How to make a custom worlspace from Heightmap

[zilav]

Yes, you can load .esp from TESAnnwyn into any official editor: GECK for Fallout 3 and New Vegas, CK for Skyrim LE, SSE and Fallout 4. It'll probably spew some warnings, but it will work after adjusting worldspace properties (default landscape height, water height, etc.) and saving.

 

Plugin format and technology for worldspaces is the same since Fallout 3, the reason why landscape looks so bad in newer Beth games. They finally updated it in Fallout 76 hence the infamous "16x times the detail".

[YouDoNotKnowMyName]

That's what I wanted to know! Thank you!

 

(And yeah, FO76 is a whole other can of worms, I prefer games that can't be "taken away from me" after already buying them :laugh:)

[DocMoebius]

Heightmap import is actually pretty straight foward. You select your world space and put in the desired size(cells) and it tells you what resolution your heightmap should have. Then you either just rescale your pic to the required resolution, which will result in a loss of detail, or you have a pic with the required resolution - which is rather unlikely since big worldspace, like the one Bethesda used for F4, use pretty big pictures. Then all you need to do is to convert it to 32bit float and load it into the CK. Don't forget to play with the min height and max height values and press F5 after each generation to load the current map until you get the desired results. Something as big as the F4 worldspace would need a resolution of aprox. 6145x6145 though.

 

I've played around with this feature a lil bit now as I'm starting a new worldspace and I basically tried to 1.) draw my own heightmaps in GIMP, 2.) import heightmaps from a site like http://terrain.party/ , 3.) create my own heightmaps in blender and load them into the CK.

 

I've had the best result with stitching pics from terrain party together, but unfortunately they don't always seem the have the most accurate data and certain grey values differ resulting in sharp and ugly edges. Therefore I'm trying a new approach at the moment which is to look through different gov sites, for instance like https://viewer.nationalmap.gov/advanced-viewer/ ,which get their data from NASA, in order to get the best resolution. I suppose the best solution would be to somehow get your hands on high res heightmaps from mars, since they have all the nice craters and erosion which looks pretty nice in a Fallout game.

Edited December 23, 2019 by DocMoebius

[YouDoNotKnowMyName]

Ok, thanks for explaining how to do it!!

 

Yeah, I used that http://terrain.party/ website to get heightmaps of the area I want and I think I will use those.

You said that the results will be "ugly" or "unsmooth"? That will not matter too much, because I can just smooth it out a bit by hand in the CK.

I will have to edit each exterior cell anyway, to add trees, buildings, ....

It's just that I have a rough shape of the landscape in the CK, the "details" will be done by hand.

I don't plan on creating a 100 % correct representation of the landscape, so a few meters higher or lower will not matter that much ....

 

(I basically plan to recreate the area where I live, a small town and a few villages, some hills, ...; noting too big ... for now ...)

[DocMoebius]

Ok, thanks for explaining how to do it!!

 

Yeah, I used that http://terrain.party/ website to get heightmaps of the area I want and I think I will use those.

You said that the results will be "ugly" or "unsmooth"? That will not matter too much, because I can just smooth it out a bit by hand in the CK.

I will have to edit each exterior cell anyway, to add trees, buildings, ....

It's just that I have a rough shape of the landscape in the CK, the "details" will be done by hand.

I don't plan on creating a 100 % correct representation of the landscape, so a few meters higher or lower will not matter that much ....

 

(I basically plan to recreate the area where I live, a small town and a few villages, some hills, ...; noting too big ... for now ...)

Just taking one picture with terrain.party is totally fine. The problems start when you want to have higher res pics of a larger area, so I took 9 pics and tried stitching them together. Unfortunately all 9 pics had different grey tones at their edges altough they represent the same terrain, which is pretty strange. It must have something to do with the available data on terrain.party or their conversion algorithm - I'm not fully sure. The reason why I did this is because only a small portion of your worldspace - the center - will be the area where your actual game takes place whereas the rest of the sorrounding area actually just serves as some kind of background and I want everything to have decent detail.

 

E.g the commonwealth worldspace goes from something like (-96|-96) to (96|96) whereas the actual playable area sits in the center of this rectangle with something like (-25|-25) to (25|25) (not counting the buldge of the glowing sea area).

So you should always keep in mind to have some sort of cool looking background like mountains because the distant LOD of Fallout 4 sucks and you want something for the player on the screen to look at and also because you'll maybe have players flying around with vertibirds so they shouldn't be able to see the "void of nothing" at the edge of your map. It's quite interesting to see how Bethesda did it. Not only speaking about the heightmap but how it works in conjunction with their level design at the edges between the playable area and the "background", which often times is the same pattern: a wood area followed by a smaller mountain with some clouds, followed by a big mountain area without any clouds or trees. This way you get a pretty nice looking sight that creates atmosphere but is also saving ressources because the game doesn't need to render 10000 trees. So it's sometimes better to sacrifice realism for atmosphere and performance.

 

I don't know how experienced you are with creating new worldspacse but I can only recommend to create your own SOCL of trees, plants and later on ofc stuff like barrels, certain buildings etc. to speed up the whole level design process and ofc to plan everything thoroughly before you start such a big adventure. I know what I'm talking about because I already lost ~2 years on a worldspace and I'm starting a new one atm.

Edited December 23, 2019 by DocMoebius

[YouDoNotKnowMyName]

No, I don't really have any experience with worldspace design, otherwise I wouldn't be asking all of this :laugh:.

But I don't plan to publish this mod anyway, it's (like almost everything else that I do) just for "personal use".

At least I think so ....

But I get what you are trying to say with the "background" to the actual playable area.

Good for me that the real-life area I'm planning to recreate has pretty natural "borders": a large river on the west, mountains north and east and a large valley on the south "border" of the playable area.

So pretty "natural" restrictions, the valley could be "blocked off" by fallen rocks and stuff like that ...

Anyway ...

If I eventually finish it and have too much confidence, I might upload it ...

 

And yes, like you said, the StaticCollection thing, or whatever it's called, will be useful, especially for the buildings and stuff like that.

[DocMoebius]

Sounds good that your area has some simple natural borders - this should make things easier. Just generate LOD and set your worldspace borders in the region editor and see how it looks before you actually start adding any ground textures and other details so that you don't need to worry about reworking certain stuff later on. I really hope that you'll release your mod eventually. The community can never have enough cool worldspace mods :yes:.

 

Let me just give you some more advice regarding SCOLs(which are just one part of useful things you need to learn besides object pallets and packins) which will help you to save some time for your mod and to make things easier (so that you don't need to learn things the hard way like I did).

 

Static Object Collections have several great uses that can save you A LOT of time! Bethesda themself used them quite often(even more so in the later DLCs):

 

1.) Set dressing: Crates/barrels for instance are commonly used the most throughout the commonwealth for set dressing. You can almost see them everywhere. The problem is that it takes a lot of time to place ten thousands of them in the CK. So what I did was for instance in the case of barrels is, that I created 10-20 different SCOLs of barrels(usually 3-10 barrels in each SCOL) which I then just "paste" from my object pallet to quickly fill a certain area with barrels. In case that I need more variation I just break them up and relocate/rotate some of them and add other details. This way you can probably save like 90% of time for different objects, given that you'll probably work >~1-2 years on your worldspace.

 

2.) Architecture: There are two different ways of using SCOLs here. Firstly, Creating your own set of small buildings(usually shaped as simply as possible with doors on the back and the front so that people don't notice if you use them too often) to fill empty spaces between more complex designed custom buildings. Bethesda themself did exactly this throughout the game(just look up their SCOL buildings and you'll understand what I mean). Take for instance Concord. There are buildings which were designed by hand(the museum) in the CK, which takes a lot of time, and then you have SCOL buildings and static buildings to quickly fill in the gaps. This is also pretty apparent when you get to urban areas in the middle of the map. This also gives you the great advantage of being able to quickly perform a material swap for your SCOL buildings(for instance stone walls to wood walls) and it also allows you to inject your own style of buildings and therefore create uniqueness for your mod. Secondly, for architecture you can use them as some kind of template. You'll find yourself wasting a lot of time in the beginning when you try to create bigger buildings or ruins because you'll probably need to search for a lot of pieces by hand or you scroll through them in the render window. So what you can do, when you create a ruined building for instance, just take a SCOL of a ruined brick building(Bethesda already has some of them in Fallout4.esm) and just break it up to use the parts for your own ruined building.

 

3.) Trees/Plants: You'll noticed that there are SCOLs of certain plants/trees(e.g shrub groups and tree clusters). You can do the very same here and create your own SCOLs of different plants and trees to give the mod your own style and to speed up the whole process of adding plants/trees.

 

4.) Trash: Bethesda already has some really great static object collections and packins of cool road trash that you can use. Just select the "all" tab in the CK and search for "RoadSC" and you'll see some of their SCOLs for trash. Again, this is a really good way of saving a lot of time by either using the Bethesda stuff and adjusting it or creating your own SCOLs.

Edited December 24, 2019 by DocMoebius

[YouDoNotKnowMyName]

Thanks for the advice!

Yeah, that's what I planned to to: Create the few "important" and unique buildings "by hand" (custom meshes) and use "default assets" for the other buildings.

Currently i am trying to learn where all of the static objects actually are in the CK. (I worked with Skyrim for years, so I'm learning where to find / how to use all of the Falllout4 assets in the CK).

[YouDoNotKnowMyName]

Uhh... I just tried to convert a heightmap with that texconv tool and it didn't work. Here are the parameters that I used (or whatever that stuff is called):

 

texconv.exe -w 16384 -h 16384 -f R32_FLOAT -ft DDS "D:\StuffForGames\Fallout4\ModDev\FK\ForExport.png"

 

The tool gives me the following:

 

reading D:\StuffForGames\Fallout4\ModDev\FK\ForExport.png (16384x16384 B8G8R8A8_UNORM_SRGB 2D) as FAILED [convert] (8007000e)

 

I have no idea why it doesn't work. At first I had the wrong size (4097 px X 16321 px, like the CK recommended for -64 | -254 to +63 | +255) an texconv complained that the image size was not "power of 2", so I changed the size to 16384 px X 16384 px.

[DieFeM]

What I could find about this error: https://forum.step-project.com/topic/14073-error-executing-texconv-returned-error-failed-compress-8007000e/?p=235592

The error number 8007000e from TexConv supposedly means "Ran out of memory"

 

 

So I guess it happens because the image is to big, try converting it to tga in gimp, then to dds.