Skyrim Mod - SkyFalls and SkyMills - Animated Distant Waterfalls and WindMills

Ever wondered why distant waterfalls turn into ugly icecubes? I did. I was disappointed to find no mods available that fixed this issue, only mods that changed the ugly icecubes for slightly less ugly ones.

All of the other mods claim distant animated waterfalls cannot be done. Well behold! I did it anyways.

Some people mention The Skyrim Distance Overhaul LOD Improvement (SDO) by Grieche. I use this mod in all my images and my video. It is a brilliant mod, recommended by me, but it does not render distant waterfalls animated, because simply ticking the "is full LOD" box on the old static waterfalls does not work!
The SDO mod does however compliment mine real nice, especially the optional waterfall effects file! (Makes things like the steam on bottom of waterfalls and the rapids fully animated in the distance)

In essence I literally replaced all Waterfalls for ones that can be rendered as full LOD, using the same meshes and textures throughout, making it fully compatible with the main water mods.

I have also made the Windmills and watermills distant animated (Compatible with and highly recommended (essential) Windmills resized! 1.5x I uploaded a video HERE). It was really simple to be honest, except for the Solitude mill, that was a nice challange. It makes a nice difference. This file shouldn't have a performance impact, or a very minimal one, even on low end PCs. (A compatability patch for Project Parallax remastered is up under the optional file section)

Current known bugs:

- The Unofficial Skyrim Patch (USKP) changes to swindmill.nif for the Solitude wall mill are not carried over in the meshes from Enhanced Lighs and FX (ELFX) by anamorfus, which is the mesh I use. I have made a mesh that is both ELFX compatible AND carries over changes made by USKP, it will be included in next update.

- My mod removes the new splashing animations from waterfalls that come with the Realistic Water Two mod by Isoku. There is a workaround, but the current workaround is performance intensive.
Workaround= Renaming the Realistic Water Two meshes fxwaterfallbodyslope, fxwaterfallbodytall and fxwaterfallbodytall02 under data/meshes/effects To: fxwaterfallbodyslopeSF, fxwaterfallbodytallSF and fxwaterfallbodytall02SF AND setting iMaxDesired=6000 OR HIGHER under [Particles] in skyrimprefs.ini. (THIS TWEAK IS CPU DEPENDENT AND NOT GPU!!)
To remedy the issue, without the tweak/performance impact I need to recreate my mod, and duplicate all waterfalls. How much of a performance gain this provides for people that have a performance impact with the above workaround and tweak I do not know. Recreating the mod would take me a lot of time. Since I do not have time at the moment, this will be fixed somewhere in Oktober.


This mod does NOT contain scripts of any kind, and should therefore not cause save bloating.

I recommend running this mod, or just Skyrim in general really, in combination with ENBoost.

Please leave a comment if you find any bugs. They are easy to fix!

Remove any mod that overhaul the distant waterfalls such as Better distant LOD waterfalls, they are no longer required and cause weird glitches where the LOD file comes trough the animated waterfalls added by my mod.

=Compatibiliy=

This mod IS compatible with:

The Skyrim Distance Overhaul LOD Improvement by Grieche
WATER - Water And Terrain Enhancement Redux by SparrowPrince
Pure Waters by Laast
Realistic Water Two by Isoku
=ALL THE ABOVE MODS ARE HIGHLY RECOMMENDED IN COMBINATION WITH THIS MOD=
The optional SkyMills file is compatible with:
Windmills resized by pfaffendril which I consider essential! (My mod fixes the solitude farm mill bug that comes with that mod, so don't hesitate to install the 1.5x version of the Windmills Resized mod.)

This mod is NOT compatible with:

Mods that edit or overhaul distant waterfall LODs such as Better distant LOD waterfalls.
Any mod that moves, re-shapes or otherwise adjust any waterfalls in the game. None in my current load order as far as I am aware. If you find any mods that are incompatible please let me know.

The SkyMills file has an incompatability with:
Project Parallax Remastered a patch can be found in the download section