 360 degree HDRI sky boxes (or they were before they were compressed to DDS)
• Most cells use 4 or less light sources.
• Some scenes have huge resolution textures. Particularly the 3D scans, some of which use 8k chunks. So some of these cells are not for the faint of GPU.
• The download is massive, coming in at a gargantuan 8gb compressed, and a full 20gb installed. If you’re low on space, this mod is absolutely not for you.
• Every location has its own info stand. I know a lot of you don’t like to do the reading, but please do read them. They have info on each scene, and some will tell you things you need to know.
• You get to the museum via a totally inconspicuous picture on the desk in Faringar’s back office, in Dragonsreach. That’s in the Cloud District. You get there often enough, don’t you?
• Each location has an invisible door to return from. It is directly behind you as you enter, and it’s big, so you won’t have a hard time clicking on it. Always make sure you take note of where it is when you enter.
• All assets are used legally, and all legal licenses and credits can be found in the credits.txt file.
• The SE version sky boxes aren’t as good. Nothing I can do about it. The nif functions used in the LE version simply don’t work in SE, so I had to work around it. I don’t think the difference is too huge, but you can tell.

And with all of that long-ass post down, here are the downloads:

Vignettes LE: Download from Halo’s Mods | Download from Google Drive

Vignettes SE: Download from Halo’s Mods | Download from Google Drive

Yes, we have google drive downloads this time, because it’s such a big file, my server’s 2mb/s per user limit just won’t cut it for some people.

Okay, there’s your progress update. That’s been my entire last month. Hope you guys find it useful!