[Naomi Ward]

Everyone who's struggling:
Fully meshed and textured LOD can be done in less than 30 minutes! For a reasonably sized worldspace, at least.

All the steps to do this have been laid out in full, and it's really quite simple now. If it's taking you more than a few hours, you are missing some of the directions.

dirkduggler: the steps for what you did are all done in full by using Oscape to generate meshes, colors (PNGs), and normals, and then converting the PNGs to DDS using nConvert. You do not need to do anything at all in the CK, and you shouldn't have to do any manual editing of textures either.

[Dragonz Dancer]

I'm sure I'm not the only one struggling with creating new worlds. Any tutorials would be appreciated, and a video tutorial may be even better, for those of us who just aren't seeing what we're doing wrong.

Thank you for all of your hard work, and can't wait to see what gets created by all of this.

[Sasha Brown]

OKay, I know this has been pointed out....but I am confused.

To generate the LOD objects we need to put TGA textures in \Source\TGATextures\lod\.....but where do I get these from? And what do I have to do to them?

[TWITTER.COM]

OKay, I know this has been pointed out....but I am confused.

To generate the LOD objects we need to put TGA textures in \Source\TGATextures\lod\.....but where do I get these from? And what do I have to do to them?

The textures are in Data\textures\lod\. You need to copy those (they end in *lod01.dds or *lod01_n.dds or something similar) over to TGATextures\lod\ and convert them in an image editor to .tga files.

[Emily Jones]

OKay, I know this has been pointed out....but I am confused.

To generate the LOD objects we need to put TGA textures in \Source\TGATextures\lod\.....but where do I get these from? And what do I have to do to them?

What program are you using to generate objects? Because that's my next step.

[GabiiE Liiziiouz]

Files to download please.

https://skydrive.live.com/redir.aspx?cid=1d26cdb31c1539fa&resid=1D26C

There you go, that's the heighmap I extracted using TESannwyn, basically using the default command line for extracting a vanilla skyrim-compatible heightmap in the TESannwyn readme. Although coordinate 0,0 seems to be in the middle of the sea somewhere with no land in sight (I can easily get to land with the COC command though). I've had a read of the whole thread now but I'll be honest everything moves so quick it makes my poor brain hurt. Maybe there's something wrong with my .esp, I don't know, let me know if you spot anything - I seem to be keeping up a bit but like I said, discussion moves kinda fast and since I'm fairly inexperienced in the world-creation side of modding I seem to have some huge gaping holes where basic concepts (like texture generation) should probably be haha.

[Phoenix Draven]

Apologies if my question disrupts this conversation, but I have a worldspace related question of the newb variety...

I intend to create a small world space (basically a large mountain lake that connects 5 temples with probably a lot of clutter with cliff statics as containment). Does the bug and workarounds described in these 3 threads affect me? (I guess I'm referring to the LOD bug more than the NPC fall-through).

[Lucie H]

Apologies if my question disrupts this conversation, but I have a worldspace related question of the newb variety...

I intend to create a small world space (basically a large mountain lake that connects 5 temples with probably a lot of clutter with cliff statics as containment). Does the bug and workarounds described in these 3 threads affect me? (I guess I'm referring to the LOD bug more than the NPC fall-through).

Is your mountain lake going to be bigger than about 1 cell in diameter? Then LOD affects you.

If the whole thing is less than maybe 8x8 cells you should be able to do that entirely by hand no problem, so heightmapping isn't a worry for you. NPC fall through, nope.

[Britta Gronkowski]

How big is a cell? That's something I haven't grasped yet about exteriors.

[Chris Duncan]

How big is a cell? That's something I haven't grasped yet about exteriors.

4096x4096 units, about 120ft on a side. If you go into any exterior and hit B it will toggle cell lines and you can see for yourself. They aren't too big.

[Latisha Fry]

Is this covered in GECK tutorials?


Yes, it is.

Next question:

Does assigning LOD from a parent worldspace work around the LOD issue?

[Chris Guerin]

Is this covered in GECK tutorials?

Is what, specifically?

[Sarah Bishop]

The worldspace basic information. I never used any of the previous CS's, so some of the concepts are foreign. It looks like the GECK Wiki will help..

[steve brewin]

The worldspace basic information. I never used any of the previous CS's, so some of the concepts are foreign. It looks like the GECK Wiki will help..

Oh yeah, check up here: http://geck.gamesas.com/index.php/Category:World_Spaces

That pages and it's linked pages should basically cover everything else. The only unique things about exteriors, in terms of making them, is water, landscape, and sky/weather stuff. Other than that its drag and drop like interiors. Oh and navmeshes can only be done in each cell, so you must connect them by finalizing navmesh. (This creates a green line to signify where they connect on the cell borders)

[Bryanna Vacchiano]

Does assigning LOD from a parent worldspace work around the LOD issue?

[Raymond J. Ramirez]

Ah those GECK notes were helpful. They also led to these -

http://cs.elderscrolls.com/index.php/Landscape_LOD_Tutorial

http://cs.elderscrolls.com/index.php/Creating_Large_Worldspaces

Just wondering since I'm obviously aware people are having issues with LOD etc, how much of those old tutorials is still relevant?

[Tyrel]

The only broken stuff is stuff that was never strongly documented. Aspects of heightmapping are broken, and a lot of LOD stuff is broken, IN the CK but it can be circumvented relatively easily with 3rd party programs and a little know-how.

[Sun of Sammy]

The textures are in Data\textures\lod\. You need to copy those (they end in *lod01.dds or *lod01_n.dds or something similar) over to TGATextures\lod\ and convert them in an image editor to .tga files.

Thank you! How did I miss that.

[Killah Bee]

Let's just say I figured out the region generator for the most part... http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/486624570079227896/40980767429C4828A9A1A9F22AC16C6E70797518/

However, it took 4 days and about 15 hours... So. I may do a tutorial explaining the finer details about it, since there is definitely a trick to making it look half good.

[Genevieve]

You should defintely do a tutorial and put it on the CS wiki.

[marie breen]

A tutorial would be great.
Did you use the region generator to create the landscape texture as well?
I'm getting mixed results so far, the borders between regions and were regions overlap are completely blank though, just using the default texture.

On a different note, did you do anything special to get the grass to show up ingame? My grass shows up in the editor but never ingame.

[Emily Martell]

Once I get a working system I will post a tutorial


Not sure how many can follow it though, thanks to having a beefy computer I can actually do a lot of things that make the CS crash for others.

[Campbell]

Hitting an error when I try to generate "There is no data about this heightmap in the active plugin list."

Whats that mean?

Ignore, me. Silly question, I didnt choose the correct heightmap. Note to self and others; fill, then select name of heightmap before pressing extract. Default Tamriel. Thick or what?

[Rudi Carter]

Alexander, Sorry i havnt been around to answer your questions, (i started college a few days ago so ive been a bit busy).

[Phillip Brunyee]

hmm, im also getting the lod tree bug (lod trees apearing over fully rendered trees) has anyone solved this yet?