Hi any tutorial around? I have played with tesannwynn but still not working well to import unsplit landmass, but alsoI woudl like to know all what's next to do after having the land ingame ...

Haven't tried it myself yet but make sure you're using the current Tesannwyn, of sourse.

There's http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1351378-tutorial-for-generating-landscape-lod/ for dealing with LOD once you've done the import.

As I said I am using TESAnnwyn ... and the landmass import is cominginside all cut ...

"all cut" - do you mean that there are sort of "layers" in your landscape where the terrain seems to work for a distance and then reset to zero when it should carry on the slope?

If so then you have your byte order wrong. Your raw file needs to be in LSB order (Least Significant Byte first) whereas yours is MSB (most significant first).

Go back to your graphics / modelling package and switch the byte order - there should be a setting somewhere. If not then you'll need to find a converter. I generally use ImageMagick - but that's command-line driven and horrible so you'll want something else!

If there is a to large difference in height there will be breaks between cells. Maybe this is your problem.
Have you tried to make the heightmap larger (in pixels), or make the hieght range (in grayscale) lower for your heightmap?

I have made a decription on how I have made my world work, maybe that will be of some help to you.
For some reason I can't post links...
The page is called hoddminir Mod development (on blogspot)

This is the error I am getting ....

http://img716.imageshack.us/img716/8803/98380401.jpg

http://img843.imageshack.us/img843/8591/59108202.jpg

this is the code line I am using ...

TESannwyn -i Skyrim -w Issgard -h -250 -s 0.005 -d 256x256 -b 16 -p 1 Issgard.raw



This one?
http://hoddminir.blogspot.com/

That looks a bit like byte order to me, although I'm not sure. The command line looks fine. How did you generate the heightmap?

I made it in worldmachine then edited in photoshop to reduce the size from 1024 to 256 ...I didn't want a supersized world to texture but a small one

Why not just change your export resolution in World Machine, then? Just change (or create a new) extents to have the same linear dimension but quarter of the resolution.

I think Worldmachine uses LSB for its r16 output but Photoshop might be changing it - I think I've had that problem when colloaborating with someone who uses it. Did you try with the WM output directly?

Do you have an image of your heightmap?

What size do you actually have in mind? Do you really need to use a heightmap? Can't you just raise your land with the the landscape editor?

As for "what's next to do after having the land ingame?" what kind of question is that? Populate it? Place textures, houses, rocks, trees, random clutter? Add interiors, NPCs, quests? Test the mod then release it?

My guess is, yes, he needs a heightmap: in-game terrain-editing is a nonstarter for anything other than smooth hills or final detailing. World Machine allows complex structures to be built in a tool that works, with proper erosion modelling.

And the question was, "What's next?" not "what's everything else that's left?" which seems perfectly reasonable to me. It should probably be getting the LOD to work before investing too much effort in the rest of the mod - but we know LOD's broken at the moment so I'd go with region generation. Even if just to put a texture on the landscape I think it's worth it because the region generator can blend textures with more subtlety than is really possibly by hand.

I bought l3dt after using it a few times. Well worth ￡22. It may be worth getting L3dt on a trial to see if you like it then following the command line stuff we used over on the mod forums. Go to the mod forums and search l3dt. I remember trying a program over in Oblivion and just giving up on it, cant even think what it was called now. L3dt is much easier.

My experience with medium sized worlds differs. And gamesas didn't bother either, and used models for terrain details in Skyrim.

For a large continent-sized project you need some base terrain to get started and have a feeling for the dimensions, yes, but for a "small world" it's not worth the effort, IMO, unless you want to remake a real life location.


Since when is a computer more subtle than a human? A computer's job is to work off tedious repetive tasks, like filling the wilderness with random stuff, so that the human with his artistic sense can concentrate on the real places of interest. A "small world" shouldn't have any place for computer generated wilderness.

LOD is the last thing I would care about, because I won't hesitate to change land to suit my storytelling purpose (or simply on a whim)

I'm wondering if the issues you're experiencing are overflow/underflow errors. TESAnnwyn says it corrects them, but I noticed when I had errors it would break cells. Try either making your whole height map darker in photoshop (which it looks like you should do anyways do to your current -s) or lower your -s by a bit.

I like to get end-to-end workflow roughed out before I then repeat for detail. It stops any nasty shocks happening if you realize there's an incompatibility between what you're doing and the way a system operates. Personal preference, though.

In Oblivion region generator was great at layering textures, since you could define multiple influences and it would set the transparencies accordingly. I'm not that great an artist so I could never "paint" as well as it could - I just concentrated on cleaning up where it couldn't handle cell boundaries.

Personally, I didn't get on with l3dt - I like World Machine.

Anyway - back on-topic:

Another great gotcha on this subject is signed vs unsigned integer values. World machine and most graphics packages I've seen work with unsigned integers - there's not much meaning to a negative brightness, after all. Tesannwyn and the TES engine work with signed integers - with zero being sea level in Oblivion: now it's a negative value in Skyrim's Tamriel but you probably don't need to worry for a separate worldspace.

Anyway - if you have values in your source file that are over 50% brightness using unsigned integers then TesAnnwynn will interperet these as negative values. Try to constrain your world machine output to no more than the darker 50% of the range - stick in a clamp before your output.

That will possibly sort out your very small -s value as well: you're probably trying to compensate for a landscape that covers the entire vertical range.

What's LSB? I didn't try wm output couse the minimum to make it work for me was 1024 size , for some reason it crashed under that so I resized just in PS the raw file and resaved as raw 16 bit.


here :

http://img833.imageshack.us/img833/7160/50146430.jpg


A work by hand is tedious , long , unprecise , rough and not enough detailed , no serious landscape can be made just by hand if you want to have features like eroded terrain flows and similar features you need to work with tolls like WM or others...

As for the Kind of question it makes perfectly sense to know from other more experienced modders with the CK or people that tried already to know what is or not possible and what parts of the world to edit lik eregions , navmesh or other stuff that I yet didn't look into ....



This



I think you do not have a clear idea of what "tools" can do in terms of real landscaping , the hand is also required but to tune all diffeerent options in the tools then go manually inside the editor to fix , still a lot of work , but much better results ...




Ok above is the map I used a reduced from 1024 to 256 size heightmap , I wanted 256 couse I didn't want a huge world to work on , but a small island that is belieavably big but not a nightmere to complete in a decent time ...

plus is a good start to learn landscaping than start straight with a supersized world and then leave it at half ...

My Idea was to create a northern Island in the Sea of Ghosts surrounded by Ice , thermal wheathered , smoothed by erosion of wind , ice , sea and volcanic force , have the Island be separated by the continend couse of the cold but the island is inabhited due to the thermal springs that keep it warmer than the surruounds , I planned to make a small hold there with a quest for my planned stuff , the kind of terrain shoul be a mix between the norhtern most ice lands and the yellowstonelike area of skyrim with a intermedium of the snowy lands ... so basically 3 regions types, I so did need to know how to manage regions , climates, areas , procedural scattering if there is any , seems the grass works like that .... etc ...

but first I need to get how to make the heightmap to work ...

Your heightmap is definitely too bright. Anything over 50% brightness will be interpreted as a negative number during the import.

Put a clamp before your output device and "clamp" to anything under 50% brightness. You won't lose any detail. Alternatively, since you're using photoshop, just reduce the brightness - but you must end up in the bottom 50% of the brightness range.

256 sounds fine but I don't know why your output would crash for < 1024 resolution. Very odd.

LSB is "Least Significant Byte first" ordering for the file data. On a 16-bit number, the format puts the small half first. It's very common, and is how Tesannwyn and TES will expect the data. Photoshop should have a setting for "Mac" or "Windows" byte ordering. You need "Windows".

Weird I tought I posted and instead didn't post anything ....
anyway I worked it out with a 112 level setting in PS , but why that ? I tought raw 16 bit allowed for way more than just 255 levels or are just remapped over 65 k etc?

how I shoudl procede now manually texturing? Since I imported a color map but I can't see it ingame I guess this feature doesn't work with skyrim?

http://img215.imageshack.us/img215/9331/79423331.jpg

16 bit will allow 65535 levels but TESAnnwyn expects signed values so values between 32768 and 65535 will be treated as negative because of the way negative numbers are represented.

As long as you restrict your data values to 0 - 32767 it will work fine - and you still effectively have 15 bit resolution. I would go ahead and make the effort to get that working if I were you, otherwise you're wasting the detail World Machine creates. Just restrict your brightness to the lower 50% of the range then save as 16 bit with Windows byte ordering. If TesAnnwyn throws a lot of uver/underflows you should run a 1-pixel blur over the image in Photoshop - won't harm the detail and will smooth out the jumps.

I suggest you review the presets in Skyrim's region generator and find what's been used for a mountainous area then copy the setup to a new region definition. Can't be more specific than that because I haven't tried the region generator yet. Too busy building the whole of Tamriel in World Machine!

No jumps , the heightmap is fine and so the vertex too worked fine altough looks very dark , I do not get why the sea is so turquoise and shiny is possible to fix that somehow?

I had to upvert the vertical orientation of the color map as it seems to be flipped when applied , as for the map I went for a 16 x 16 couse the original 8 x 8 was too small really to do anything ... I even tried a 12 x 12 and worked fine but I think 16 x 16 gives more room ... this is like a 512 x 512 sized area the island itself is in center so may be half of the terrain cells may be 64 of rised land , as for the cut I had to lower the landscape of -2048 to more or less reach with the lowest point of the map the base level of ingame terrain ....

How can I do to make lods and fix the sea now ? are there any auto procedural terrain scattering generators in skyrim?

http://img818.imageshack.us/img818/3366/63570560.jpg

is there an alternative way to make the lod settings file?

I'm afraid you've now reached the limit of what I know about Skyrim's terrain! There is a "how to work around bugs with LOD generation" thread - have a hunt through the past few days' posts: it's in here somewhere

I mean the lod setting file , I tried generate with that generator but doesnt work and make my game crash but if I do not use I see less than when I had no lods...