Texture change after generating Precombine / Visibility Data

[fiddleflap]

I would like to remove the brambles, rocks and shrubs from the crop fields at Sunshine Tidings. I have set these objects to be ‘initially disabled’ within the Creation Kit and after saving and testing my plugin it all appears to be working as intended:

 

 

From my very limited understanding I believe this breaks the games precombined meshes and ideally I should regenerate them. However after doing so the texture for the crop field in game changes from ‘FarmPlot01CrackedMud’ to ‘FarmPlot01’ although it appears correctly in the Creation Kit:

 

 

The disabled objects are in cells -21,8 and -22,8 and I use the following steps to re-generate the Precombine and Visibility data:

• World > PreCombine Geometry for Current Cell ( -21,9 )
• World > PreCombine Geometry for Current Cell ( -22,9 )
• Visibility > Generate Visibility for Current Cell ( -21,9 )
• Visibility > Generate PreCombined Visibility for Current Cell ( -21,9 )

I am guessing I must be doing something wrong and hope someone can let me what I can do to correct this.

[fiddleflap]

Managed to find a fix. Disabled the required objects including the crop fields and then regenerated the precombines and visibility data as before, then copied and pasted each of the crop fields and then enabled each copy. Seems strange to me but it works and I don’t get the micro stutters in the area that I would experience if I never regenerated the precombines :laugh: .

[84Cronos]

Bethesda did material swaps in two different ways: 1.) locally for an object in the world via a matswap from the drop down menu 2.) a custom matswap for a copy of the base object itself. From what I can tell from my testing, it appears that the latter always reverts back the matswap to the default material from the object's .nif after generating precombines/previs with the standard CK approach. What you could therefore do is, replace the original farm plots with "FarmPlot01" via "CRTL + F" and then apply a CrackedMud material swap(you might need to create one if there is none).

 

This obviously brings up the question how Bethesda avoided running into the same problems, since there are literally hundreds of these weird matswaps all over the game.

[lee3310]

Bethesda did material swaps in two different ways: 1.) locally for an object in the world via a matswap from the drop down menu 2.) a custom matswap for a copy of the base object itself. From what I can tell from my testing, it appears that the latter always reverts back the matswap to the default material from the object's .nif after generating precombines/previs with the standard CK approach. What you could therefore do is, replace the original farm plots with "FarmPlot01" via "CRTL + F" and then apply a CrackedMud material swap(you might need to create one if there is none).

 

This obviously brings up the question how Bethesda avoided running into the same problems, since there are literally hundreds of these weird matswaps all over the game.

I ran into a similar problem with "modernHouse" and nothing worked except changing the material in the nif itself (you can also edit the precombined nif after generating it but you will have find the right one. I think there is an xedit script for that)

[greekrage]

2 ways to fix the issue...

 

a) open the nif in nifskope and change material/textures and re-import it into the game as a different nif..

 

b) the lazy way... Grab anything small enough to be embedded in the original nif that has ONE texture and isnt a texture swap and make a scol... Note : swap the textures before doing so... Now the precomb generation will ignore the original swaps...

[PJMail]

The people who generate lots of precomb/previs for mods (including their own) generally have a process for creating precombines that include running a script to add in these matswaps.

If you are interested in their accumulated wisdom on this subject I would suggest you look into the various Discord forums mentioned in the "Previsbine Repair Pack" (PRP) nexus mod as a starter.

BenRierimanu has useful info here as well, though this is for using the command line version of precombine/previs generation so probably something you will get to eventually.

 

Problems are still being found so surprisingly after 8 years building precombines/previs (previsbines) is still an area of active investigation.