Any good tutorials on cave making?

[Exoaria]

I love caves, as opposed to dungeons they are murky and have their own peculiar feel about them.
Unfortunately I don't love creating them anywhere near as much as I do burning down skeevers with fire spells in their atmosphere - anyone who is familiar with dungeons and the creation kit will know what I mean. A lot of people say that the cave tiles are not scaled, and are not meant to fit together. This is not true, they are just as much like Lego as the rest of the tiles. The difference is that just as there are front and wall tiles for the Nordic and Dwemer dungeons, the caves have a more complex system about them. Their pieces are labeled 01, 02, 03 etc. This is to ensure that you are able to effectively make a cave that snaps to the grid and doesn't have any of these terrible seams.
It's a lot harder than it sounds, though, and it's taken me this long to figure it out since half of the modding community was convinced that you just chuck a few dirt mounds on top and you're GTG.

I really just want someone to link me to a decent tutorial, with someone who knows what they're doing that gives a good explanation on how to make complex and beautiful cave systems that don't look like a public toilet you'd find around the back of your local Safeway. I need to have the basics reiterated to me, because I have had so much confusion and I can confirm that there is a proper way of making cave systems and I just need a good explanation and elaboration on what those processes are.

 

Even if there's someone decent here on the forum that can type out what they know about it all, I would appreciate it to no end. Currently my caves are looking very blank and amateur simply because I can't get a decent hold and knowledge of the system and effective way of creating them - otherwise, any links to videos/articles would be of just as much value to me. (I've seen For Adventure's tutorial on YouTube and although he was brilliant at explaining all the other aspects of Creation Kit, he had the laziest concept down for cave creation and by my assuming that you can just place random tiles down and cover them up with mounds and clutter as he said, my dungeons are looking like they were made by a five year old.)

[dfac364]

I don't know of any good tutorials but Ive made more caves than i can count, the way i do it is build the walls first because they will fit together and still allow for some variation, than with the middle pieces i scale them up or down to get a rough floor, than i add a couple cliff islands and go through with dirt mounds and boulders to break up any repetition and cover any seams. Ive made some pretty nice caves like this but be careful not to scale the middle pieces to much, it doesn't take much to make them look bad.

 

Also if your caves look like a five year old did them than you need to adjust the way in which you employ your dirt mounds and boulders, scale them, rotate them, and expose just the tops. you need to change it up and the dirt mounds should be mostly underground unless you are angling them and mixing them with boulders to go in a corner.

Edited May 24, 2013 by dfac364

[Twizzler77]

It's been 5+ years since I've done any modular environment work, so I'm not going to add anything directly.

 

However, I will point you here:

http://wiki.polycount.com/CategoryEnvironmentModularity?highlight=%28%5CbCategoryEnvironment%5Cb%29

 

And more specifically, a GDC 2013 talk about modularity in Skyrim:

http://blog.joelburgess.com/2013/04/skyrims-modular-level-design-gdc-2013.html

 

Hope this helps!