Trouble when generating LOD

[ShepardDarksky]

Hello I was wondering if anyone could help me find out why this new world-space I'm doing keeps loading in this seemingly incomplete LOD.

I'm fairly new to generating LODs and after a painful experience in the Creation Kit I decided to opt for XLODgen as it seemed much more straightforward, but even after generating the LOD I keep seeing flickering in the water and very visible pop-in when getting close to other cells.

 

 

 

I honestly don't know if it has to do with the draw distance or with something in the CK.

I'd really appreciate some advice.

 

Edited April 7, 2023 by ShepardDarksky

[84Cronos]

It's hard to tell from your screenshot alone, but your object LOD seems be either nonexistent, out of place or faulty. Did you follow proper tutorials on how to generate LOD via xLODgen? Did you even generate object LOD? Is everything placed in the right directories?

[ShepardDarksky]

I mainly generated the world LOD, not Object LOD.

I know I'm most possibly missing a step or doing something wrong but I just don't know.

Edited April 7, 2023 by ShepardDarksky

[ShepardDarksky]

Okay I just went in and regenerated the LOD, placed the meshes and textures folders in the data directory.

Still the low quality terrain and set pieces are still there.

 

 

[84Cronos]

Did you follow a tutorial? For instance Zorkaz' tutorial on how to generate LOD via xLODgen? And don't worry about the low quality LOD meshes/textures, that's exactly their purpose, to be performance friendly because the player won't see them most of the time or they're really far away. That's why you try to hide ugly spots at times by adding something to the foreground or by adding additional details which have LOD and which make sense in the context of your scene and your overall composition. Just add some texture painting and maybe a couple more rocks and trees and it's gonna look pretty different already.

[ShepardDarksky]

Big thanks, that helped me clear up a couple things, but I still don't understand why the terrain looks like this when looking at it from a far distance.

 

 

 

 

I get It's probably because the game isn't loading the rest to help on performance but still I'd like to find a way to load in that area of the map to make it visible.

 

[84Cronos]

Is there water behind the tree line? If not then something went wrong. I also assume that these trees aren't supposed to be hovering in midair, so I suppose that they're probably placed on meshes which don't have LOD models. When it comes to creating landscapes or exterior spaces in general, one always needs to take into account if an object has a LOD mesh attached to it. You can check that for each individual object by opening up an object in the object window and checking if the box "Has Distant LOD" is ticked.

 

To clarify the low quality part again: Imagine the game would load each and every mesh/texture at its normal quality level for as far as the player can see. The computational power and memory that would be needed for such a task would be completely insane, in other words completely impracticable for normal consumer systems. That's why only a very limited number of assets in a fixed radius around the player are being loaded "normally" at all times. Everything beyond that is either not loaded at all or only a heavily simplified version of the object is loaded if available. In the case of Fallout 4 they had to optimize around old gen consoles which means lots and lots of super blurry, low res textures, lights without shadows and many other simplifications for performance reasons. Hence the ugly LOD ground textures, although I'm not 100% sure if something might have gone wrong on your end because the screenshots are kinda blurry, it's WIP and I don't know what I'm supposed to see/what you imagine what it should look like based on your level design. Again, I would recommend to do some texture painting, since especially the default LOD ground texture comes with some heavy and ugly normal maps.

[ShepardDarksky]

There is supposed to be terrain in that area that extends to where the lighthouse is.

 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/it90fxitkj96adj/W5.gif?dl=0

 

Also I checked if the trees had distant LOD, but it appears that the tree clusters I'm using don't even an option for it.

Instead what happens is that only the top half of some trees are showing up while others just disappear completely.

Edited April 7, 2023 by ShepardDarksky

[84Cronos]

The tree clusters are SCOLs(Static Collections). You can turn multiple static objects into a SCOL which allows you to use them as if they were one object, e.g. when moving them around or applying material swaps. At least in most scenarios. The SCOLs just use the LOD meshes of their respective base objects, so that shouldn't be a problem as long as there is a LOD mesh attached.

 

From what I can tell, based on your newly uploaded gif, it appears that the tree LOD seems to be indeed faulty. Seeing just the top definitely isn't normal. The dirt road and shack disappearing is afaik normal as they have no LOD models if I recall correctly. Are you using the right lod settings file and was your worldspace created correctly? Are you generated LOD for the whole worldspace or only specific chunks? Again, which tutorial are you following?

[ShepardDarksky]

I've followed multiple tutorials, starting with this one by Neeher, which mainly used the CK to generate LOD.

Then one by Candoran2 that used the Skyrim xLODgen. And this one by Luxor. I also used the instructions in the Far Object LOD Improvement Project.

 

I know it's been a bit of a mess as I've tried multiple times with varying results while generating LOD for the entire map.

 

I'm mainly building the worldspace to try and finish it before generating LOD, and placing down all the assets before texture painting the ground.

At this point I honestly don't know if that was a good idea.

Edited April 8, 2023 by ShepardDarksky