Half of all models/items in large cells won't show up in my Creation Kit's render window, can't mod anymore

[VanyarElf]

Hey everyone, recently upon booting up my Creation Kit I've discovered a problem which seemed to crop up at some point but wasn't present before, which is that every single relatively large cell I try to edit in the Creation Kit, from the base game that is, seems to be missing at least half of all its static objects, items, containers, etc. It's as if my render window developed some kind of rendering quota. 

All of those statics and objects still appear in the cell view list, and if I pull their model from the object window and place it in the cell, it will show up normally with its mesh and texture, but half of the cell's original objects remain completely invisible and unclickable in the render window. For example, here I am booting up the BoS bunker in Hidden Valley, and you can see it only loads up a couple of hallways, while everything else is missing. You can also see that the navmesh for the missing rooms is still there, and the room boundaries too by the way, but the statics and items are not. 

This is completely preventing me from making any mods and I desperately need some help figuring it out. Things I did so far:

Reinstall the creation kit, checked that multiple masters are allowed to load, checked that the statics and objects aren't missing from the game itself ( They aren't, they're only gone in the render window). 

[madmongo]

Check your GECKCustom.ini file. Somewhere in there should be a setting called bUseMultibounds. It should say either bUseMultibounds=0 or bUseMultibounds=1. If it's 1, set it to 0 If it's 0, set it to 1. If it's not there at all, add it.

There is no setting that works for all cells. You'll have to flip it back and forth depending on what cells you are editing.

[VanyarElf]

On 11/21/2023 at 9:13 PM, madmongo said:

Check your GECKCustom.ini file. Somewhere in there should be a setting called bUseMultibounds. It should say either bUseMultibounds=0 or bUseMultibounds=1. If it's 1, set it to 0 If it's 0, set it to 1. If it's not there at all, add it.

There is no setting that works for all cells. You'll have to flip it back and forth depending on what cells you are editing.

Oh wow, I can't believe that actually fixed it, thank you so much. Why the hell does the GECK have a function that randomly hides half the cell and how did I manage to turn it on..

[madmongo]

Multibounds are used by the game engine to cut down the amount of processing that it has to do to figure out what it needs to render on the screen.

The GECK should still show everything in the cell regardless of the multibounds (because otherwise how are you going to be able to edit the cell?) but that's just yet another GECK bug. I assume that they added multibounds processing later and never bothered to update the GECK's rendering window to ignore it.

Most people turn it on when they are trying to edit certain cells that either won't render properly or will crash the GECK with it turned off. Most cells will work fine with it on or off, but then there are some cells that you can only edit with it on and other cells that you can only edit with it off. Isn't the GECK fun?

I've always said that the GECK is really a secret Vault-Tec experiment designed to test modder's frustration levels.