[LE] First impressions of Creation Kit and what I wish I knew before I started!

[bongodoctor]

I have spent the last week learning how to use creation kit to create an interior - which I hope will end up being a player home/explorable ruin with an NPC or two and possibly a quest etc. I have spent a lot of this time pulling what was left of my hair out and swearing at the computer as I got to grips with its quirky interface and controls. I am now on my third iteration and am at the point where I can put together an interior with a load door linked to another in the Tamriel worldspace, light fittings and light sources along with ambient lighting, sounds and music etc. Still have to tackle the actual contents, NPC's and quests etc.

 

However these are the things that took me a while to work out. There are lots of guides online with lots of useful tips, but they often don't explain the very basic things that I suspect people experienced enough to write the guides take for granted. So this is aimed squarely at complete newbies like myself...

 

Firstly even though I believe it is technically possible to get Creation Kit working with Skyrim VR it wasn't straight-forward and I ended up buying Skyrim SE just for the purposes of creating mods - I will develop and test in SE then play/deploy in Skyrim VR - keeping both systems completely separate. If you don't play Skyrim VR this isn't an issue.

 

The biggest barrier for me initially was having no idea what the names of the parts I need to drag into the render window that would connect with the parts I had already added. If there is a list online with pictures anywhere I would love to know where it is! There is a naming scheme of sorts, but it doesn't seem to be that logical or consistent, so I have had to learn by experimenting and trying to remember, often opening other interiors to see if they had something I was looking for to copy the name from etc. Some of these really aren't obvious at all for a novice - it took me a long time to discover the corresponding corridor pieces which connected to the doors etc, and the Dwemer set (which I am concentrating on initially) comes in three different sizes with some interoperability between them using special connecting pieces.

 

Once you have the pieces you have to get them to connect together with no gaps etc. This seems to work for pieces of a similar size/shape but some objects just don't fit together very well. The other issue was when I added pieces they were often floating high above the other pieces and it was taking me ages to get them lined up. Highlighting another piece before dragging the new piece on helps a bit, but the method I have settled on is to just layout a plan of the rooms using square floor pieces from a top down perspective and then simply changing the pieces using Ctrl+F to the pieces you want. That way all of the main room pieces are automatically lined up, although some pieces need re-aligning when rotated. If I set the snap to grid to 512 and snap to angle to 90 this makes it really easy to move things around and snap them together. With smaller objects I change this to 256, 128 or 64 etc and the angle to 45,30 or 15 for odd angles. It is also possible to adjust the position of objects by right clicking and editing them - similarly light radius and strength can be edited this way. I often find this much easier than trying to click and drag...

 

The second thing I struggled with was not being able to see parts of the room properly because other things were in the way. Markers can be hidden by pressing M, but you can also hide objects temporarily by double pressing 1 while they are highlighted - press 1 again to bring them back. This has made the whole process so much easier.

 

The third issue was that once I was up to about 5 rooms there were just so many pieces with the same name it was really easy to get confused - so I have now started naming all of the pieces with the mod name, room name and specific parts using A,B.C etc if there are more than one of a part - that way everything in the same room is always listed together in the object window. e.g. CastleSmithyCornerA

 

Another revelation was that everything looks much smaller in Creation Kit than it does in game as there is no way to judge the scale of the room parts in relation to the size of a player. I think in future I might add a dummy NPC or just an armour dummy to each room to give me a scale. In the first version I made I went into the interior in SE and discovered that the shelves and lights I had spent hours carefully placing on the walls where in fact about 12ft up and I couldn't reach any of the objects I had placed on them. Land of the Giants set...

 

I found creating a suitable entrance from Skyrim into the interior much trickier than I thought it would be. Firstly you need to find some real estate which isn't already occupied by something important, and then you have to try to fit the shape of the entrance to the landscape (I am not ready to start editing exterior landscape yet). As my interior will be inside a mountain/underground I had to try to find a suitable cliff face to attach it to and this took quite a long time to get right - I also needed stairs as the landscape wasn't flat - this might be a bit easier with a building which you could put on stilts or locate on a small mound etc.

 

I would recommend getting your basic interior layout and the external entrance built and linked so you can test entering and exiting before spending hours on an exterior/interior and finding it difficult/impossible to place. I had to add an extra hallway to my interior to make it correspond to the entrance structure above ground.

 

Anyway still very early days, but I will post an update if I have any more revelations with Creation Kit - in theory once you have a few interiors or rooms created you can then use them as templates for creating newer interiors much faster - but I can see how it takes modders months or years to create their elaborate buildings, cities, islands and quests etc...

Edited July 5, 2022 by bongodoctor

[greyday01]

While making your mod, everything you create, cells, potions, spells, NPCs, everything at all should all have IDs that start with the same 4-letter prefix. It makes it so much easier to find every object that you create for that mod. Scripts too. Meshes and textures not so much since they should all be in a folder with the same prefix so they will be easy to separate from meshes not created by you.

[bongodoctor]

While making your mod, everything you create, cells, potions, spells, NPCs, everything at all should all have IDs that start with the same 4-letter prefix. It makes it so much easier to find every object that you create for that mod. Scripts too. Meshes and textures not so much since they should all be in a folder with the same prefix so they will be easy to separate from meshes not created by you.

Yep I have now put the same name at the start of every item in my cells, followed by the room name, then the part name and finally the letter if there is more than one - so all of my items are grouped, and all the contents of each room is grouped together when looking in the editor - took a lot of time but worth the effort :smile:

Edited July 6, 2022 by bongodoctor

[bongodoctor]

So the next thing I have learned through responses to another post on this forum section is that there is a limit to how many items you can place in one cell without it starting to have an affect on performance etc (still don't know what that limit is yet - but sticking to five rooms per cell for now). So you need to divide your layout into different cells which are then connected by load doors etc - but they will all be contained in the same .esp file. It is this last bit I didn't grasp at first - i thought each unique cell corresponded to a seperate .esp - but I was wrong. So you can create a number of new cells in Creation Kit and link them together and they will be saved in the same .esp active file...

Edited July 6, 2022 by bongodoctor

[Shadeybladey]

Thanks for posting your experience.

[Pellape]

I mod Oblivion with CS (Construction Set) without any issues and support it as well, but when I opened CK 2012, when it finally came out the first time, it looked so different, well the UI is almost the same, but not at all really, well a lot but still... Some buttons are gone and some new are added. I closed it down again and never used it again until a week ago. I did the same with CS for Morrowind the first time I opened it 2004, but I got help from Qarl and AlienSlof and the other modders hanging at Canadian Ices forum around 2005, the best top modders at that time, so if they could use it, I could learn it as well. I will start making scripts next Saturday for Skyrim and we see if I can figure it out or not. I can script Oblivion in my sleep, but Skyrim looks a bit different. Well... I will figure it out. It was the same when Oblivion came out, we had to learn everything all over again 2006 as we did not had normals in Morrowind as one example and we made TIF, not DDS in the beginning as there where no DDS exporters available back then, so all our textures we made where blurred in game as TIF really sux. But we did that as a team at least. Qarl tought us the differences, as he managed to figure it all out and teach the rest of us slowly, but steady, how to make new textures, new meshes and get them into the game. Qarl passed away 2011, so he never had the chance to test Skyrim at all, R.I.P but his stuff is still available for Oblivion and his textures was the best I ever seen and I still use them. So what do I want to add or get with this?

 

I feel your frustration for sure as I feel frustrated myself right now :D Will I as I am an experianced Obliviom modder be able to learn to mod Skyrim? If we look at all 80000 Skyrim mods at Nexus, I would guess Yes really. I must learn it, there is no way I can avoid it any longer. Do I have fun in Oblivion? Yes I do really, specially as I managed to make my Oblivion setup very stable. It starts fast, so it goes fast to make stuff in CS and get into game and test it. The backside I see with Skyrim is the time it takes to actually get into the game and test stuff. It is so damn frustrating. The first thing I do when I wake up is to start Skyrim and walk away, eat breakfast, tickle my bellyring, grab a coffee, smoke a ciggy, and then the Continue Game button will be available, not before. :D Starting Oblivion takes a couple of seconds, even with ENB and OBSE included. Fast in, fast out, edit and so on, no waiting... I hate to wait, so frustrating... :wink:

Edited July 8, 2022 by Pellape

[greyday01]

Following the video tutorials at creationkit.com will help a lot for the basics

 

Darkfox127 has a lot of YouTube videos that go through common things that modders need like mannequins, bookshelves, custom containers and the like. He goes step by step and makes the processes very clear.

 

One thing when you are making a mod, keep a folder for mod stages. Save your esp into it often and add a note to the end of the name that tells what you just finished. I make a save and copy it there many time in each modding session. Makes it so much easier if you mess up and to go back a stage or two.

 

[bongodoctor]

Following the video tutorials at creationkit.com will help a lot for the basics

 

Darkfox127 has a lot of YouTube videos that go through common things that modders need like mannequins, bookshelves, custom containers and the like. He goes step by step and makes the processes very clear.

 

One thing when you are making a mod, keep a folder for mod stages. Save your esp into it often and add a note to the end of the name that tells what you just finished. I make a save and copy it there many time in each modding session. Makes it so much easier if you mess up and to go back a stage or two.

 

Good tip - I had been keeping a backup but not adding a note as to what stage I was at :smile: I really wish there was a way to lock pieces in place or group them together in the render window as I constantly end up accidently dragging the wrong piece - if there is please let me know :smile: I have been working my way through the videos and I am learning a lot - the thing I find hardest is just navigating around the render window and rotating the camera - it is especially tricky when trying to check inside small rooms etc - so I just save and boot up SE to check it for gaps etc... Does anyone know what the recommend number of items you can put in one cell before it affects performance?

Edited July 8, 2022 by bongodoctor

[bongodoctor]

I haven't used any of those games or kits myself, and I think the biggest issue in creationkit (and all 3D editors) is that you are trying to navigate a 3D environment on a 2D monitor with a X/Y mouse, so it is difficult for the computer to know which direction you want to go and unless the controls are completely intuitive it is very easy to make errors and get lost/confused. I think the best way to navigate and build would be by having a first person player camera so you could move around your construction using the same controls we use in game and place parts from this view. But CK is very old now and completely free so we can't complain.

 

I am not sure why Skyrim is taking so long to boot on your PC though - it takes about 5-10 seconds on my machine fpr SE and maybe 30 seconds for Skyrim VR (Rift S) and I only have a mid-range PC i7, 16GB ram and a Radeon RX590 - unless you are running 1000 mods with very high quality textures etc - I have about 150ish mods installed but no high quality textures or ENB etc - I only use Skyland, SMIM and a reshade mod - all my other stuff is quality of life and extra content etc...

I mod Oblivion with CS (Construction Set) without any issues and support it as well, but when I opened CK 2012, when it finally came out the first time, it looked so different, well the UI is almost the same, but not at all really, well a lot but still... Some buttons are gone and some new are added. I closed it down again and never used it again until a week ago. I did the same with CS for Morrowind the first time I opened it 2004, but I got help from Qarl and AlienSlof and the other modders hanging at Canadian Ices forum around 2005, the best top modders at that time, so if they could use it, I could learn it as well. I will start making scripts next Saturday for Skyrim and we see if I can figure it out or not. I can script Oblivion in my sleep, but Skyrim looks a bit different. Well... I will figure it out. It was the same when Oblivion came out, we had to learn everything all over again 2006 as we did not had normals in Morrowind as one example and we made TIF, not DDS in the beginning as there where no DDS exporters available back then, so all our textures we made where blurred in game as TIF really sux. But we did that as a team at least. Qarl tought us the differences, as he managed to figure it all out and teach the rest of us slowly, but steady, how to make new textures, new meshes and get them into the game. Qarl passed away 2011, so he never had the chance to test Skyrim at all, R.I.P but his stuff is still available for Oblivion and his textures was the best I ever seen and I still use them. So what do I want to add or get with this?

 

I feel your frustration for sure as I feel frustrated myself right now :D Will I as I am an experianced Obliviom modder be able to learn to mod Skyrim? If we look at all 80000 Skyrim mods at Nexus, I would guess Yes really. I must learn it, there is no way I can avoid it any longer. Do I have fun in Oblivion? Yes I do really, specially as I managed to make my Oblivion setup very stable. It starts fast, so it goes fast to make stuff in CS and get into game and test it. The backside I see with Skyrim is the time it takes to actually get into the game and test stuff. It is so damn frustrating. The first thing I do when I wake up is to start Skyrim and walk away, eat breakfast, tickle my bellyring, grab a coffee, smoke a ciggy, and then the Continue Game button will be available, not before. :D Starting Oblivion takes a couple of seconds, even with ENB and OBSE included. Fast in, fast out, edit and so on, no waiting... I hate to wait, so frustrating... :wink:

Edited July 8, 2022 by bongodoctor

[Pellape]

Well bongodoctor. I use old HardDrives, SKSE64, 260 mods now but not big textures, as I use the performance textures, that was fixed to a proper size and also cleaned, after Bethesda faked them for SE, making them double sized by only rescaling them. I use an NVIDIA 730 or whatever, I cannot check it as I am not at home right now, it is not a bad GX Card, but it has only 4Gb RAM and I have 8Gb RAM in my computer. So maybe that is the issue, that I should get a GX card with 8Gb RAM and install 16Gb at my game comp? Oblivion starts so fast, Skyrim takes 5 min at least to start up.