Are there objects in the Creation Kit (windows) which, when placed, let you see outside (i.e. the trees, mountains, sky), from inside a house? I did a quick search and can't find any windows you can actually see through. Thanks for your help.

No, you won't find any such thing. Interiors and exteriors just don't line up like they look like they do. Interiors are in entirely separate cells of nothingness.

Are you sure? I saw a project on skyrimnexus where someone did. It's called "Castle Strunmah". Sorry i cant post links

I'm absolutely sure there are no such windows in the CK. That was your question.

Mods are a different story. With transparent window models and a little landscape finesse, mods such as the amazing http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1395440-wipz-immersive-interiors-skyrim/ are possible. One could also build an interior in an exterior cell. Not many people do because the interior models and exterior models don't line up.

So what do you think the guy in the forementioned mod did? How would I do it too or is it too complicated?

I noticed that about Strunmah, also. I would open it up in the CK and see how it was done!

I'm pretty sure it's just the normal texture thats been modified and made transparent where the window is supposed to be.

My Skyrims glitching out as my graphics card in the RMA process. Can anyone research this for us? Also, how would you go about making it transparent?

Vanilla game examples:

There are many locations like these, but here are two good examples:
- The Great Porch of Dragonsreach (*)
- The North-facing porch outside one of the entrances to the player home in Solitude.

In both places you can see a wide extent of the surrounding landscape of Skyrim. However, that has nothing to do with the actual playable landscape, and it is rather an unpopulated mock-up or duplicate that has been included with the cell where you are. Just type ~tcl on the in-game console and go over/through the railing to have a closer inspection.

(*) This is a prime example of creating an interior in an exterior cell, but one that is dedicated for the purpose, and not the normally playable one. Just imagine adding a transparent window to the scene, and there you have it.

And just as a curiosity: If you ever played Oblivion and had the Thieves Den DLC, it used a similar construct for a windowed room inside a larger interior cell. If you entered that room, you entered a duplicate interior cell, where you could peek through the windows at a low-quality, unpopulated mock-up of the original cell.

So how do you go about recreating such an immense and complicated landscape inside one cell?

I have not tried it in practice with Skyrim (I have played with this kind of stuff in Oblivion using TES4Edit) , but I guess you could start by creating a duplicate of the larger cell, that you wish to be viewable, strip it of whatever is not necessary, and insert your interior stuff into it. How well the CK supports doing that, I wouldn't know. Anyway, you may have to place your creation in a separate exterior "World". I don't really wish to offer any more guesses about the details of how to do it, because I can't know for certain.

Interesting. There wouldn't happen to be any good tutorials on this would there?

The examples are not interior cells, they are worldspaces. What you are seeing when you look out is the Tamriel LOD meshes and textures.

Quite(*). Essentially, you have to create a sub-world space, or whatever it might be called, pretty much like what the separate city world spaces are, which probably are in a way dependent on the "basic" Skyrim exterior cell records. If it works anything like in Oblivion, those subordinate world spaces should be able to make use of the same world landscape data (height, normals, textures, etc.), that is stored for the basic outdoor cells of the basic Skyrim world space, as long as you have your cell coordinates set correctly, so the basic landscape itself does not need to be duplicated. Then you have to just fill them with suitable objects, identical to the ones in the space you wish to mimic, and so on... However, that is all based on how Oblivion works, so take it with a bucketful of salt. I dare not suggest anything more than that. You may have to experiment and look at the existing examples to find out how to do it with the Skyrim CK.

(*) In the example I gave about the porch in Solitude, what you see in the distance is really an extension of the same city world space, that just has some additional low-quality LOD items inserted, like the light house in the distance, and so on. The example with the Dragonsreach Grand Porch is a more proper one, because it has a separate sub-world space created just for this purpose. I think it is called "WhiterunDragonsreachWorld" in the CK, where the porch itself is at cell coordinates (7,0). If you have a look at it, you will see that quite a number of exterior cells are included in that world space (to properly flesh it out, I would guess).

Scary how much work that must be!

Wow. Thanks for the elaborate responses guys.


But yeaaahh. This seems like it might be way too much work for someone who's never completed anything in the CK before (me) to do. Thanks for all of your help though guys.