[wip/recruitment] The Changing Seasons of Skyrim

[vfxninjaeditor]

I could see using decals being an issue. Not to mention, but we would probably have to use a lot of them which would mean settings like fDecalLifetime= iMaxDecalsPerFrame= uMaxDecals= would have to be significantly increased in a person's .ini files. Doesn't fDecalLifeTime= indicate that decals are on a timer? That's what they are used for, right? To show a new texture on top of a texture for a short period of time. I also think it might cause more performance issues than we want. Having so many decals when we can just make a pre-generated texture.

[snapmoderator]

Agreed, lets go with pre-generated textures. We should make a list of the ground textures that we want to have snow or leaves or grass or dirt or ???.

 

Obviously a lot of them are mixture of these already. Most of them have leaves or snow on them already. In a way this presents a conundrum. Maybe not conundrum, but we need to make textures that are the basic ground without the added elements already.

 

Then somebody will need to create various version of alpha layers of leaves, snow and grass to overlay.

 

Do we have anybody who can do these overlay textures? The leaves are straight forward, but snow needs a bit of thought to make look convincing at varying stages of snow coverage. Also we probably need to do a few grass ones. So some grass/dirt ones will have varying levels the grass getting thinner and thicker.

[vfxninjaeditor]

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).

[snapmoderator]

Well even though Cabal doesn't usually give permission, could pay to still ask and explain the desire of using what we consider the best textures and give him full credit. After all this is a pretty high impact mod as far as becoming a mainstream must have mod. Hopefully he will want to become part of that. Otherwise keep hunting :-P

 

Oh yeah another overlay we might want is ground flowers, like clover and dandelions, to help with intensity of the added mesh flowers and grass.

Edited November 17, 2013 by snapmoderator

[vfxninjaeditor]

Well even though Cabal doesn't usually give permission, could pay to still ask and explain the desire of using what we consider the best textures and give him full credit. After all this is a pretty high impact mod as far as becoming a mainstream must have mod. Hopefully he will want to become part of that. Otherwise keep hunting :-P

 

Oh yeah another overlay we might want is ground flowers, like clover and dandelions, to help with intensity of the added mesh flowers and grass.

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

[snapmoderator]

Those look amazing!! The shadows are built into the texture right? Eye popping goodness :)

 

To make things potential more complex, but possible required is to think about having regions. For example does the Winterhold area have its own climate? Would you expect Winterhold to thaw as quickly as the Reach? The problem is that snow textures are the same for every corner of Skyrim. In fact you might expect some areas never to thaw completely at all. The upper mountains should probably retain some level of snow all year around.

 

For my mod Immersive Snow and Ice, my plan was to regionalize Mountains and Rocks for this type of idea. I'm was going to have very frozen ice, snow and rocks for Winterhold and soft melted snow for warmer regions.

 

If we were to attempt this then it might mean just phasing transitions for areas at different times. But we would need to make new forms for each ground texture per region so that we can target specifically. We can define cells to regions and use TES5Edit to change the forms to the new ones.

 

Also the scripting will need to have relationship between calendar intervals and transitions for each region, to know when to trigger the swaps.

 

It might not be even regions, could be divided between North and South. Or Cold, Mild and Warm.

Edited November 18, 2013 by snapmoderator

[vfxninjaeditor]

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.

[snapmoderator]

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. But also we should look at every other aspect, like models, trees, etc.

 

The models should be categorized so that we can control of level of directional snow to be appropriate for the general climate. Trees will be phased differently as well.

 

Its probably not as much work as it sounds. Its just making sure that we perceive how transitions should look for varying regions.

 

As far as conflicts/compatibility I'm not sure. Because we will be creating new forms, any mod that has reference to those specific forms will not apply the changes. So for example if a mod applies snow footprints decals only if form is equal to what normally is the snow land texture, unless we create a patch, it wont know what the new forms are. So might pay to think about existing mods a little bit.

[vfxninjaeditor]

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.

[snapmoderator]

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.