I got an idea from this post -
http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1394072-how-do-i-put-my-weathers-into-climatesregions/page__view__findpost__p__21174104
to help me with region editing.

In it, SluckyD states -
Great idea, I thought.
After going through the TESAnnwyn ReadMe file, I realised that there are quite a other tricks that can be done with the program. One of them especially caught my eye,...the ability to create an esp with your own choice of texture, not just the default brown dirt one.

This is ideal for my needs. Around 50% of my worldspace is snow, with the remaining area using around 7-8 different textures. After a few attempts, I got a completely snow covered worldspace. Great,...or so I thought.

Although the CK shows the entire worldspace covered in snow, when LOD is generated, the LOD reverts back to the brown dirt texture. I then decided to try and change the dirt texture to a snow texture in the Textures.bsa, but it doesn't seem to be there. The closest I could find was the Dirt02.dds texture, but it's not the same as the (what the CK refers to as) LAND_DEFAULT.

Is this LAND_DEFAULT texture hard coded into the TESV.exe ?...
...or does anyone know where it is hidden ?

IIRC LOD textures are completely different. They are 1024x1024(?) images with approximations to the textures within the cell landscape to effectively mimic actual terrain from a distance.

I dont know much about landscape LOD so hopefully somone comes along to help more. But I do know there is no single texture you can replace to achieve your goal.

So essentially your problem is that the LOD doesn't match the actual terrain colours? How do you generate your LOD textures? Do you use the CK or Oscape? Try to use the other one. Trying to replace this LAND_DEFAULT is not the way to go.

If it still doesn't work, don't use TESAnnwyn to make it all snow, simply use the Region Generator to draw one big region around your worldspace and only add the snow texture to the list and then generate that region. It should only take a few minutes and everything will be covered in snow.

Edit: Had a quick look, LAND_DEFAULT == LDirt02 in MERP's heightmap (also imported with TESAnnwyn, but not with a base texture change). I'm not sure what TESAnnwyn exactly did, but I'm doubting whether this feature even works properly for Skyrim. I recommend dropping it and using the region generator like described above.

The LOD was coming out brown, as it does with the LAND_DEFAULT. I tried both the CK and Oscape,...no joy.

I think I may have mis-understood the ReadME for TESAnnwyn. I was under the impression that it actually, physically replaced the LAND_DEFAULT, when in fact it only paints over the LAND_DEFAULT surface texture (if you know what i mean).


To put you in the picture, I've been working on a fairly complex landscape texturing setup in the region generator and a few snags have shown up. Mainly the LAND_DEFAULT sticking its nose in where it's not wanted ie. on the snow texture. It fits in fine with grasses, and adds to the variety a bit.

The region I'm working on covers the whole 4096 x 4096 worldspace. Doing it in seperate regions ends up with zig-zag borders and looks hellish, so I'm doing the base textures in one fell swoop.
Anyway, when I read the TESAnnwyn thing about replacing the default, I thought my problems were solved. Apparently not

It did actually work with -t 0000089B (Snow01), but I think the LOD problem stems from the fact that the worldspace has a FormID that starts 01 and the texture has a FormID that starts 00. I've noticed this in the past. It seems the texture and the worldspace must start with the same FormID for LOD to be generated correctly.
I had partially given up on the idea, but there was something in the back of my mind that made me think that I was doing something wrong, or that it could be corrected in some way.

I think the LAND_DEFAULT appearing in generated regions is because of incorrect settings. We've generated many regions already and never had that problem. As for the zig-zag borders, it's unavoidable as far as we know. We fix it manually, it doesn't cost that much time.

I don't think the formID is the problem, but rather the fact that the landtextures are not in the same plugin as the worldspace. At least for Oscape this seems to be a problem, for MERP I moved all landtextures and their texturesets to our MiddleEarth.esm.

Try duplicating both a landtexture and it's corresponding textureset into your worldspace plugin, and redirect the duplicate landtexture to the duplicated textureset. Paint terrain with it and try to generate LOD with Oscape. It'll most likely work.

That's probably what caused it, and the fact that TESAnnwynn may have a little problem with Skyrim. The -t with FormID switch only mentioned Oblivion and the .dat file has the FormIDs for Oblivion textures, not Skyrim. I thought I'd give it a try anyway.
I've added about 15 custom textures and these show up in the LOD without any problem. Any vanilla stuff gets duplicated just like you describe and paired up with the correspomding duplicate texture set. Just every now and again, they fail to generate properly.
Here's an earlier example of what I'm doing -
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/tambos.turf/Skyrim/Worldspace_Medium_Angle.jpg
In that example, there's only 5 textures and as you can see, the snow covers a large portion. It's a lot of work to go through ~8000 cells of snow texture and find/correct the faults. My latest region test is generating 11 textures to cover the whole landscape in one go, but this is causing more of the LAND_DEFAULT dirt texture to show through. The more textures I add, the worse it gets.

Don't get me wrong, it's not whole chunks of dirt showing through, just a few vertices here and there.

Looks like I'm going to be spending a bit of time at the touch up stage

Hey Tamb0! Could it be that you surpass the limit of textures that can be used in one cell quad? Skyrim only allows to use 6 different textures per cell quad which is even worse than Oblivion. When I'm designing regions for MERP I only use 4 or 5 different textures per region - you'll need some more textures for sure as soon as you're going to add additional details to your landscape like for example roads. The generation errors are normally happening when you generate more textures than Skyrim can display. And the more textures you use the more often you'll surpass this limit.

To verify if this really is the problem you could just load a cell with such an error, open your landscape editor, select something in that cell, point on the problem and press "i". This will open a window which displays the distribution of textures in each quad of the chosen cell.

I hope this solves your problem!

I encountered that problem at one point. When there are too many in the quad, no texture is generated, just a black colour.
I'm actually starting to fix fix the problem by tweaking the density and clustering numbers. It's looking a lot better now, with only very few patches of the LAND_DEFAULT showing through.

Good! I just thought of another solution btw How do you set up your generation list? Do you use parent and child textures?

Normally I use two parent textures: one for flat areas (e.g. slope 0-45) and another one for steeper areas (slope 45-90). Both parent textures must have a density of 100. This way your whole area will get covered with those two base textures without the default texture showing through. If you want to add more textures you should apply them as child textures.

I have 8 parent textures with around 20 child textures, split between them. I did try with fewer parents, but things just got a bit messy (I think the CK started getting confused). Anyway, it's looking a lot better, just the odd patch with the default texture showing through and a few patches with too many textures (black area), but these can easily be fixed manually.

Thanks for the help guys.