Help Generating LOD

[Deleted1205226User]

This is the most complete guide about LOD in English, I know:

http://www.truancyfactory.com/tutorials/fallout3/fallout_lod.html

[Fallout2AM]

on Beth GECK guide + engineer guild + few personal considerations

I was meaning Truancy factory

[RoyBatterian]

That's the one I meant too... darn it :D

[Thaiauxn]

I'd be down to help contribute my knowledge to a comprehensive guide as well. Ever since I made the switch over to doing environment art for CryEngine I've forgot a lot about GECK, but I'll whip out our old notes and add to it. Especially the map making part. Other than Beyond Boulder Dome, I think F: PB is the only mod with a custom world map for the pip-boy, so I could contribute that tutorial section too.

 

I don't want anyone else to deal with what JoshBadWritter is going through. I know how it feels. Plus, Josh is a nice guy, so I'd like to help.

 

http://media.moddb.com/images/articles/1/112/111252/auto/ScreenShot362.jpg

 

This screenshot is using a really old trick to get the GECK to behave using EMH's method from his Alton, IL mod. Basically what we did was use FNV Edit to rip the .esp apart and render it down to 9 Blocks:

 

 

 

We then saved 9 copies of this plugin and rendered each Block in the GECK, which took around 2 hours to complete. We then used the original plugin and rendered a 10th time just to get the dlodsettingsfile, and from there it just skipped all the heavy s***, stitched the boarders, and output our final world mesh. But that took DAYS.

 

It wasn't until Freddie arrived with his knowledge that we were able to run it through from start to finish - and that took 14 days, straight. From what Josh says his world is just a little space, so that certainly helps. This method could work, so I'll try to write it up tomorrow.

 

After the world mesh is decimated, it's smooth sailing.

 

HA! No, lol. You still need to render your terrain texture, which is easy. No problem there.

 

Objects, however, just like the lip-sync tool, shipped broken. In order to render objects, you need to export ALL of the .dds textures from the New Vegas BSA, convert them to .TGAs, and save an ALPHA channel for each one, otherwise you get this:

 

http://media.moddb.com/images/articles/1/112/111611/auto/ScreenShot477.jpg

 

Chucksteel so graciously made such a conversion for the community that I linked earlier. http://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/36693/?

 

But he forget the alphas. :tongue: So our Jedi Master Freddie went ahead and made those for all of the files. I might still have them in dropbox so I can upload them.

 

The last issues are painting the map, which you CAN DO, but it all has to be done by hand. Professional GECK had a tool to combine hand painted textures made in photoshop with GECK terrain. Nowadays this is totally standard fare - every engine can do this on the fly, no rendering required. GECK, however, shipped with this feature broken.

 

 

If you use the "combine hand painted textures" feature to our non-commercial GECK, it would seize up and die trying to render the LOD. So no matter what, after you have a heightmap, you need to manually paint the landscape one cell at a time. It has no mip-map painting tools, which is incredibly frustrating, and there is no way to import a decimated mesh to GECK, unfortunately. It has to crunch the terrain decimation itself or its coordinates don't match the terrain. After you adjust the heightmap manually, you also have to totally redo your LODs, so you only have one shot to get everything right on the first render.

 

The last button: There are no trees in New Vegas. Trees are handled as objects instead.

 

TrickyVein and ChuckSteel would be good folks to ask to contribute also, but they are both very busy. Miles, I think, has a guide for his DEM -> Heightmap ->GECK somewhere, along with an LOD tutorial. His method uses all free software.

 

A complete guide would have made the process much much better looking and far less painful. The price of ignorance+determination is very steep. :tongue: So a new guide to spare future GECK environment artists that pain would make me happy.

[RoyBatterian]

Sesom knows quite a bit too so I would like to see him contribute.

 

The problem with Plants and Tree's apaprently is the low poly models needed to properly generate the LOD for them. For some reason Fallout 3 Tree LOD works, but NV's is broken. It's thought that obsidian just didn't know how to properly generate the LOD, and got around it by making the "trees" as object LOD. There doesn't seem to be low poly models for much of the needed object LOD, buildings and other things that obsidian made are strange and don't match up very well with the high poly ones, or remained high poly it seems... This is second hand information for me though, Tricky, Chuck and Sesom can elaborate and correct anything I've misunderstood here. Vurt can probably contribute to this discussion too as he generated LOD and made low poly meshes for his flora overhaul for FO3.

[Nimboss]

This is a bit hasty reply, but I'm busy with work related stuff so apology if it is not correctly made.

@Thaiauxn
"Especially the map making part. Other than Beyond Boulder Dome, I think F: PB is the only mod with a custom world map for the pip-boy, so I could contribute that tutorial section too."

Well I made one mod map for NV called Green Isle new world space, it was very tricky since my world space was not square, and the map had to be scaled a lot to match the world space coordinates for map markers. To get a picture for the map to work with I used TESAnnwyn to export the hightmap as a .bmp and made the rest in a paint program.

The part with Generate Terrain Textures make me little confused about what I have missed? So there are better ways than use the GECK tool to paint what kind of grass or sand texture you want on land? Or did I totally got it wrong what it is used for?


"The last button: There are no trees in New Vegas. Trees are handled as objects instead."

There are (speed)trees in NV, it's just that there are very few left over (even some more left overs in FO3), which make it very boring, and the LOD texture for trees are miss scaled default by 30% on hight, if I recall correctly.
I use them in the aforementioned Green Isle mod also. Also the LOD of those are not persistent, moving to long away even the LOD sprite is disabled (not found the correct game setting for that one).
Bethesda anyway have moved more and more away from SpeedTree since Oblivion to make all as models instead and own LOD models, like in Skyrim. I don't think they use this technology at all with that title, cost may be the reason since last time I checked there is a hefty price tag to use the SpeedTree solution for a game. Might be lot cheaper to do things themselves.

@RoyBatterian
"The problem with Plants and Tree's apaprently is the low poly models needed to properly generate the LOD for them. For some reason Fallout 3 Tree LOD works, but NV's is broken."

The LOD for models are possible to do for NV, how to get them proper and good is another issue. When I converted MOMOS77 Palms from OB to NV, I was faced with the lack of LOD model for them since that was a must have. First attempt was an epic fail, GECK was screaming of missing that or lacking this when generating constantly.
However I found one little line in a Quote, I think it was on Nexus and a reply by one of the GURUs on the subject (I have tried to find it again but failed). The LOD model was told is a different breed compared to normal .NIF files, it have some flag indicating LOD and possible different layout of other parts also. After a tedious work of mirroring a stupid LOD .NIF file and hack it a lot, I got something that at least is usable, but it's not pretty.

@all
I wish all this knowledge had been scribbled down in a central tips&tricks wiki somewhere, as it is now you find pieces here and some there all over Internet. Or like in a thread popping up like this, how long you think it will take before this also has sunken deep into the pacific ocean of Internet.

[Thaiauxn]

That's a good way to do it. I tried using TESAnnwyn back in the day, but i found it was just too much of a hassle. LOD2 for instance was just, way overbloated with data. but it's other tool kits are great for extracting heightmaps. I haven't been able to get one out of GECK yet that wasn't badly compressed, so the gradient creates deep rings in, say, Mudbox, or World Machine. Maybe TESAnnwyn could do a better job. Anybody that knows TESAnnwyn should pitch in.

 

And you're right about the speed tree thing. It is prohibitively expensive and probably why Obsidian elected not to use it.

 

Let's see if we can't get a Wiki somewhere. If not, I can post it on my website's blog, ore maybe we can get it hosted on the Nexus?

Edited February 27, 2015 by Thaiauxn

[rickerhk]

Nexus has a wiki for posting that kind of stuff: http://wiki.tesnexus.com/index.php/Main_Page

[Thaiauxn]

Nexus has a wiki for posting that kind of stuff: http://wiki.tesnexus.com/index.php/Main_Page

 

Sweet! Yeah, we can post it here: http://wiki.tesnexus.com/index.php/LOD_Generation_For_New_Vegas_and_Fallout_3

 

Since I think everyone can edit an article, this is a great idea.

 

I went ahead and gave it a start. Everyone else - pile in. :)

Edited February 27, 2015 by Thaiauxn