Talu Swamp Development

[Ibsen's Ghost]

For the Talu Swamp, I'm aiming to go for a fairly lurid look to it that makes it resemble a pine swamp. The problem is that I'm restricted with the variety of trees available at my disposal. The intent is to go for the look that is shown by the first two pictures here. However, the second includes 'loblolly pines'. I'm really hoping that Koniption can return at some point to do some trees similar to this as I think this is the thing that's really missing for this region.

In the meantime, I set up a trial region as shown. I'd like it to be quite a bright one to contrast with Murkwood. As you get closer to Murkwood, I can blend some of the Darkmoor and Murkwood textures as you get deeper into the marshes. For watery areas, maybe I can bring in some of the mangroves to the Talu Swamp as well but I'd prefer to use the spindly ones shown here or, far better, some loblolly pines.

I used HookThorn, ScotchPine (adapted), Valenwood and our own Pine Forest trees here. The rocks and ground textures are my own but there's also Senten's goldfinger banana and angel trumpets plants.

Please let me know what you think and whether you think something doesn't work, should be added or so on.

[Ibsen's Ghost]

So I went looking for other trees and tortured myself by looking at the speedtree.com website (which are impossibly expensive and accessible only to top companies). Here's some of my 'dream trees'. The first is possibly the most wonderful of the whole damn incredible bunch....it sent me into a little dreamy haze! It goes through 'Bogtower', 'ChineseBanyam', 'loblolly' (not as good as I expected), 'vivax bamboo' and 'weepingwillow'.

After this, I trawled through some old Morrowind resources and found some of Vality's old mods. These are pretty cool trees. They're not speedtrees (which means they're not animated and aren't affected by breezes) but they use mossy parts and vines and they have the correct bulbous trunk effect that I was looking for....the only problem is that they are so old that the CS does not recognise them and simply produces an error marker when I check them out in the CS. Anyone know of a workaround for this?

[morcroft]

From a cursory look at Vality's Bitter Coast mod, I see four trees. I think there are a few conversion tasks:
1. Import the mesh into Blender; rescale; export Oblivion NIF.
2. Take the original, Morrowind rextures that are in .tga format and convert to dds
3. glue the textures to the mesh in nifscope.

I think it's all do-able, even easy, but there are problems:
1. a mesh that's good enough for Morrowind is probably not good enough for Oblivion.
2. I think the texture re-use could be a violation of the MW license.

[Lady Nerevar]

reuse of textures is definitely illegal, but the usability of the model really depends. a lot of high end morrowind stuff is good enough for oblivion. trees, in particular, could use to be lower poly, as there would have to be a whole lot of them in the forest.

[Koniption]

Hi all,

You can always make up new textures, if you can't use the Morrowind ones.

Also, be sure Vality allows permission to use his models in other mods. A possible "README" in his Bitter Coast mod might have the terms for being able to use his models.

I know I'm needed here, but I can't mod much right now. I can do a little modding here and there, but I have to be careful.

Ibsen, pick out one tree type that is not in Vality's mod, that you wish to possibly see in the Talu Swamps, and I'll try to chip away at making it.

Koniption

[Ibsen's Ghost]

Thanks for the input, morcroft and LN. Textures really aren't a problem at all. For Vality's mod, there is a link to an online readme that cannot be accessed. He's moved on long ago, I think. However, I've seen someone by that name around the Bethesda forums so I'm fairly sure he's (or she) still around in some capacity. Nevertheless, a broken link to a readme would appear to suggest a low level of protectiveness about the models. Furthermore, these models were available in a pack for modders to use....I think it was the Elric website that I found them at....not sure now....as long as credit is granted, I see this as a green light.

@ Koniption - No problem, KP. There's no great rush for things like these anyway. However, I guess my biggest need here is for a tree to match with the loblolly pines that you see in the OP. Ideally, go for the ones with the bulbous base of the trunk in the second picture I uploaded (of the OP). These ones look fairly thin-ish further up and quite tall so that they can be bunched together quite close to make up for the lack of canopy. However, what I like most about them is their similarity to the vanilla snowgumtree. Like the snowgum, both the 'Bogtower' and 'Chinese Banyam' are particularly fine examples of long, thin, hanging Spanish moss in a fairly large quantity....so that would be ideal too.

@ Everyone - I have been considering doing something entirely different for the Talu Swamp and not going through the region generator at all but simply duplicating clusters of trees in tight packs surrounded by occasional rocks. It wouldn't look pretty and would feel quite repetitive and featureless but that would sort of be the point. We have colourful variety elsewhere and I tend to think you should get lost in there....Plus, if I were to have knee-height water for most of the region, it should look quite convincing and very original....

[Lady Nerevar]

i think he is indeed still around, though not as much as he used to. might want to send him a PM just to be sure, i seem to recall him having permissions related problems before. i also remember his site going down a while back, that page may not have been restored.

[Koniption]

Originally posted by Ibsen's Ghost
Thanks for the input, morcroft and LN. Textures really aren't a problem at all. For Vality's mod, there is a link to an online readme that cannot be accessed. He's moved on long ago, I think. However, I've seen someone by that name around the Bethesda forums so I'm fairly sure he's (or she) still around in some capacity. Nevertheless, a broken link to a readme would appear to suggest a low level of protectiveness about the models. Furthermore, these models were available in a pack for modders to use....I think it was the Elric website that I found them at....not sure now....as long as credit is granted, I see this as a green light.

What Lady N. said.

Originally posted by Ibsen's Ghost
@ Koniption - No problem, KP. There's no great rush for things like these anyway. However, I guess my biggest need here is for a tree to match with the loblolly pines that you see in the OP. Ideally, go for the ones with the bulbous base of the trunk in the second picture I uploaded (of the OP). These ones look fairly thin-ish further up and quite tall so that they can be bunched together quite close to make up for the lack of canopy. However, what I like most about them is their similarity to the vanilla snowgumtree. Like the snowgum, both the 'Bogtower' and 'Chinese Banyam' are particularly fine examples of long, thin, hanging Spanish moss in a fairly large quantity....so that would be ideal too.

All the pics I find of loblolly pines are of non-water trees that have no bulbous base. I think the tree in your pic is either a "bald cypress", or "water tupelo" tree - both of these two trees look very much like what's in your picture.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_Tupelo

Oblivion already has several cypress speedtree models. I did find a "tupelo" billboard texture, but I couldn't find a spt speedtree file that has "tupelo" in its name...so maybe there was a billoard texture, but Beth never made the tupelo tree??? I don't know, for I still have not played the game. For all I know there are water tupelo trees in the game.

I will make a type of tree like in that photo you found..but do you want pine-needle foliage, or the water tupelo type of leaf (not like a pine needle, looks like a bay leaf <used in stews for seasoning>)? Does it really matter?

Koniption

[Xae]

In order for the area to really look like a swamp there'd need to be water-filled swales and actual wetlands. Right now, it's quite hilly, at least from what I can tell by looking at the screenshots, and as such comes off a bit more like a forest.

I imagine it'd look a bit like the area around Seyda Neen in Morrowind though submerged a few feet under water. Being that this is the Black Marshes, it'd be reasonable to assume that the player will spent quite some time lumbering through waist-high mucky water. Or, at least, that's what comes to mind when I think about it.

[morcroft]

I made the tree below as a test using blender and a freeware called ngplant as described in this tutorial. It's a procedural generator, so you define the characteristics of the plant and it sort-of grows it.


Clearly, it's no speedtree; and there's an awful lot wrong with it at the moment - especially the textures, but is it anywhere near the right track? It's around 4000 tri's - a bit big, I know, but there's probably scope to decimate it down a bit.
The key thing is that if this is usable then I can make variations on the theme by varying the parameters and seed value in ngplant and get it to do the heavy lifting. And it doesn't add to Koniption's workload!
By the way, there are some really nice trees made with ngplant but I tried importing the eucalyptus and it was 30,000+ polys! I have made compromises...!