The Vvardenfell Heightmap

[Lightwave]

The 2X Vvardenfell Heightmap (including Firemoth)

Since the double scaled, texture converted Vvardenfell heightmap (with the scaled vertex colour image) and associated LOD files are ready and available for downloading, I'm effectively turning this over to you folks to mod with, modify what you like, re-texture where it's ugly, create your towns and ruins etc.

These are the two files you will each need to get, if you haven't already over the last few days:

1. The 2X Scale Vvardenfell and Firemoth textured and vertex colour mapped TES4 landscape:

Vvardenfellx2-LW5.7z (74Mb)

Just copy the ESP file in the archive to your Oblivion\Data directory.

This heightmap was generated by extracting the data from Morrowind.esm and "Siege at Firemoth.esp" and converting to a 16-bit RAW image with TESAnnwyn along with the Vertex Colour Map and Texture Placement map. All 3 images have been double-scaled. The heightmap was doubled in Photoshop CS with Bicubic Smoother interpolation and a blur applied twice to help flatten the terrace effect produced by normal bicubic. Then the images were reimported with TESAnnwyn to TES4, including the nearest match MW->OB placed textures.


2. The LOD Texture and Mesh files:

Choose either: Vvardenfellx2-LOD-Package-StandardDetail.7z (13Mb) for low-mid end hardware. These are the same quality that Oblivion uses (1024x1024).

Or Vvardenfellx2-LOD-Package-HighDetail.7z (13Mb) for mid-high end graphics hardware (256Mb+ graphics).

Extract the contents of the Data folder from either of the above LOD archives to the Data folder in your Oblivion game directory and then double-click on the GenerateVvardenfellLODs.bat file. The process will take about 5 minutes and also generate a 79Mb BMP called VvardenfellMap.bmp in your Data directory, which contains a textured overview of this landscape which you might find useful.

You should now be able to visit the new world in the Oblivion game itself. Include Vvardenfellx2.esp as one of your data files, load any gamesave, open up the console (~) and type: cow vvardenfell -5 -50 to start in Seyda Neen. You can find many other major cell locations by loading up the ESP in the CS, then warping there using the console in the game and the COE command. I believe I may have overcome the common LOD load order problem, so you shouldn't have to worry about changing the order you load your ESM/ESPs.

The heightmap itself is fine, any terracing introduced by scaling is truly very small and should it bother anyone, is trivially smoothened in the render window.

The land needs more subtle texturing obviously, because going from MW's 7.3m x 7.3m texture sizes and double-scaling to OB means the same square area is 14.6m x 14.6m, giving a patchy feel. There are no blended texture layers because MW didn't support texture layers and OB does not automatically blend the edges of different textures, which leaves a sharp edge between changing textures.

The LOD textures look blocky because default 1024x1024 LOD textures are not high detail. The MW->OB texturing is blocky anyway, but since LOD textures show only 1 pixel per texture, any area containing a 14.6mx14.6m texture ends up as a square block of a single colour on the LOD.

The Vertex Colour Map helps define the edges of rivers, roads and towns, but being scaled, the edges of marked areas are thicker than before. Many circles also denote rocks, which were scattered like a god's pebbles across the original landscape, IMO looking a bit silly once you could see TES3's MW with the MGE Distantland, I felt they were too frequent and looked out of place.

The LOD landscape meshes I've distributed are far from perfect. The Construction Set still won't make them join properly, even though the heightmap is fine. So you will occasionally see join lines running across the LOD landscape, and weird barriers sometimes appear in rivers and valleys, disappearing when you get close, which is annoying. This is not a long-term issue, if Bethesda don't fix the generator when Shivering Isles is produced, someone else will have to write a proper landscape mesh generator. Since the LOD mesh produced by the CS is always quite low detail and craggy, we might benefit from a new generator.

KuKulzA: Ideally both these files should be moved somewhere a bit more formal central source at some point, e.g. such as Silgrad Tower. You might want to rename the Vvardenfellx2-LW5.esp file to something else too, entirely of your choosing. You can try and visualize how the land looks with the current imperfect LOD meshes and decide whether you still want certain regions modified from their original shape. There's no requirement to do this right now however, it can be either be done in the render window as you mod the region, or this reference heightmap ESP can be altered sometime before you get to the actual region you want altered, such as when you said you might want to flatten the grazelands area.

I don't have any really interesting screenshots yet, just these few as I wandered around last night, so I look forward to some more from the rest of you.


3. Optional Download: NPCs for Vvardenfell

You can also download an ESP of all the converted and placed NPCs from Morrowind.esm: These are all the NPCs converted using TESPort and placed back on to the new scaled up and shifted landscape. This file is called Vvardenfellx2-NPCs.7z.


Lightwave

*edit* Moved download links for heightmap and LOD packages to new server.

[KuKulzA]

wow... thank you very much :yes:
a formal central source, will do! the quirky LOD is too bad, I do hope some will make a landscape mesh generator like you said. Thank You so much! :goodjob:

[Ebonyknight]

Very well done.

[TheImperialDragon]

Holy crap... no words can do this justice, great work! :goodjob:

[solid_moose]

Unfortunatly I clicked on the link to see how big the file was found it was 75megs, thought I should wait until I had more bandwidth, the clicked x.

10 mins later it came up with the "all downloads complete" thingy.

Oh well, I've got no excuse now

[InsanitySorrow]

Perfect :goodjob:

Now i can start on Seyda Neen, hopefully by monday i will have some screenshots, yay :banana:

[Dave_91]

This is fantastic Lightwave, credit for your great work so far!

A few questions (sorry if some of them are already described):

-Will loading the Vvardenfell Heighmap with another .esp, or editing it and saving, still crash the CS with the data overload, or is that now resolved?

-How does Vivec now look? Is everything fixed?

With a little luck, I might be able to start working on an early landmassed version of Maar Gan with LOD. (probably tonight if I can get everything working.)

Thanks for your input, and once again, great work.

[Lightwave]

Dave_91 wrote: -Will loading the Vvardenfell Heighmap with another .esp, or editing it and saving, still crash the CS with the data overload, or is that now resolved?

You should never have an 'overload' unless you load the heightmap as active and start modifying it, which you should never do unless it's been agreed that a formal change should be made to a portion of the heightmap now so that becomes affected. It should never be loaded as active with another mod under any circumstances either. This is the reference heightmap, meaning it should only be loaded as inactive and the standard model for everyone to base their little changes on. All your changes should be saved to a new fresh ESP.

At the final completion of this project, possibly even at the completion of each region, everyone's separate ESPs can be combined with the reference heightmap ESP, so any landscape changes will over-ride the reference. I'm almost sure it'll be impossible to do this merging in the CS due to the XP memory limit, but possibly TES4Gecko or Wrye Bash may be in a position to combine all the records, if not I should be able to help out in the worst possible case.

Dave_91 wrote: -How does Vivec now look? Is everything fixed?

Vivec has no rips - the 2 floating shoreline cells were fixed in version 4 and this version (5) by me adding an import height limit on TESAnnwyn so nothing imported falls below -2048 game units (sea-floor). With the Vertex Colour map you can see the exact layout and position of the Cantons under the water. You shouldn't find any rips anywhere on this heightmap, TESAnnwyn reported no under or overflows and the CS no errors on saving. The usual offenders, Dagoth Ur and Vivec are fine. Bicubic Smoother automatically solved the small 2 metre wide rip in Dagoth Ur, so I didn't even need to modify the converted heightmap in the CS.


Silgrad.esm and STATics

The question of using the statics from Silgrad.esm hasn't been formally resolved: Previously you were loading Silgrad.esm as a master which made your mod dependent on Silgrad.esm causing OB to treat your Vvardenfell Worldspace as different to the master heightmap and resulting in most of the land disappearing when you visited it in game. It may be that the way I've fixed the LOD problem indirectly also solves this dependency problem too, but I don't know.

But in any case KuKulzA didn't feel you should be making this project dependent on 'Silgrad.esm', and I agree; the main thing you'll probably want Silgrad.esm for is just the STATic records so that you (or anyone) can easily drag and drop any Silgrad meshes on to the Vvardenfell landscape. Ideally these should be copied to a new ESP (not ESM) which you include as just one of your inactive data files.

What do others feel about this issue though, should there be an ESP of STATics from Silgrad.esm or should everyone create their own, as and when they need them? If you want an ESP containing just the STATics, I can probably extract them quickly enough from Silgrad.esm.


Feel free to try and generate new LOD meshes if you want, sometimes I swear Beth put a random number generator in there because it looks slightly different every time. Generating all 36 LOD mesh quads in the Heightmap editor only takes about 15 mins on my PC. I tried filling all the quad cells with empty cells, but the mesh was no better, so that's not the cause.
Do not bother trying to generate new LOD textures at this stage though, because my supplied generator works fine for the current texture layout (i.e. it's quite blocky!)

Good luck,

Lightwave

[InsanitySorrow]

I took a look last night and WOW was i amazed :goodjob:

[Dave_91]

I took a snoop around the map. It's huge. The textured land makes all the difference, it's almost like a different place from the last time I was there. I can well imagine the players of the mod will be able to get lost in the vast world you have made. Well done.

I couldn't resist a few screenshots of the island, here goes:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7

8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16

17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26

27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34


That's quite a few. I hope you like them as much as I enjoyed taking them. Here's the link to my Vvardenfell screenshots Photobucket album. If you don't want to go through all the images individually, just follow the link.

I'll get started on a newer version of Maar Gan too, complete with distant buildings etc.