I want to get into landscaping...

[emprint]

I'd like to build myself a little Bavarian village. To remind me of someplace from when I was a kid. Sort of place kept alive by trade and minimal agriculture, seated comfortably in a valley watched closely by an older Legion fortress. My valley would occupy its own worldspace, since I have found any of Bethesda's lovely terrain that I'd want to tear up.

 

Having spent a lot of time prototyping various elements in the Construction Set, I've determined that I have one major weakness: landscaping. I'm not asking for somebody to do the work for me. (Though, you know, everybody loves help.) What I'm looking for is suggestions and articles on using Oblivion's tools to create plausible landscapes.

 

If it helps, here's the scope of the landscape:

 

* 1x1 mile worldspace, surrounded by mountains on at least three sides.

* Extensive forested, explorable space within the valley. If I develop the skill, I'd like to create some variation in the forests.

* A general "end of winter" feel, with melting snow and plenty of green grass.

* Enough flat-ish space to erect a town, a small fort, some dwellings and brigand camps.

 

What I'd like to know:

 

* What are the best techniques for crafting real-seeming forests, mountains, and valleys?

* Where can I learn about them?

* Is there, in fact, a large empty space in Cyrodill which would suit my purposes?

 

I realize this is extreme newbie stuff -- I'm a software project manager by day and a professional writer by night, so I'm quite leery of scope creep.

 

Thanks very much for your input!

[Vagrant0]

* What are the best techniques for crafting real-seeming forests, mountains, and valleys?

* Where can I learn about them?

* Is there, in fact, a large empty space in Cyrodill which would suit my purposes?

First, while the heightmap editor might seem useful for planning most of your world space, it usually ends up crashing the CS. You should really only use the heightmap editor from within a new .esp with only the worldspace defined, that way if it does crash you only lost that bit of work already done. You can use it later, but make sure that you save the mod before opening it up. Additionally, the heightmap editor is rather ram intensive, even with 2gb ram, and closing out most other programs, you'll still crash. The main purpose of the heightmap editor is to get the general mass of the landscape; how many cells you're using, where mountains are, and bringing the terrain above sea level.

 

Each cell is 4096 units, (128 units roughly equal 6 feet) or 192 feet wide. Which means that a 1 mile area would cover an area 28 x 28 cells (unless my math is way off (probably is)). You might want to start out by building up those cells into land above water, then just make the whole area within level. Then from there, raise up the areas you want raised. Remember to adjust the magnitude of the tools within the heightmap editor to lower amounts so that you get more gradual increases. You may wish to make several attempts at laying out the basic worldspace to get familiar with the heightmap editor and what everything does.

 

Forrests and ground textures can be added quickly with the region editor. Importing a region from Tamriel usually works better than trying to make one from scratch. You will still probably have to go through and adjust the trees and other stuff, but setting up regions is really one of the later steps, after you've already sculpted most of the terrain, and have a sense of what cells are supposed to be what. You might even want to get some graphing paper to plan this out. You will still need to go through all those cells to add pathgridding or manually sculpt the terrain, but using regions to place all the trees, rocks, and other stuff can really save you alot of time trying to figure out where everything is in the side menu.

 

Needless to say, there isn't too much useful information on the subject, most of what you have to do, you will probably have to figure out on your own. New world spaces aren't something you can expect to do without atleast good understanding of the CS, even trying to use the existing worldspace to add your own town can be rather difficult and time consuming (probably more so since there aren't many open places you can use and would have to adjust your town to fit those spots). Just remember, LOD data should always come last, and can be a royal female dog to get working, getting your landscape made, and the town built and populated is much more important than getting LODs to work.

[emprint]

Thank you. Is there a way to mass-raise my entire landscape to a minimum level, or to import a heightmap from an external bitmap?

[emprint]

Is there a way to mass-raise my entire landscape to a minimum level, or to import a heightmap from an external bitmap?

 

Answered my own questions. Well, the import feature in heightmap editing crashed my CS... before even allowing me to select a map. My guess is that my PC isn't beefy enough.

 

My main modding experience is with interiors and scripts. It's kinda confounding that, with landscapes, I haven't really been able to find my starting point. And it's a little frustrating to be able to sketch something out that I can't produce in tools. ;)

[emprint]

I figure while I'm begging for help I might as well show how I'm roughing this out. (Note that this isn't actually a heightmap, just a sort of a thumbnail I worked out to help me visualize the terrain.)

 

The lighter greys are higher altitudes; the green is the varied space in which I'll be building my forest, small hills and village. The blob in the right top is supposed to be a tall mountain. (I'd like to give that a good view of the surrounding terrain -- advice?) The very dark grey in the lower left is a poorly drawn river that I'd like to cut across the lower right corner of the map.

 

I'd appreciate any advice you have. Thanks!

[Vagrant0]

advice... Keep in mind that any change in water elevation would affect all water in that cell, you can't slope water, but can construct waterfalls and similar things to bridge changes between two elevations.

 

If you want to have a mountain lookout, you'll need to also create the areas around that mountain so that you don't have the terrtain dropping off into nothingness. One solution would be to make a cave or path that leads to a ledge along a face of that mountain so that you only need to be concerned about the areas visable from that ledge (and can hide everything behind with more of the mountain. Rather than being able to view everything from the top.

 

If you can't get the heightmap editor to work, you'll have to do the work using the landscaping tool. While this is a bit more time consuming, you can speed things up by figuring out what features are in what cells, so that you can work on one piece at a time and have them connect together. You might even want to expand how many cells the CS loads at a time (think it's in the .ini located in your mydocuments folder) and make sure you can move between cells, loading new cells using arrow keys (makes it easier to work). Start out just roughing out the terrain, don't worry about trees or textures, this will increase load times. Work from large to small editing radiuses. The advantage to doing it this way, rather than with the heightmap editor is that you have a better feel of how high things are, and it allows for more variation in land height since the height above 0 will probably vary significantly between points when you start connecting them together. This ultimately makes the landscape more interesting since the potential for flat planes is reduced.

[emprint]

Is there a good way to assess scale within the heightmap editor?

[PanzerOfGod]

construct waterfalls and similar things to bridge changes between two elevations.

 

A bit off topic, maybe, but where are those waterfalls and the rocks that fit them located in the Object window?

[Vagrant0]

construct waterfalls and similar things to bridge changes between two elevations.

 

A bit off topic, maybe, but where are those waterfalls and the rocks that fit them located in the Object window?

Have to construct them by combining both individual rocks, raising the terrain, and using some of the things found in the world objects>activator>landscape group. You kinda have to be creative in order for the gaps to go unnoticed. You might even want to look at some of the waterfalls in game to see how they're constructed. There's one north of chorrol, one north east of chorrol, some southeast of skingrad, some west of cheydinhal.

 

Is there a good way to assess scale within the heightmap editor?

The best thing I can suggest is to go into 0,0 before loading the heightmap, and raising the terrain just a bit above sea level, then level a large portion of the sorrounding area to that same height. Then when you load the heightmap editor, move your cursor over that area, down below it'll show the xyz of the cusor, you can use that to figure out where the waterline is (around 4096). You can then use the normal units (128 = 6 feet) to figure out heights over that. You might even want to adjust the color coding so that you can get a better feel for the heights. If you want a large area all the same height, or randomized, you might be better off using one of the selection tools (turn on the gridlines for a little help) to select that specific area, then use the generate feature with the base offset of where you want the average height of that area. Amplitude determines how high or below that initial offset things can be, frequency determines the roughness of the area. You might want to play around with them a bit to get a feeling how they work. You might even want to try generating the whole terrain, then just scupting a portion of that to suit your needs.