RUSTIC ATRONACHS

Halfway up the mountain is a high-resolution recreation of the sky's elements daisies, fire, frost, and storm. Also included are the ancient Frost Guardians of the Dawnguard and the Ash Guardians of Dragonborn. 4K and 2K textures available.

RUSTIC ATRONACHS are high-resolution reproductions of the sky's elements daisy, fire, frost and storm. Also included are the ancient Frost Guardians of the Dawnguard and the Ash Guardians of Dragonborn. According to legend, these lesser Dadra are believed to be highly intelligent, but their appearance lacks any real evidence.

As the saying goes, the eyes are the windows to the soul, and these creatures lack them. The flame head design rules out anything, but at least it has an animated flame effect that adds visual interest. The frost has pits indicating eye sockets but lacks any other features. Atrona in the Storm has a living mouth, what looks like a nose, an eye that looks like it's squinting, and what could be a deep depression in one eye, but it's all stone.

It seems to me that if there is a place for eyes, then why not make real eyes? As with the Frostbite Spider, Bethesda's artists paid no attention to the eyes, when the detailed eyes give character and a sense of intelligence behind them. For obvious reasons I didn't add any eyes to the flame Atrona, but I did make a new high-res texture for the animated fire effect.

Adding eyes to Frost gives it a sense of menace it lacked before. Unfortunately, if you're using a mode that makes the frost more transparent, you won't be able to see the eye properly. You only get the shape of the eye, but the refraction mesh makes the outer texture too transparent to see the eye in game. Therefore, textures work best with vanilla mesh. Dawnguard's Ancient Frost has a different mesh, so the appearance is different, just the texture itself.

Storm Atrona now has one eye, and it's squinting because the side of the hole's head is split open, and it doesn't make sense to have an eye in that position. Still, having an eye would give Storm Daedra more personality. I also modified two of the lighting effects textures since the originals were a bit rough.

Dragonborn's Ash Keeper is based on Storm, but it doesn't have any other effects besides the dust cloud it creates. I didn't do any eyes for the creature because the mesh repeated parts of the texture and it was impractical. Typically, I try to stick to just texture changes to make my mods as universal as possible. I only change the mesh when absolutely necessary, but that's the case with Ash Keeper. For some unknown reason, Bethesda didn't give the creature a matching normal map, but instead borrowed one from the scenery folder. Now, obviously many people use landscape textures from alternative mods, so people will use different normals that won't match the diffuse texture I created. So I made a matching normal map and edited the mesh to use it.

I spent quite a bit of time adding detail to these three elements to make them more interesting when you encounter them in the game. Hopefully, people will enjoy this latest addition to my rustic vintage special edition for the sky.

4K and 2K textures are available. Normal maps are saved as Bc7 to eliminate compression artifacts. Choose the solution that best suits your setup.