Well does anyone recall just how bugged and awkward trees were to mod into the game. Speedtree difficulties and the like?
Basically if you like aspen and pine, Skyrim will float your boat. If you like anything else. Forget it. Ive just had a scout through the meshes and the only trees I can find are very much themed into the game. Oak? nope, Yew? nah, anything else? Not that I can find.

There are various other limitations too, such as plants and other flora. This cant in any way be described as an extension of Oblivion, but a limited selection from it (obviously improved upon).

Anyone any good at making trees that dont crash the game when distant rendered?

Oh good.

Maybe those are the only trees indigenous to Skyrim?

Granted, but the issue is that nothing can be ported from Oblivion to Skyrim and my experience of tree mods was generally that they caused a crash and were tricky to render in LOD. Things may well have moved on since and trees wont prove a problem, but the main point is there will be a bit of catching up to do. People are already speaking of extending the borders into other provinces and that requires work, now not only to develop those areas but to re-introduce all the basics.

Its not a complaint about Skyrim as its set in a specific region so it would have been pointless work for Bethesda to include palm trees, but perhaps a little foresight might have been in order. Bethesda have more free rein to put Oblivion stuff into the game, we as modders cant.

From looking at the things... I expect plenty of quirks making new ones.

Gotcha.

Bethesda said they made their own tree building software for Skyrim. Now I'm not going to get anyone's hopes up, we may never see it, but I think it's possible they'll release it with the construction set or sometime later for modders to use.

I think its pretty much a pre-requisite otherwise the entire idea of modding beyond the current environment is either out the window or going to look a bit strange with nothing but pine trees. Oooh errr. The more I look through the folders and files the more sense of trepidation.

I am sure Vurt will manage it.

Well its good its been discovered this early, at least we have time to fret, bite our nails and wonder.
Hopefully Bethesda will have had the foresight to provide some kind of tool inside the CK to help create custom trees, how did it work in Fallout etc?

I think the new system makes it easier, provided you have some 3D skills. They aren't using speedtree, so you can't automagically create them there- but on the flipside, tree modding isn't exclusive to modders holding speedtree licenses. They'll be created in a 3d app like Blender/Maya/Max/Etc.

As far as I can tell, but I haven't looked that closely, you have a basic trunk shape, with different arrangements of branches/leaves that can be switched on or off via a special node. I'm sure the CK has a flag for picking between the branch configs for each tree when placing them, and surely has an array/growth tool for placing trees in a region.

Nothing too complex or cringe-worthy about it. Of course Bethesda wasn't going to create every tree known to man for the game.

Well, there's birch, too

Well, trees in Skyrim are NIFs now, instead of SPTs. All that will be needed is for the modelers to study how Bethesda constructed their trees, and make sure the mod designs follow the same practices. And the trees can simply be constructed in Blender or something. Might be more difficult than it was for Beth if they made a tree modeling program for themselves, but at least it's possible now.

If Bethesda built their own tool for utilizing trees, I'd imagine--and hope--that it is a component of the CK, built in. Wold be nice. I'd like to attempt to make some sequoias.

I bet they're using the tried and true vertex color method for their tree-wind. It's a fairly straight forward way to set the parameters for the tree wind animation, described in GPU Gems 3 (if I remember right).

This. There's a good chance the CK will have their own version of SpeedTree for modders to take advantage of. I can't imagine all of their trees were created individually in modeling programs when they specifically mentioned they had created their own tree-creating software. We'll just have to wait and see.

Does that mean you could make a trunk, a few different branches and you'll end up with a large amount of variations of the same tree with little effort?

Do you know how billboards are handled in this case?

Well if that's the case we may have to hope for different trees added by Bethesda via an expansion...

Well fingers crossed that the CK will provide some kind of tool to allow trees to be made. I remember that custom trees were possible in Oblivion but they crashed my game whenever I tried to use LOD with them.

Since it's known that Bethesda have used 3D Studio Max in the past, I'd almost guess that they made their own plugin or maybe even modified an open source plugin for it. If the latter is the case, due to an open source license they shouldn't have any problems releasing it to the community. On the other hand, if it's an extension of the CS, which I doubt simply because the CS has no modeling capabilities, it would open a wider range of tree mods possible.

Just my thoughts

~DE

The files I looked at didn't have billboarding, but I'd imagine it works the same as usual. I don't recall seeing any in-game either.

Surely one could convert any suitable 3d mesh to the Skyrim nif format and use it as a tree? I'm not sure why you'd need to know how Bethesda made theirs. Is it because of the way distant land works?

Well, I mentioned this before but they might be using vertex coloring to specify the wind animation parameters for the trees. If that's the case, we need to figure out what channels (RGBA) are tied to a given parameter (if they are using this system, hopefully they're using the same setup as in GPU Gems 3 since it would be really easy to set up new trees in that case). Anyone that can open up one of the trees know if there's vertex color data?

Nope, looks like they're using Skin+Bones to animate the trees, vertex colors are used to push color on the textures.
And actually, looking closer now, these different meshes within the switch setup appear (on the surface) to be the same shapes, so I'm probably wrong about how this works with the tree configurations.

I just hope they've fixed the LOD creation. I could never get that to work for FO:NV (never tried it for Oblivion, was it bugged there too?).

The way i'm going to start out is to do a pure replacer, that way i can just switch out some of the tree models for new varieties and add those to the existing LOD texture.

Too bad about the animation, I wish they would've used a shader for that.. Can't wait to hear 534253453 people spam my mod page with "uhhh i think you forgot to animate the leaves?"

Wandering around looking at trees, had a bit of a duh moment. I suppose that the animations could control which directions the branches face, based on a random seed stored.... somewhere.