Crazy New Foliage & Updated Camera - Ultimate Skyrim SE Devstream (3/8/21)

Hello there everyone! Liz (the UltSky support lead) had the great idea of recapping my weekly devstreams here on Patreon to keep y'all in the loop.

Hopefully you all find this useful, and please feel free to comment with feedback, or with any other topics you'd like to see covered! <3

Development Summary - Week of March 1st, 2021

I spent my time in two areas this week: expanding the visual suite, specifically the foliage and distant terrain, and further improving the third person camera.

• The current build now utilizes the Folkvangr grass mod, as well as Origin of Forests for the Falkreath area. There is a large variety of dense ground coverage, and I think it looks absolutely gorgeous across the board. Please skim through the above video to see some examples.
• I dipped my toes back into DynDOLOD, which greatly expanded its feature set since the last time I worked with it. (For those who don't know, DynDOLOD is a tool that generates improved distant terrain & objects, such as buildings, trees, and others.) 
• The updated DynDOLOD features include full 3D trees, even in the distance, as well as full distant grass coverage (thanks to the grass caching from No Grass in Objects). This might be the biggest gamechanger in the bunch: grass is simply rendered forever, and the resulting effect is nothing short of gorgeous.
• I spent a ton of time tweaking SmoothCam for a further improved third-person camera experience, including horseback camera. I also added Simple Lock-On SE, which feels really responsive & adds another dimension of usability to third person.

I still need to tweak my DynDOLOD settings to address some issues with distant grass discoloration, and I'd also like to experiment with some additional tree mods in the future. However, I'm backseating these tasks for now & focusing on the higher priority tasks outlined in the roadmap video: specifically, finishing up the last of the recipe edits, and resolving NPC appearances (to eliminate the tinted face bugs).

I hope you all have a wonderful week, and thank you as always for your support.