[LE] Tip of the minute...

[cumbrianlad]

Well, I'd hardly call this the tip of the year: that would be really pompous. Tip of the day? That's maybe a little ambitious too. Tip of the minute will do!

 

Creation kit seems to have as many idiosyncrasies as Skyrim itself. I found another one today whilst setting up a scene in a quest. Here's the scenario...

 

You want to add a trigger box but you want to add it to a vanilla location, not your mod's tomb/home etc. In my case it was the Four Shields Tavern in Dragonbridge. You use the object window to select and drag the box into the render window and hey presto! Nothing appears. The trigger box is in the tavern because it shows up in the Tavern's cell view window and can be fully edited from here: it's just that it's not visible in the render window. You try left clicking in the area where you plonked the trigger box but select nothing but walls, rugs, pots and sweet rolls. You try zooming out and rotating the camera around in a desperate bid to see your essential activator...nothing. Selecting the trigger box in the cell view and clicking to view the object results in the camera orienting on a spot full of nothing but the aforementioned rugs, walls etc. You know that markers are turned on because you can see all the others in the area. You try turning collision geometry on in desperation but that doesn't work either. You load your main tomb/house into the render window and place a trigger box there: you can see it. CK just won't show it in the other location.

 

At this point you could get the 3d data for the area you want the box to be in, work out where the centre of the box should be and adjust the x,y,z coordinates to suit. Then you could go into the activators primitive tab and give it x,y,z dimensions that you think will work. That's a real pain in the proverbial and you could easily get it wrong, right? You really want the comfort of using a gizmo to resize your lovely trigger.

 

Here's the tip! (it took me ages to try it.)

 

Load the cell where the box has to go into the render window. Click on an object close to where you want to place the box. Then use the 'create trigger' icon in the menu bar to select the type of box you want and hit okay. Voila! the trigger box appears complete with lovely gizmos for you to pull around to your heart's content. You can then edit it from the render window in the normal way.

 

That's definitely worth an award for tip of the minute in my opinion. I'm making myself a nice cardboard medal and colouring it in with felt tips, as I type (I'm not really).