Dumac [Finished]

[Seniosh]

Man, i hadn't seen the link to the meshes and stuff, just DL'd and i'll check em out in a minute.

The real concern i have is that when if i do the region-gen now, it will look mostly the same, just better when you change the models. It really all depends on how you hook it up in the ESM, so duplicated files and variants can be named whatever they need to be

As for branches - the most important thing is that they don't go out at extreme angles (you'll almost never see a straight branch pointing downwards for instance, nor will it be going at an 80 degree angle upwards next to the trunk). Also, don't put too many branches that attach to the tree in a small area. Stagger them.

The BC trees are actually great in abiding by these guidelines of tree-ness It's not like you can look at them extremely close up anyhow.

[Seniosh]

I've begun generating the landscape again, and i've run into some really odd quirks.

aside from the normal wackiness whenever I do anything, my rocks aren't sinking.

In particular, StExComRockBC01 and StExComRockBC02 will not sink, at all. Shown are two screenshots of the first StExComRockBC02's i could find. Both are supposedly being sunk 65 points. Obviously, they're not being sunk that much.

Any ideas as to why? or should i just take them out in favor of rocks which behave.

Also, what are the criteria for generation? I'm happy with the preset i have now, but that's only because I'm prepared to do a TON of hand-tweaking in a small space, and i've accepted that it's nigh-impossible to generate good swampland. What i have right now is a good base, and i can add/balance the flora, create height variation, and place muck pools later.

[TheImperialDragon]

May I have a look at the ESP?

[Seniosh]

I've just been tweaking it a bit more. I realized that i had a few trees which did not have "is a tree" checked, and it was throwing off the plant diversity for the region.

Also, i re-realized that the order of objects in the list heavily effects the generation, and radii and density must be changed to account for this. My main concern right now is getting a nearly even spread of trees generating, so that i can just move around the existing trees, and not have to compensate to add diversity

[Phitt]

Just read this thread and would like to make a few notes regarding Speedtrees vs 'modeled' trees. There are many disadvantages when you don't use Speedtrees like I experienced in my Sheogorad mod (where I can't use them since it's impossible to make Emperor Parasols that way).

1. Most importantly you'll have a hard time making a good looking LOD landscape. The Speedtree billboards are much, much better for performance than VWD objects. The number of polys used on the VWD objects doesn't even matter that much, even with a simple 2 triangle plane for each object you'll get a lot of lag with hundreds or even thousands of objects. I tried making the menhirs VWD and even with only 1000 of them in the whole worldspace I had a lot of lag (even with a 2 tri plane for each one I tried). With thousands of Speedtrees the game runs fine on the other hand. I think the reason is that Speedtree billboards are not affected by game lighting, they always look the same no matter what time of day it is. I now have only about 350 VWD objects in the worldspace (Parasols and buildings) and it still cuts down performance by a good amount - would be much better if I could use Speedtrees.

You can't make billboards for them as well unless you make rotated versions of the non-VWD trees that you move into the right angle in the CS. The reason is that billboard nodes automatically rotate the object by 90 degree when you place it, no idea why. Can be seen when you place a fire for example, it's always lying on its side at first.
I've also heard transparency doesn't work on VWD objects at all, which would make it impossible to make good tree LOD.

For my menhirs I now use a workaround by batch replacing them with a fake Speedtree that has a menhir Speedtree billboard, generating the LOD and then replacing them again with the menhirs. Might work for you as well if you have the pivot of the trees at xyz 0 like Speedtrees have (otherwise the billboards won't be alligned correctly obviously). Downside is that they don't fade in like real Speedtrees (not so much of a concern) and that the real trees/menhirs won't be visible when the billboards vanish on cell load if someone uses a low object slider setting (because they are too far away still and not faded in yet). For my pretty large menhirs that happens when the slider is lower than about 40%. If you have small trees it might happen even with a higher setting.

2. Speedtrees sway in the wind and make use of the canopy shadow feature. That's a nice effect, and probably it would look a bit strange if you used a mix of Speedtrees and modeled trees. Some will have shadows and sway, other don't.

I'm not sure how your trees look, but if it's possible to make them in Speedtree I suggest you find someone to do it for you. Much less trouble for a better look.

[Seniosh]

That's a really nice summary. It might be better placed in the Modeling thread for the trees, seeing as i'm not actually the modeler (though i think i understood about half of that, which is more than before)

Right now i'm actually still using the trees we've already got, which are, in fact, speedtrees. I have heard similar things, and everything you've said makes sense, so i hope we can get everything in speedtree

@ TID:
Here's the latest .esp file. The rock-sink problem fixed itself after i re-booted the CS, but i'm actually pretty happy with the overall density of the trees and stuff. I've got a mixture of smaller rocks and flora in there as well. It's obviously not something you can just take, generate a region with, and then leave it alone, but i never expected the Bitter Coast to be like that. Rather, it's a base i can work off of. Let me know what you think. I'd rather get out of this endless cycle of generating and tweaking, after a while i begin to lose track of how many hundreds of times i've clicked the "generate objects" button inbetween tweaks of a single number

[TheImperialDragon]

Thanks for posting that, Phitt. That sounds important, and it might just save us a lot of time...

@Seniosh: I still need to look at the generated area and the preset in a bit more depth (my computer's lagging like crazy probably because I have my uGridsToLoad set to about 15), but I did notice that there's a thick population of green trees. Maybe it's just me, but it doesn't exactly ring like the Bitter Coast to me. It is your region so it's up to you. Perhaps it'll look better after there are muckpools and other changes after the generation? hrug: Do you know how it looks in-game?

Also, did you want to make changes to the landscape shape before generating? If so, you should start by making the changes in a separate ESP using the landscape editor. Be careful to not go beyond your region area if you do make changes to the landscape...

[Seniosh]

Yeah, actually it does have a bit many trees. Overdid it a bit perhaps.

The problem was that the trees from morrowind had a much greater spread than the oblivion trees do i think, Probably overcompensated. Plus my memory was a bit fuzzy on the Bitter coast. I'll thin it out and then see how it looks. It's also misleading because there aren't any swamps in there yet, and the area is a good deal larger than morrowind.

I think i changed the landscape a while back in order to better see what swamps would look like. If you'd like, i can see if i can undo all changes other than the region preset in order to clean the esp. Guess it's been a bit too long in-between sessions of generation It shouldn't be hard to get the tree density to go down

[edit] Just looking back at morrowind, i remember now why there was so much of a need for new trees. What is the likelihood of getting SpeedTree versions of the trees that TMJ and SACarrow were working on?

[double-edit] Alright, i upped the radii of every tree in the pre-set by 3/2, so the density is drastically reduced. Also, i deleted every reference to anything that wasn't the pre-set, so the landscape is back to the way it was. I'm going to take a look at it in-game later to make sure it's as close as i can get it to Morrowind. Then maybe i'll make a test .esp for screenshots, where i'll go in with the landscape editor to see how good and swampy i can get it

[Zurke]

Hi all. I read that speed trees some how have shadowing built in or can be set. Does this mean that the shadow tool in the CS does not need to be used with speedtrees? Also are the trees in ST assets speed trees or not?

[Seniosh]

All of the ST trees currently in the ESM are, i believe, speedtrees. The trees which TMJ made for the Bitter Coast are not Speedtrees, they are static models.

As for the shadowing question, you'd have to ask an expert. Maybe Phitt or TID can answer it.