vfxninjaeditor

I don't think anyone has forgotten. Personally, I just finished off a huge work load of video projects. Not to mention, it is the holidays right now. I will likely be consumed by family stuff till the beginning of January. Don't fret though, I am still thinking of ideas for flora and the landscape design. I updated my Unique Grasses mod and already have another update planned.

This thread stopped flowing...we should continue talking. :)

You can also do this to individual grasses in the Creation Kit which is much more useful.

I don't understand why Bethesda went the extra mile to add snow that actually looks like it's covering the branches in Solstheim but didn't do it for Skyrim!?! Aside from that, we could probably work with these right?

Yes, I was thinking this too. Have the piles over time accumulate more leaves (also changing color; colorful at the beginning of fall/brown and dead at the end). I don't replace the ground textures to remove the leaves. It doesn't hurt to have a few still on the landscape texture themselves. Although, now that you mention it, I might make a generic dirt texture for fallforestleaves01.dds. It's the one that has the most leaves on it. With 3D leaves, it's effectively pointless. Keep that in mind. fallforestdirt01.dds and fallforestgrass01.dds should probably keep some leaves.

Sadly, this won't work either. SparrowPrince and I were working together for a little on my mod and he said that none of the custom grass meshes he made by hand worked. They all swayed in the wind and got distorted. The reason he told me this was because I asked him if he could model a low poly pine cone mesh (which would be very cool to add as grass objects to this seasons mod).

Okay, I know the problem. Just tested the mesh you sent. Problem is, there is no fix that I know of. Basically, the distortion is coming from the grass 'wave period'. Even with that value set to 0.0001 the mesh stays distorted. Setting to 1.0000 made the mesh look less so, but now the snow is moving back and forth slightly which is unrealistic. The only mesh setup correctly or this is Bethesda's rock grass. It doesn't wave no matter what wave period is set to. I have a feeling it's something in the .nif itself that makes it work. Your best bet would be to compare the rock grass mesh with the snow one. As for the alpha, I have no idea what to do with it. I know when I tried doing a semi-transparent alpha for some grass I made - it didn't work. You might to enable some .nig flags for a smoother alpha. You guys are more qualified in doing that. I have no idea were to look.

Could you post some screens of it in snowy areas? Also, could you send me the mesh? The idea in general is pretty awesome. It gives snow some depth rather than a flat landscape texture everywhere.

I like some of the concept that he implemented in his. Overall, it's a bit much. Besides, many of his ideas for grass and such I have already implement similarly in my update for Unique Grasses. Everything I have in my mods is free to be used in what we are developing here. Compatibility for texture overhauls will be a bit subjective. Users will have to find and replace files on their own. Otherwise, they will just be using whatever comes with our mod. If we are going to change the seasons in Skyrim, we essentially have to make a huge texture overhaul.

It will crash the CK. I tried adding a 21.8kb plant to spawn as a grass object and it crashed. After I tried it in the engine, I tried adding it through TES5Edit. The game crashed upon loading. I then tried again through the creation kit by adding it without loading any cells. That didn't crash until I got in game. So sadly, the meshes have to be very small to work at all. EDIT: Here's an idea. If someone could edit the meshes to separate each and every drift, we might be able to add them all as separate objects. We don't need the big one in the middle but the 3 others probably would work.

Ah, okay. This is clearly why I will only be doing texture work. I don't know enough about the convoluted engine. :D You can have as many grasses as you want! :smile: You just have to edit the line 'iMaxGrassTypesPerTexures=#' accordingly. That's the beauty of what we are doing. We can get pretty fancy with our flora and environment. There is no performance hit to have so many grasses if you don't go crazy high on the density. You distribute them naturally anyway. A note on grass meshes: The engine will crash if you try to import a grass mesh that is to large (file size). It's stupid. So, yeah. The snow meshes will have to be low poly (like the rock grass already in the game) and the texture quality will have to make up for the poor mesh.

From your first sentence: "Yes we would be have new forms for each landscape texture and then "paint" them on. By paint I mean use a script to auto convert them via TES5Edit." It doesn't sound like we will be using the standard landscape painter in the CK. Wouldn't it be more simple to use it for certain areas? Like keeping the higher mountain areas covered in some snow all seasons (High Hrothgar/Throat of The World). Please excuse me if I am not understanding you correctly.

So, basically we would be painting the landscape with our new landscape textures to make some new regions? Does anyone know if landscape painting can cause any significant conflicts with other mods? I think just painting new textures into the regions would be the most simple solutions and then swapping stuff with scripting.

I will PM him to let him know our intentions and ask for permission. He's a nice guy, hopefully he will want to collaborate. About dandelions, clover, and other ground plants. I have added dandelion meshes to my Unique Grasses mod (v2.0 has a better mesh for the dandelions). Also check out some of these from my update 2.0 (not yet released). These are all 3D using the forestgrass01.nif. Clovers and Fall Ground Cover http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5518/10832935864_4cda4be0fd_c.jpg More Clover http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5504/10832776465_a5b78b2d94_c.jpg Ground Ivy. It's hard to see, but It's the only image I have currently. http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2805/10784862025_cfa28dc364_c.jpg Real 3D Aspen Leaves http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2852/10766194354_258022a242_c.jpg More Aspen Leaves http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7434/10766217844_983e81c27a_c.jpg Misc Plants http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3775/10284517115_7793d806a5_c.jpg More Sexy Clover http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2841/10284502136_94599a3ab6_c.jpg

Yeah, I can do all the alpha overlay stuff. Everything except the snow should be easy as pie. Just a bunch of masking in photoshop. You are right, vanilla Skyrim already has a mix of these textures. We basically need to eliminate that. I love that we only need to create overlays for most of the seasons (i.e. Grass in the rift will have leaves overlayed in the fall). It makes a bit more simple for some textures. Obviously, some will require completely different textures depending on the season (melted snow and mud when transitioning from Winter to Spring). The one texture I am most worried about is roads (and in relation, dirt textures. Since they are connected to the roads.) I am not confident that I can create what I consider a good road texture. For instance, I love Cabal's texture for roads. IMO, the best one out there. Problem is, he doesn't give permission to use or alter any of his texture (due to people who uploaded versions of his armor without asking). It would great to use a already made road and dirt texture and just overlay/edit it to fit each season. Maybe you all have some thoughts. It basically comes down to the fact we need to choose our roads wisely. To many mods that overhaul the game do crappy jobs on the road textures, therefore creating lots of seams between different landscape textures (The Seasons of Skyrim Project is a prime example of these seams in the summer edition).