Vintra's meshes

[Deeza]

Looks great so far! One thing I should mention is that TOYB's design had a lot of curved sections of the walls. Riverhold itself is almost circular in shape. Are you planning to make curved pieces as well as the straight ones?

[Vintra]

Deeza: Yes, of course there'd be circular piece too.

Glad you like it, anyways!

[Deeza]

Sounds good. I look forward to seeing it.

[morcroft]

That's a good point - what angles will we need - and what works from a positioning perspective in the CS? Normally you'd want to position with grid and angle snap on so that means we'd want full 90 degree plus 45 degree sections. Is it going to be practical to position any other angles?

[Vintra]

The second wall piece is also finished.

There's a glitch, when each piece connects to other, not seamless. Don't know how to fix it, yet.

Vintra

[morcroft]

I can't see in detail, but it looks to me like you've included the "ends" of the pillar in the main wall mesh and have smoothing turned on, so the engine tries to smooth round the corner "into" the surface of the pillar.

Make the wall as a piece like
[half-pillar]-[main wall section]-[other-half-pillar]
with no end mesh (or bottom for that matter - saves polies)
the engine won't then try to smooth the ends, and the meshes will line up.

Then create a wall-end section to close off the half-pillars. You have to get that pillar to be both mirror- and rotationally symmetrical, so you can place them in-game. If you aren't already then make sure the whole piece is 128 game units long (I think) so it can be placed with snap on.

[Vintra]

Originally posted by morcroft
I can't see in detail, but it looks to me like you've included the "ends" of the pillar in the main wall mesh and have smoothing turned on, so the engine tries to smooth round the corner "into" the surface of the pillar.

Make the wall as a piece like
[half-pillar]-[main wall section]-[other-half-pillar]
with no end mesh (or bottom for that matter - saves polies)
the engine won't then try to smooth the ends, and the meshes will line up.

Then create a wall-end section to close off the half-pillars. You have to get that pillar to be both mirror- and rotationally symmetrical, so you can place them in-game. If you aren't already then make sure the whole piece is 128 game units long (I think) so it can be placed with snap on.

Thanks for the advice.

I'll take a look to my meshes, and try out some of your ideas.

EDIT: By the way, i have talked with Bone_collector, who is actually working on a new creature expansion. I've suggested for him, to make manticore, sabertooth tiger, mummy ect. Some of them can be useful for Elsweyr, i think. Especially, the manticore, which is a lore-based Elsweyr creature.

[The Old Ye Bard]

It looks good, however the biggest problem I see is it not completly jiving with the description mentions in TIC " The walls were safron, irregular, and not particularly high" which I drew in the concept like the top was crumbling/was made more naturally, and then secondly it's very important that the walls are curved (and curved naturally at that).

The textures are looking really nice though, what I think can be done with this set, is that it can be used for the settlements in the Riverhold kingdom, rather than Riverhold itself (which means this set will actually get used more). Prehaps even used around the ruins of Ne-Quin'al.

This is kind-of what the walls when finished should look like, link (except covering a larger area).

[Vintra]

First of all, these meshes are very irregular. You may not see from the low-res screens. Saffron and irregular is fit, and also the size.

So the top is crumbilng? Allright, then. Sorry, i didn't noticed that info.
And the walls curverd, this is okay too.

But i don't want to put to these wall meshes to junk. We can use it for other city, maybe with other textures.

Allright, i'll try to make a new one.

[morcroft]

No - don't junk them! They are nice pieces and as TOYB says, we can use them somewhere else. They do seem appropriate for Elsweyr, even if not for Riverhold city itself.

I'd say try and fix that end-section problem, polish them up and get these meshes into a usable form and I'll include them in the resource pack. Don't park them halfway through or they'll probably never get done.

@TOYB: a "naturally curved" design for Riverhold's actual walls may make them tricky to place in the CS - how should Vintra design for that? How many "puzzle-pieces" will we need?

Vintra, if you haven't already then take a good look at the architecture\stonewall set from the Oblivion BSA - you'll see there's 60-odd pieces there which is far more than you can make but it may give you ideas. I'm already doing some complete retexes of those for general-purpose walls.

That set does various ramps and offsets, but only ever does 90-degree curves - I think that's because it's so hard to line up the edges for anything else. I started trying to work out how many pieces you'd need to make a fully-aligned set (like stonewalls) that includes 45-degree curves and it's pretty complex. I think it's going to be best to make pillars to separate the sections and embed the wall-ends in those.

If TOYB wants more variable curves then I think you'll need to make some intermediate pieces, all made on a 128-game unit grid
I think we'd need:
straight section
45 degree curve
maybe left-right "wiggle" piece
Pillar model to cover up the alignment kludging between pieces.

Do we need to be able to take hills? Again, Stonewalls does but it's pretty complex - you need to cover "top of hill" "on the hill" and "bottom of the hill" - in theory both with and without curves, but that's overkill!