Better Dirt Cliffs and Alpha

Overhaul of alpha channels for almost everything involved in blending the textures of dirt cliff tops and roots, as well as roots and walls. There are also some improved SMIM earth cliff root textures, plus a reshape of the ice cave ground texture and "icecavesnowtrim01". Now also includes cliff meshes with blending enabled on cliffs.

These textures have certain soft dependencies as they are designed to blend well with specific textures. I recommend installing SMIM (which has the special dirt mesh retextured by this mod), then Skyrim 2020 (2.7, then covered by 2.8) by Pfuscher, then LH's dirt cliffs (you'll be covering most of them), then winedave's Septentrional Landscapes. Basically the goal is to use Septentrional's cave floor and snow textures, Skyrim 2020's cave walls, LH's earth cliff roots, and blend them together properly, which is not an easy task but this mod basically does the trick assuming you use the following combinations or textures with similar colors. Really, as long as you have some moss on the cave walls and you don't overwrite the Cavebaseground02 texture included in this mod, it should be a significant improvement over vanilla textures or any other retexture that uses a vanilla alpha channel (everything I've seen does, I guess they just forgot about the alpha).

Vanilla Alpha looks very silly and blocky, so no matter what textures you put in the RGB channels, they don't blend well. Really suitable for all types of muddy cliffs and cave surface edges. You can't fix it with smooth gradients either, since all meshes are tested with alpha and no blending. So, to make an alpha for a mask or other texture that is going to be blended with other materials and have it work properly in tests, you just dissolve the gradient into very small solid particles. Much like how you print a comic back when a tiny dot of ink can only have two strengths: 0% or 100%. Bethesda kinda does this on the upper surface at the base of the cave, but not on the lower surface, so you get this really weird collar at the corner of every cliff. Therefore, I increased the number of "particles" massively.

However, there are other problems with cave textures, such as ice caves having ice or snow on almost every surface, but the ground textures are usually just rock. Of course, it doesn't make sense to have no snow inside the cave, but if the walls look all icy, we can't blend them with the ground unless the ground also looks icy or snowy. So I also changed the texture of the ice cave. They should look good on Septentrional Landscapes (I also recommend downloading Hyperborean Snow as my snow textures will blend in with these), and I recommend downloading all of winedave's textures as they are really good and they have such a great alpha channel reshape as most other versions.

Alpha is actually an important part of making landscape surfaces realistic because no matter how great a photographic texture is, when you encounter a texture seam between two materials or even just a mixed pattern that doesn't make sense, it can be shocking to what you're seeing. Like, the grass is covered with flowers, ivy and ferns. Then blending this into another texture's Alpha should make the flowers, ivy and ferns visible, while the grass starts to disappear. But instead, you usually just see a general dissolver applied to the entire product, so you see very few flower particles everywhere, as if someone had cut the grass in a field in Skyrim. Pfuscher's textures are also very good in this regard, which is why I based this mod on mixing these textures together.

SMIM added some cave meshes using their own texture paths. One was like a mossy version of a cave, and the other was the same thing but with snow on top. LH's mod is the only one I've seen that doesn't miss these. But Alpha cuts off the small roots, and the big ones are too blurry, so black edges appear on everything because the Alpha test threshold is too forgiving. So I made the Alpha actually make sense …