Silgrad Tower from the Ashes
far nif textures - Printable Version

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+---- Thread: far nif textures (/Thread-far-nif-textures)



far nif textures - morcroft - 07-17-2011

Is it reasonable to make a _far.nif that uses more than one texture - or does that totally defeat the object of a _far.nif?

Reason for asking: I'm making city walls and it would be simpler to use parts of the wall and tower textures rather than trying to squeeze everything into the gatehouse texture.


- Koniption - 07-17-2011

Yeah, I think it's reasonable.

There are vanilla Oblivion _far.nifs that do the same thing, such as....:

meshes\architecture\bravil\bravilarcherparadox_far.nif

Koniption


- morcroft - 07-17-2011

Thanks KP

Bit puzzled now, though: I can't find bravilarcherparadox_far.nif - it doesn't seem to be in Oblivion - Meshes.bsa or Oblivion - Misc.bsa. Where is it stored?


- Koniption - 07-17-2011

Quote:Originally posted by morcroft
Thanks KP

Bit puzzled now, though: I can't find bravilarcherparadox_far.nif - it doesn't seem to be in Oblivion - Meshes.bsa or Oblivion - Misc.bsa. Where is it stored?

Ack, you're right. I looked through the BSA's, and it's in Silgrad_Tower.bsa.

I don't think it'll hurt things too much though, to use more than one texture. I saw that the bravilarcherparadox_far.nif, also had all the NiBinaryExtraData's, deleted from all NiTriStrips and NiTriShapes. This helps dramatically lower the filesize of the _far.nif. The NiBinaryExtraData is only really needed so see the effects of normal map (bumps, peaks & valleys, etc - in the color texture). But a _far.nif is so far away, that needing to see the effects of normal maps, is a moot point.

Koniption


- morcroft - 07-17-2011

Thanks - I've read that the engine doesn't even try and compute the normal map for VWD. In any case the game ships with really tiny normal map files for the far nifs - so I'm just re-using those. I think with no normal map at all you get funny effects with things like fog and rain.
I'm making new far nifs with reduced polycounts and high-to-low poly texture baking to get the final textures. I'll have a look at the nifs produced though, there's probably more optimisation to be done, so thanks for the tips.


- sandor - 07-18-2011

Quote:Originally posted by morcroft
Thanks KP

Bit puzzled now, though: I can't find bravilarcherparadox_far.nif - it doesn't seem to be in Oblivion - Meshes.bsa or Oblivion - Misc.bsa. Where is it stored?
It was custom made for ST.

OB usually has one texture for their far nifs.



The polycount amongst others is the part that determines the in-game efficiency.