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+---- Thread: Redoran Buildings Progress Thread (1) (/Thread-Redoran-Buildings-Progress-Thread-1)
- Razorwing - 05-09-2006
Axen: All buildings were dwarfed in TES3, and the Redoran ones were more dwarfed than others. There's a couple of reasons for that.
One, Bethesda didn't want their towns to cover too much ground, i.e. eat up too much of the wilderness. They had to mod Vvardenfell manually, and shrinking the area towns took up was one way of getting enough wilderness. To get around the small house problem and have enough room for it to look like people lived in a home, buildings often had large basements. It was particularly pronounced in Redoran settlements, with Skar in Ald'ruhn being the most ridiculous example.
Two, they didn't want the player to spend forever getting around town. If you compare the games I'm sure you'll agree that the player can move much, much faster in Oblivion than he did in Morrowind. If you had built a town like Leyawiin on the TES3 engine I'm halfway sure it would have covered as much ground as Vivec did, but because of the increased speed it won't feel that large. Running around a house in TES4 is as fast as it is in TES3, despite the houses in TES4 being like four times larger.
So, for our Oblivion mod, I personally think it makes more sense to adapt the Redoran structures to the realistic scale used by the new game like we have done. That way our Dunmer can live above ground like normal people and still have enough room for life's imagined necessities.
gravedigger84: Thanks!
- Axen - 05-09-2006
Yeah, but... the size they are now, they're damn HUGE.
- X23 - 05-09-2006
I'm glad you made the structures bigger. Now the houses can have 3 floors instead of just 2. And they look cooler on the outside. A big improvement over TES III. I like the textures too.
- Axen - 05-09-2006
What you could fit inside of them is more than what you can fit inside most Imperial buildings. :/ It feels like walking in a city made by giants.
- Siegfried - 05-09-2006
Really, they need to be scaled down a bit, they can still be larger than MW, but... a Redoran hut shouldn't seem to dwarf a two story Cheydinhall home.
- masbeth - 05-09-2006
yeah..maybe if they have the same interior size as a cheyindel house, but they just seem so huge, since they are rotund, and therefore they look exceptional large compared to the cheyindell house...since the base is rounder and larger, and its the same hieght... so maybe just a bit smaller i would think....
- Razorwing - 05-09-2006
Is it something we should have a poll about?
- Axen - 05-09-2006
The huts were appropriately sized for the average commoner in TES3 in my opinion. The basements that they sometimes had were for storage (and, in Hararai Assutbanipal's case, for more). As for the other buildings... I don't think basements can be really avoided without making them ridiculously huge, due to the shape of them.
As for the whole "the buildings had to be dwarfed so that it wouldn't take forever to get across them, and in TES4, you walk faster, so the buildings should be larger"... Hell, one time when I made a soultrap-glitch character with 250 speed, cities still didn't seem very small, just seemed like I could get around them a bit faster.
- Siegfried - 05-09-2006
I was just thinking that, yeah a poll could be a good idea. I still think though that its obvious that they need some size reduction no matter what. The huts are ok when you aren't thinking back to Morrowind, but when you end up walking through downtown Ald-Ruhn or something how can you not. The larger buildings though just seem insane, 7 times or so the size of the guy in the screenie, I have to wonder how they built soemthing that big with medieval tools, it being round and all, plus I really like the whole basement thing Morrowind had going. Anyway back on topic, if you have a poll make sure to put in a decent summary of the two viewpoints, not just asking what looks better.
- Zarf - 05-09-2006
I think we just need to make the doors bigger and the rest of the building smaller.
Caligula, the reason I want to import them in to my copy of Max is because I know how to fake shadow detail. But I REQUIRE 3DS Max to do it.
Here's an example.
[GALLY]post24890_1_bland.jpg[/GALLY]
This image rendered very quickly and is very bland. THere's no shadow detail. The maps on the box and plane are just blank and white... no detail at all.
[GALLY]post24890_2_shadow.jpg[/GALLY]
This image took much longer - about 15 seconds to render. However, notice the nifty soft shadows. This is what I can add to your models if I can get them correctly in to Max.
I used Render to Texture to bake the shadow information on to a map. Here are the maps that came out, after I modified them to look even better in Photoshop. This is the box:
[GALLY]post24890_3_box.jpg[/GALLY]
Here's the plane:
[GALLY]post24890_4_plane.jpg[/GALLY]
And the final image, after I removed the skylight. This took as much time as the first image to render, which was practicly nothing:
[GALLY]post24890_5_mod.jpg[/GALLY]
See now? One final example.
Before (Simulated 'in-game' results, no awesome texturing or shadows):
[GALLY]post24890_6_before.jpg[/GALLY]
After (Simulated 'in-game' results, no awesome texturing, shadows added):
[GALLY]post24890_7_after.jpg[/GALLY]
What's great is that these shadows look great even at 3 in the mornming. :-D
[MOD=Razorwing]Linked thumbs makes the post easier to read. Hope you don't mind, friend.[/MOD]