Equine Texture Improvements V2.0

For a while now, I’ve thought that the texture quality of most of the horses in this game look awful, when compared to the quality of the player assets. The fur looks very undefined, and the models are covered in this horrible, blocky sheen. This mod attempts to fix that, by adding rough, high resolution fur detailing over the horses’ normal and ambient occlusion texture maps, as well as increasing the PBR roughness. This means that all of these changes should apply to every horse and mule in the game!

Also optionally restores the unused bay horse textures, which are leftover assets from Rockstar’s remake of RDR1’s Cleveland Bay, a horse that was used sometime during RDR2’s development. More information down below.

The textures are now way more detailed, with increased resolution and detailing. I have also decided to alter the levels on the ambient occlusion maps, for a stronger shading effect.

Optinional file:

To facilitate the changes of coat colors throughout the horse breeds, Rockstar made diffuse textures that can be tinted to use several different colors. These textures are lower quality in nature when compared to other diffuse maps, having lots of compression artifacts and a resolution of 1024×1024. However, sitting unused in the game’s files are untinted diffuse maps with a resolution of 2048×2048, belonging to a bay-colored horse that can be seen in some beta screenshots of the game, and that also has an uncanny resemblance to RDR1’s Cleveland Bay.
I thought those textures looked great, so I’ve decided to restore them in an optional file, by replacing the coat color of the palomino dapple American Standardbred that you can buy in the Valentine stables.

Coat color name has also been altered in all the menus!

Installation:

Make sure you have ScriptHookRDR2 and Lenny’s Mod Loader installed, then extract the contents of my .zip into your main RDR2 directory. The same applies to the optional file.

Compatibility:

Main file:
Should be compatible with pretty much any horse mod! These files edit a few specific .ytd merges, while most horse mods only edit .ymt files. If you want to be 100% sure it works though, use the LML mod manager to make my mod load after everything else, and tick the “overwrite” box. Or, use the Red Dead Modding Tool to check for any conflicts, and manually delete the conflicting files.

Optional file:
This one is trickier. If you plan on using this, and are using any mod that edits “a_c_horse_americanstandardbred_palominodapple.ymt”, then you will have to either lose out on whatever edits were done to the palomino dapple American Standardbred by the other mod (like increased size, for example), or you will have to manually merge both files yourself. Please don’t make requests for me to merge it with any mods, I’m not interested.

Credits:

xuru

Download mod

File	File size
Equine Texture Improvements-2-0	85 MB
Reduced Coat Shine-2-0	72 MB
Equine Texture Improvements-1-0	36 MB
Beta Bay-1-0	10 KB