[Rel] Outhouse

[Tobi the Dane]

Hi everybody, I am pleased to inform you that I have together with SACarrow made an outhouse:



It's made up of three pieces, a house, a loo and a door.
Using the snap tool in the CS, it will snap together perfectly.

SACarrow will upload the files in a short time.

[sandor]

I'll use these in Steadhelm for sure. :goodjob:

[SACarrow]

This is really cool! I've enclosed the 3 models and an ESP that's only dependent on Oblivion.ESM. Just put the three models in Data\Meshes\ST\Furniture\Dunmer\Outhouse and then cow Testtree 0 0 and the two outhouses should be right around the log pile you'll end up in. I put two outhouses there, one w/o a door and one with a door that leads to an interior cell.

Future plans include retexing for shacks and animatiing the door to make an interior cell unnecessary.

Here's a thought: Someone should draw up a loo usable by Argonians. :lmao:

Hoping someone gives a [well, you know] ,
Steve

[Razorwing]

I like the way it looks, nice work

Oki, here's my technical review.

- There's two empty NiNodes in DunmerOuthouse.nif and DunmerOuthouseDoor.nif, one being the child of another. To get rid of those kinds of things, go to Spells > Optimize > Remove Bogus Nodes.

- On the NiMaterialProperty blocks the Ambient Color, Diffuse Color and Specular Color should be set to pure white (or in Nifskope terms, 1). If the texture has a specular channel, the Specular Color should be pure black (or in Nifskope terms, 0).

- Try to combine meshes that have the same material, either manually by attaching meshes or by attaching all meshes to one another. Personally I prefer the first method since sometimes one material gets duplicated and that's hard to sort out (at least as far as I know, maybe there's a method I'm unaware of). In DunmerOuthouse.nif for instance there were three meshes that all used woodplanks01.dds.

- The Cylinder02 mesh in DunmerOuthouseSeat.nif lack both texture and mapping, which I think could cause some strange behaviour. At least it did in Nifskope, with the mesh switching from visible to invisible as I selected/unselected it and swiveled the viewport camera.

Please make the changes and PM me the updated nifs.

[Tobi the Dane]

I'm not sure I understand what you mean Razorwing...

You mean attaching the models to eachother? and then apply the bhkRigidBody modifier? 'cause if I do that then the box collision doesn't turn out the way I want it too.
Or you could simply import the outhouse and redo the collisions, I would very much like to see what you would do.

Are you using 3dsmax 9? because then I could send you the file or something, and then you could show me what you mean.
and while we're at the subject, how would you do the collision for this model?

currently it's made up of 40 box collisions, cause it's really hard to do use box collisions for a round object. Now it works much much better than before, the arrow penetration bug is gone, and I've gotten about 6-7 more fps.

[Razorwing]

Originally posted by Tobi the Dane
I'm not sure I understand what you mean Razorwing...

You mean attaching the models to eachother? and then apply the bhkRigidBody modifier? 'cause if I do that then the box collision doesn't turn out the way I want it too.
Or you could simply import the outhouse and redo the collisions, I would very much like to see what you would do.

No no, the collision was fine. I can't think of anything that could be improved in regards to that. Below is how I meant; the example files can be -downloaded here-.

Above we have two meshes that both use the same material. If you export it to nif, it'll look like this:

In other words, the exported file will have two NiTriStrips blocks which is slightly inefficient.

Instead click one of the boxes - and in this particular case, convert it to editable mesh alternatively add an Edit Mesh modifier - then scroll down to the Edit Geometry rollout. Click the button named Attach and then select the other box. Now they'll be one mesh, and will be exported as a single NiTriStrips.

It's good to compress the number of NiTriStrips by attaching meshes with the same material whenever possible. Bethesda always did it, so I suspect it helps performance. If you use the same texture in two materials however - let's say one material rotated 90 degrees and the other 0 degrees - then they must be two different NiTriStrips.

Originally posted by Tobi the Dane
Are you using 3dsmax 9? because then I could send you the file or something, and then you could show me what you mean.
and while we're at the subject, how would you do the collision for this model?

currently it's made up of 40 box collisions, cause it's really hard to do use box collisions for a round object. Now it works much much better than before, the arrow penetration bug is gone, and I've gotten about 6-7 more fps.

I have 3D Studio Max v9 but I like v8 better. I kept v9 around in case I ever needed to open max scenes for that version.

I would probably use four collision boxes to emulate the round shape, one set of four boxes for each architectural elemont. One set going from the bottom up to the surface the player walks on, one set for the protruding detail on the wall's inside, and so on. I think I would have used one box for each crenel, just because the player stands flatly on any surface, but it's hard to say. I might have used several. You didn't do anything wrong by using 40 boxes though, if it's a static object then Oblivion can handle that with ease.

[Tobi the Dane]

aah okay! Yes I got it now. It's really cool. Okay, I will use this trick for my future models, I haven't redone all my fort models yet, but I will diffinetly use this.
Thanks for the help.

[Razorwing]

Cool, glad I could help

[SACarrow]

To add to Razorwing's advice: I would do the attaching of meshes after saving the scene but before exporting. That way you still have the individual geometric objects to play with. Also when attaching, think of retex possibilities. With the outhouse, the only different retex possibility I can come up with is the door handle; maybe in a UC outhouse, that might be metal.

Just my thoughts,
Steve

[Tobi the Dane]

Ok, I'll do something about the meshes tomorrow. I was planning on add hinges to the door as well...