A better grass mod

[Zarf]

You can see my frivolous attempt to get somebody on this here:

http://www.elderscrolls.com/forums/index...pic=425018

It seems as though I probably won't get anybody to work on this for me. Seeing as I have yet to get a model properly exported into Oblivion and working (It always crashes, and I've tried fopr HOURS at a time), I would like to call on some of the amazingly talented modelers we have here for an incredibly tasking... uh, task.

Actually, I want you to make some grass for me. The initial post in TES Forums does not accurately depict what I want any more.

I want something like this:



Of course, I want it to use opacity. But I'd like somebody to make that in whatever 3D program they use, name it "grass.nif" and ship it off to me. This is to test how well we can get grass to perform in Oblivion, because (IMHO) Bethesda's models are very inefficient.

Just look. This is an untextured Nifskope pic of a DEFAULT grass model.



Yipers. Can anyone help a poor Zarf?

[raggidman]

:goodjob: that Zarf!

You've hit a sore point with me. Not a criticism, just a bad experience I had a few weeks ago when I suggested that modellers on the forum take a look at the screenies of Gothic 3 on the Jowood Forum for inspiration - and several people who should have known better immediately and unreasonably related this to the actions of a modeller who had used copies of another game's models, saying that I was encouraging the same thing. Then the thread was killed off. :confused: Such behaviour baffles me and smells like cheap politics.

What I was encouraging in that thread was look at the different styles of grass that others use and create your own. If I had access to a suitable comp. for modelling I would want to have a go at this myself, as the simple grasses that we take for granted are a very important element in the look and feel of the game.

Hope you can find a taker for this - maybe if you pm KukulzA or Ataridante? They have done wonders for the Botany Books, and are both keen modellers.

If you take this further, do take a look at the Gothic 3 screenies, other games and different sources. I think you will be pleasantly surprised by how much you can change the look of different areas by varying choices of simple grass models. And also, if handled in the right way, as you suggest, it is likely that great processing and memory usage savings could be made.

[Zarf]

Since my models failed miserably, I've PM'd RazorWing about them. Wait and see...

[Razorwing]

Originally posted by Zarf
Since my models failed miserably, I've PM'd RazorWing about them. Wait and see...

I got your PM, and here's my try. It's more mossy than grassy, but it probably works for testing purposes. It won't get more optimized than that, hehe - it's one poly. Just drop it in Data\Meshes and hook it up in the CS and it should work. Let me know if it works out, if not I can have another go at it.

[Zarf]

Thanks for the quick response. I placed it in my Meshes directory, renamed it "grass.nif", and loaded it up in the CS. It appears fine, PERFECT for testing purposes. Unfortunately, the game still crashes when I try to load. Methinks it's a problem with my mod, though, since this is TWO models that don't work right. Also of note, I can't open it in Nifskope. I get the following:

failed to load block number 9 (NiAlphaProperty) previous block was NiPixelData
failed to load nif from file "C:/Documents and Settings/[Zarf's Username]/Desktop/Razorwing_Grass_Test.nif"
texLoadRaw() : unsupported image depth 0

I am currently making a new mod for myself that will (Hopefully) replace all the grass models with grass.nif.

EDIT: I can't seem to do it. Whenever I load a cell with the custom grass model in it, the game crashes. All I do is this: I find the grass items under World Objects/Grass, then I edit them to change the NIF files. That's it. Am I doing something wrong?

EDIT AGAIN: http://www.elderscrolls.com/forums/index...try6291203

CJs06 thinks that it might be because our NIF files don't have an animation associated with them. Can I disable grass animations or something?

[Razorwing]

Zarf: These kinds of NIF files, ones with baked textures, won't open in NifSkope. But baking the textures is the only stable way of making them appear in-game using the Civ4 Exporter method.

I would imagine that it's poking around with the grass Oblivion that makes the game unstable, because I've never had the game crash on me for adding custom models.

Grass, shrubs and trees are special models in that they were created using SpeedTree, a commercial plugin for Max, and are a blend of meshes and sprites. If you fire up the construction set and browse to just about any landscape scenario, try ticking off the "Leaves" option in the "View" menu and you'll see how I mean. It's not that the leaves are planes, they really are true sprites, as far as I can tell. So, if you replace any SpeedTree model like that, I would imagine the game tries to use it like a SpeedTree model just because it's in those categories, and crashes when the model doesn't behave like a SpeedTree model. I don't think animating the model would solve the problem as such, but I'm pretty sure it would kill the framerate rather quickly.

[raggidman]

Ahaaa, maybe the grass can grow greener on your hillside now!

[Zarf]

Well, RW, that explains things to me satisfactorialy. I too think it's replacing the grass models that is fouling things up, not just imported custom models. We just need to contact somebody who has SpeedTree.

[Axen]

http://www.elderscrolls.com/forums/index...pic=502682
(By the way, does anyone else notice a little frame box at the top center of the TES forum pages?!)

[KuKulzA]

Originally posted by raggidman
Hope you can find a taker for this - maybe if you pm KukulzA or Ataridante? They have done wonders for the Botany Books, and are both keen modellers.

no, I am no modeler... I just wish I was... and I can;t seem to learn much max...
or maybe I'm not patient enough and I end up saying screw this and go call a friend to see if he's free