Need to change LOD mesh

[BadPenney]

I've lowered the terrain in a spot of the Wasteland world space to the point where a blurry lump with no collision data sticks out of the ground. I'm assuming that this is part of the LOD mesh for the area.

 

Does anyone know how to edit this mesh so that it is out of sight?

[Pax1138]

If this is the Wasteland we're talking about, then the only way to fix it I think is to redo the whole LOD, which I'm thinking you probably don't want to do.

 

I actually ran into this problem yesterday and the only solution I could find was to suck it in and redesign the area without lowering the ground any. It's funny, though, 'cause things turned out better due to the extra consideration I had to put into it. :biggrin:

 

Anyway, there may be a way to do it, but if so it's unknown to me. Maybe if you're lucky Yossarian will pop in and lay down the final word.

 

-Pax

[Yossarian22]

Ok here some more words about it.

 

LOD-Meshes are found in meshes.bsa

landscape\lod\wasteland

 

This are 1362 LOD-Chunks.

 

One of this LOD-Chunks is responsible for the Cell of your change.

 

So, here is something you could do in theory:

 

Copy the entire folder with the right folder-structure into data.

Now you only must find the LOD-Chunk, that is responsible for your changed Cell,

and delete it, go into GECK and click generate LOD for the Wasteland.

Now, only the deleted LOD-Chunk is generated, what is done in a few minutes.

 

Ok... so far about the theory.

 

And now good luck to find YOUR CELL between all those chunks...

 

I did this a lot for find LOD Cells in my own Worldspaces, but I not yet find any understandable system,

in the naming of LOD-Chunks. So, its a different story find a cell between 1300 or 30 chunks.

 

So my suggestion is, to forget it and just leave the wasteland as it is.

 

Gretz

[BadPenney]

Thanks for the replies.

 

I went ahead with the generate terrain meshes command under the World LOD menu. It took about 8 hours to finish, but it got rid of the blobs covering my new road.

 

I hopped around a bit to different locations in the Wasteland and don't see any negative effects. I'm hoping that regenerating LOD for all of the Wasteland for my mod will not cause any compatibility problems. Does anyone know if this is an issue?

[BadPenney]

Follow up report on regenerating Wasteland LOD for anyone interested:

 

After doing some terraforming in the Wasteland I found that I had dug down far enough that the LOD meshes showed up at close range looking like big blurry lumps, so I used the Generate World LOD function in hopes that I could get rid of them. 8 hours later the process was done. Several new folders had been created in the data directory of my FO3 install, including Meshes/Landscape/LOD/Wasteland. I checked in the game and the blurry lumps were gone and my new terrain level and road looked fine. I happily continued working on my mod.

 

3 days later I thought to check on the size of the LOD/Wasteland folder and found that the total memory allocation for all the terrain meshes generated for the Wasteland was just over 62 Megabytes.

 

I didn't really want to increase the size of my mod that much for such a minor terrain change that only affected 2 Wasteland cells, and thought of reloading a backup of my mod from before the LOD regeneration. I didn't really want to lose all the changes that I had made in the 3 days since then either.

 

All of the terrain meshes in the LOD/Wasteland folder have names that don't correspond with GECK cell naming methods, like Wasteland.Level4.X-4.Y-4.

 

I experimented a bit and created a new folder, cut half of the terrain NIFs and pasted them into the new folder, then started up FO3 and checked the terraformed area. The old LOD showed up again, so I pasted those NIFs back into the Wasteland folder and moved the rest into the new Hold folder I had made. The old LOD was gone again.

 

Doing this repeatedly with increasingly smaller groups of NIFs allowed me to trim away the NIFs that I didn't need down to just the 2 that actually affected my mod in about 1/2 hour. The total memory allocation for the new LOD has shrunk from 62 Mb down to 85 kilobytes. I can live with that.

 

The point of this story ( other than that I have a hopelessly anal retentive attention to detail and could probably benefit from psychotherapy ) is that if you are considering doing a Wasteland LOD change for your mod because you have changed the land levels, it is possible without an excessive increase in the size of your mod.

 

Just tell the GECK to start the Worldspace LOD regen before you go to bed or something, because it is about as exciting as watching grass grow.

[Yossarian22]

you know, the problem isnt the LOD Generation, but as I mention before, the naming varies from the wasteland cells and its nearly impossible to find a connection.

You took the hard route and filtered out the needed meshes, so your mod indead works with a changed landscape terrain, but its still a bit of a headache.

 

IF you would know the right LOD-Meshes in first place, you wouldnt even need to create the entire LOD.

You could just copy the wasteland lod meshes out of the bsa archive and then delete the meshes you want to regenerate.

Then click lod generate and only the deleted ones are recreated.

So this would be done in 5 min.

 

The Problem is here, that somebody needs to find out what LOD-Chunks are responsible for what cell.

If somebody can do that, this would be a great breakthrough in F3 Modding.

[SpeedyB64]

I would ask the FOMM team if they could possibly make a tool for that.

[BadPenney]

I would ask the FOMM team if they could possibly make a tool for that.

That would be a much appreciated outcome for many. The time consuming and tedious process that I took must prevent people from being as creative with their mods as they could be.

 

The 2 meshes that I ended up with are Wasteland.Level4.X-4.Y24 and Wasteland.Level4.X-8.Y24 and correspond to wilderness cell -4, 25 and wilderness cell -5, 25.

 

I also see that they are viewable with Nifscope and are shown offset from the axis of Nifscope by x-4 and y 24 and x-8 and y 24, respectively. Their blocks straddle the z 0 level, so the level 4 may refer to Z elevation.

 

http://www.fallout3nexus.com/imageshare/images/1103832-1244229409.jpg

 

They could possibly be manually modeled with Blender or 3dsMax and placed back into the game. I picture an LOD city outline that a player can see from a distance, but disappears into the terrain as he gets closer, like a mirage.

[Yossarian22]

The 2 meshes that I ended up with are Wasteland.Level4.X-4.Y24 and Wasteland.Level4.X-8.Y24 and correspond to wilderness cell -4, 25 and wilderness cell -5, 25.

 

I also see that they are viewable with Nifscope and are shown offset from the axis of Nifscope by x-4 and y 24 and x-8 and y 24, respectively. Their blocks straddle the z 0 level, so the level 4 may refer to Z elevation.

 

Thats very interesting. Good find out. It could proberbly be a step closer to the F3 LOD Secret.

 

They could possibly be manually modeled with Blender or 3dsMax and placed back into the game. I picture an LOD city outline that a player can see from a distance, but disappears into the terrain as he gets closer, like a mirage.

 

I already tried that, and only got game crashes. This dont mean it cant be done. Maybe I just dont have enough skills in nifscope for do it right.

[TheCutSnake]

I made the mistake of working below ground level too.

 

I ran the LOD generate mesh and waited the 10 hours it took. There are no new folders and the ground looks exactly the same.

 

Since I spent 5 weeks making this large mod, and there it would take an awful lot of work to raise the whole area, I really need to get this fixed.

 

All I want to do is fix this little problem so I can share my mod with you all.

 

Any help would be really appreciated.

 

Thanks,

Cut Snake