[wip/recruitment] The Changing Seasons of Skyrim

[snapmoderator]

I've had this slightly crazy, but potential genius idea. We could apply snow on ground textures using grass. Wait here me out! You can have up to 3 grasses per land texture right joshezzell?

 

I was thinking about 2d planes that just sit on the surface, with various alpha textures. But actually its possible that we could do little low poly mounds of snow as well.

 

One of the many neat things about doing it this way is that we can have multiple textures for snow, like ice, dirty snow, fresh powdered snow, etc and not have to generate a new set of textures for every combination of ground textures we want to apply them to.

Edited November 18, 2013 by snapmoderator

[vfxninjaeditor]

Using the Creation Kit you would do a search and replace on each form for a given cell anyway. So either way we would be doing a blanket replace, rather than tricky painting.

 

But we will probably need to do some manual editing because areas are going to cross over cells.

 

For higher regions I was thinking about checking the Z height of the objects and if its over a threshold then we can change to being the forms that we like. Once again some manual editing will be done around those fringes to make sure cut offs are not obvious.

 

Ah, okay. This is clearly why I will only be doing texture work. I don't know enough about the convoluted engine. :D

 

I've had this slightly crazy, but potential genius idea. We could apply snow on ground textures using grass. Wait here me out! You can have up to 3 grasses per land texture right joshezzell?

 

I was thinking about 2d planes that just sit on the surface, with various alpha textures. But actually its possible that we could do little low poly mounds of snow as well.

 

One of the many neat things about doing it this way is that we can have multiple textures for snow, like ice, dirty snow, fresh powdered snow, etc and not have to generate a new set of textures for every combination of ground textures we want to apply them to.

 

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.

[snapmoderator]

Ok I'm thinking that using grass for snow will not work for 2d planes. Ground textures contour with the height map, and using planes even though they slope to surfaces will still always be off parallel with ground. It depends if its noticeable, which chances are it will be.

 

However I still think that snow mounds will be perfectly legit, and an added bonus for deep winter.

 

joshezzell this is the mesh "meshes\landscape\snowdrifts\melteddrift02.nif". It would need to be scaled, but could you look at adding that as grass to the game? Its a 31kb file size, and for another mod I'm helping on we have a 62kb grass, so size shouldn't be a problem. If it crashes via the CK, then we can add it through TES5Edit instead.

 

http://i.imgur.com/SPqt6Hh.jpg

Edited November 18, 2013 by snapmoderator

[Soolie]

Hey guys, I'll be on and off a lot this week since I have a computer science and a physics exam this week

But I'll keep you posted on ideas and suggestions

 

Quick notes:

-I can do some pretty splendid lod textures when the time comes

-I can help with terrain textures too

-I thought of your snow grass object things earlier but I havent had time to try it out yet (I have some ideas to expand on it a little)

- you can have more than 3 grass objects????? Well in that case I have some more work to do for tropical Skyrim ;)

-I can do road textures too

- Actualy I can do almost any textures xD

- more later, gotta go have dinner :3

[vfxninjaeditor]

joshezzell this is the mesh "meshes\landscape\snowdrifts\melteddrift02.nif". It would need to be scaled, but could you look at adding that as grass to the game? Its a 31kb file size, and for another mod I'm helping on we have a 62kb grass, so size shouldn't be a problem. If it crashes via the CK, then we can add it through TES5Edit instead.

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.

[Soolie]

 

joshezzell this is the mesh "meshes\landscape\snowdrifts\melteddrift02.nif". It would need to be scaled, but could you look at adding that as grass to the game? Its a 31kb file size, and for another mod I'm helping on we have a 62kb grass, so size shouldn't be a problem. If it crashes via the CK, then we can add it through TES5Edit instead.

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.

 

 

I'll try that now :)

[snapmoderator]

I managed to add it as grass to the game. Actually it conforms to slopes better than I expected. The only real times you noticed planes not being parallel is when it fixed to a slope and it runs off the end. But in general its pretty good. I'm thinking that we can give 2d planes a go as well (or flattish) and maybe we can use grass snow after all.

 

[EDIT]

Yeah in fact I'm convinced if we do small meshes and up the density to compensate that this will work :smile: Now it just comes down to looks and whether it's going to be as realistic as we want it. Will still need to do transitional textures I think, but still this will go a long way to our gradual changes. We can do a daily change to the value of the alphas of the snow grass for melting and snow fall.

Edited November 18, 2013 by snapmoderator

[Soolie]

Also, perhaps we should think about doing something like this for the northern areas during winter? The vanilla snowy trees just don't look... well.. snowy enough :\
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/12/Snow-covered_fir_trees.jpg

[Soolie]

I've just been messing around with some of the landscape, Here are the results

 

http://i.imgur.com/NEOSUSj.jpg

 

 

http://i.imgur.com/4A8JOvZ.jpg

 

 

http://i.imgur.com/Elvlnla.jpg

 

 

http://i.imgur.com/37y1QGf.jpg

Edited November 18, 2013 by Soolie

[AlbinoPolarBear]

This is really cool and I will definitely keep track of it. I would help making this mod, but I am currently busy with another project.