I Hate Grass!

[David Brasher]

Okay. My computer is weak. If I bought a really powerful one, grass would be fun to play with and wouldn't bog down the game.

 

But the modding issue effects all modders and you just can't throw money at it. It seems like all my mods involve removal of grass. I almost never have to add any grass. Grass is invisible in the CS. I sure hope they change that for TES 5. Grass grows randomly, so if you want it to stop growing through your sidewalks, porches, and boulders, you have to cut a wide firebreak to be sure that not a single strand is in the wrong place. And this can look stupid just like waving grass growing through a sidewalk looks stupid.

 

Each exterior cell has a limited number of ground textures available, so you can't pick the one you want, you have to pick what is available. It seems like most cells have 90% grassy textures and 10% no-grass textures. Many of the no-grass textures are inappropriate, such as solid stone.

 

Does anyone have any ideas about what to do with the problem of grass?

 

Is there a way to quickly pull up a list of all ground textures in a cell to speed up the process of finding the one that is no-grass?

[grmblf]

Grass is invisible in the CS but you know when you're painting with grass textures because they have the word "grass" in their name. You can't bypass the max textures limit per cell, but to choose the right one and not just one that has been already used you could "paint" the whole cell you're working on with the same texture (it doesn't matter wich one) so now you could start using the ones you'd like.

[Vagrant0]

Is there a way to quickly pull up a list of all ground textures in a cell to speed up the process of finding the one that is no-grass?

In the object window (that big palette that is normally on the left and has all the forms) there's a listing of landscape textures. In this list all the ground textures are displayed, and all of them can be edited to see what grasses are linked with that texture in case you wanted to change or just double check what is linked to a texture. Sorting the list alphabetically is useful since you will be able to see textures as they are named, making those textures that look like others which are in use, but have no grass entries attached to them easier to find. Textures without grasses attached are usually suffixed with "NOGRASS". The texture list in the landscape editor can also be sorted by name, and is generally much more useful that way. Both the list in the landscape editor and the listing in the object window can be used to select the texture you are painting with.

 

If you are finding that there are no landscape textures which have "NOGRASS" for the area you are working on, it is fairly simple to just clone one of the existing entries, change the name, remove the linked grasses, and paint with that texture. If the texture is vanilla, you won't even need to include any resources or be concerned about that texture working with texture replacement mods.

 

As for working... Using grmblf's method is a fairly common one. If you paint the whole cell(s) with grassless textures, you can then add grasses back to only those parts that you want it. If you're concerned about things looking blocky, you can always paint in more organic shapes or with varying opacity. This is one of the reasons why I typically tell people not to rely on the region generators to create final content... It's far more difficult to go back over those cells with grassless textures, and then try to build a road than it is painting the entire cell from scratch. The same applies for towns and the like.

 

Just keep in mind that any portion cell with even 10% opacity of a grassy texture has a chance of having those grasses show up.