Help with LOD Generation

[TrickyVein]

Read this, and maybe this as well.

 

Delete the lod settings for the mojave wasteland before regenerating LOD objects. These are located at

 

data\LODsettings\wastelandnv.dlodsettings

 

 

When you say that 'the rocks are still using the atlas texture' you would be correct, since that's what every LOD object uses. You found the atlas texture. I suspect that blocks only look like that (how your rocks look) when the atlas texture is altered but an older iteration of lod settings are left in place and not allowed to be regenerated.

[IAssassinII]

Thanks, I'll give it a shot!

 

Yeah, I looked at both of those pages several times, but for some reason never payed any attention to regenerating LOD data.

Edited February 3, 2014 by IAssassinII

[IAssassinII]

I deleted all of the LOD data for Wasteland NV in the meshes, textures, textures TGA, and LODsettings folders. I generated the objects in the Wasteland NV worldspace in the GECK, saved, exited out, and copy and pasted the new LOD folders (only generated objects so "blocks" was the only one) from textues TGA into the data textures folder. I loaded up New Vegas and it was exactly the same ... the rocks still look weird. Is there a step I'm missing? Am I blind?

Edited February 4, 2014 by IAssassinII

[IAssassinII]

Maybe I should convert the DDS into TGA differently. I can't open any of the TGA textures in any of my programs. Before I just used a program that renamed all of the extensions. Maybe I should follow the Bethesda tutorial word for word on that. I don't understand though because the GECK still processed everything and generated the objects.

[TrickyVein]

How have you been converting them?

 

Register with Adobe to get a free copy of Photoshop CS2, then grab the plugins from Nvidia to open up and deal with .dds files.

 

.tga textures should be saved as 24-bit, 32-bit if an alpha channel is present.

 

This is odd, what you're dealing with. I wouldn't have thought it possible to generate additional LOD objects for the Mojave and now that you have, it's strange that only the rock pieces look the way that they do. They're not the only LOD objects that share texture resources with already generated blocks.

 

From where did you obtain the LOD meshes for the rock pieces? Maybe it's worth re-exporting them from Fallout - Meshes.bsa.

 

They're not flickering, are they? Flickering textures means an incorrect filepath/missing texture. If not, then it's as if the UVs of the rock LOD meshes aren't being recognized.

 

The thing is, vanilla New Vegas makes use of one kind of atlas texture with a different 'packing' or assemblage of textures then what you have created, and are using to texture your new LOD objects. So which atlas texture does the engine default to using? Since you're building in the same worldspace, there can only be one. With the addition of the sandcrete LOD textures in the atlas texture that you've created, things have been moved around.

 

I'd be curious to know what happens if you convert your .esp into an .esm and regenerate LOD objects. Not sure why that would make a difference, but this is new territory.

[IAssassinII]

I'll get on that immediately.

 

This might also be worth mentioning, in my Fallout New Vegas directory you can see these three files (which I have mentioned before).

 

http://gyazo.com/e3b3e8e7d30bc02940470c334d009de0.png

 

atlas_out_diffuse0.dds looks like the normal atlas texture that shows on the rocks:

 

http://gyazo.com/d52265f03f9bb0c64b35294cd50e25e6.png

 

And atlas_out_diffuse1.dds looks like this:

 

http://gyazo.com/d412c97b0a26c3ddeef62c139af60788.png

 

Is it a coincidence that the one type of texture that refuses to show properly in-game is separated from the atlas texture?

 

And I checked in-game to see if this was the only rock type missing (should have done this earlier), and, I don't know for sure, but it looks that way. I'm not sure about some other shades of rock but, Red Rock Canyon for example, looked fine. I guess it wouldn't make much sense though considering these look like the higher resolution textures rather than LOD's. Just thought it might have some significance.

 

I used this software to rename all of the DDS files all at once so I wouldn't have to go into each individual folder: http://www.1-4a.com/rename/ (I know it looks sketchy, but hey it worked)

 

Now I'm gonna get back on converting DDS into TGA using photoshop.

Edited February 5, 2014 by IAssassinII

[TrickyVein]

IDK what the atlas_out_diffuse textures are in the data folder. Don't think they matter. They're temporary files, or something.

 

I DO know that there is a limit to the resolution/size of the atlas texture, which is 2048x1024.

 

It could be that there simply isn't enough room to stick the LOD texture used for the rocks, which is entirely possible now that you've added the sandcrete LOD textures. Even though it looks like there's still room.

 

You can also try to 1) resize the LOD texture for the rocks in question or 2) point the rocks to another texture that's already used.

[IAssassinII]

Alright, I've been away from this for a while, but I ran into a bit of a roadblock. I had installed Photoshop CS2 and the NVIDIA plugins you linked me to. Yet I still can't open any DDS files. I did compare the old atlas texture to the new one ... you turned out to be right. The Sandcrete textures HAVE moved things around quite a bit and, as far as I can tell, the specific type of rock I saw all jacked up was the only thing taken off of the atlas texture. Now I'm hoping I can simply resize the rock texture, but I can't even open any DDS files... Any suggestions?

Edited March 16, 2014 by IAssassinII

[IAssassinII]

Alright, I resized the rock texture and put it in the WastelandNV.Buildings.dds file using Gimp. Here's what it looks like now:

 

http://i.gyazo.com/c5ed7730551d89c970332dda823cc1ef.png

 

Now what was I supposed to do next? I restarted New Vegas and my rocks still looked like crumpled up newspaper.

Edited March 17, 2014 by IAssassinII

[TrickyVein]

After you resize the texture you'll need to regenerate LOD objects. Simply placing new pixels into the atlas texture doesn't tell the engine where where the new texture coordinates are. That'd be my guess.