Regenerating commonwealth LOD ... textures of static meshes all wrong

[Dillenger69]

I'm working on a mod to fit my playstyle. I like large open expanses and huge waging battles, so I run 3 mods to add warring NPCs when I'm not working on my mod. I like to be able to watch and snipe. anyway ...

I've been able to successfully remove all the trees and vision obscuring underbrush from the commonwealth, far harbor, and nuka world. I even added a settlement in the glowing sea for good measure (no questions there, it works perfectly).

However ... I've hit a dead end. I can regenerate the static meshes for world LOD to get rid of the trees on the horizon, but the textures come out all screwy, like the mapping of nif to texture is off.

I've converted all the DDS files from the main game and the DLCs to TGA. The file names and directory structure match perfectly in C:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Source\TGATextures

The Commonwealth.Objects.tga files that get generated look ok, from what I can tell.

All the inputs look good to the best of my knowledge.

When I generate I get the following:

Build complete.

2670825 LOD object triangles.

604560 were rejected (0 degenerate, 604560 under landscape).

4778458 total LOD object vertices.

The following issues were detected during the build process:

Wrapping: A vertex in geom 'ShackBridgeFree01Support01_LOD_0:0' has a texture coordinate well outside of the (0,1) range. Wrapping is NOT supported in LOD.

Followed by a bunch more wrapping not supported errors and some "this object has too many vertices for this level" errors

I haven't touched any of the objects I see errors on. All the meshes are extracted fresh from the BA2 files.

Here's the result I get. The view from vault 111:

The trees are gone from the hills, but the rocks look like scrap piles and the electrical towers look like the side of a building.

The only plus is that I'm pushing 100+ fps most places now with all settings maxed (except grass, I hate grass) at 2560x1440

I've scoured the web for days and gotten nowhere with this. It seems nobody has tried to regenerate the commonwealth LOD, or hasn't successfully done it, given up, and didn't say anything.

Bethesda obviously either didn't use this tool to create the game, or they have some secret trick.

So, can anyone help? Any tips? Am I missing something in the process?

Any help appreciated.

Thanks

[chucksteel]

Just from looking at your screen shot it looks like something is wrong with your .tga files. Make sure they still have their Alpha Channels, I made this mistake in NV and all of my tower lines would come out blocky like that.

 

I'm just kind of guessing here though I haven't messed with LOD much in FO4.

[damanding]

I read in Discord chat that unlike earlier Beth games FO4 doesn't recognize the TGA format. That the ability to export it is assumed to be just a leftover no longer used.

[AGreatWeight]

I read in Discord chat that unlike earlier Beth games FO4 doesn't recognize the TGA format. That the ability to export it is assumed to be just a leftover no longer used.

Can't confirm this 100%, but that was the hunch I had after reading the OP's post.

[Dillenger69]

Here's a n00b question to add to all of this. Is the LOD generation supposed to create new DDS texture files? because I get nothing but three TGA files in TGATextures\Terrain\Commonwealth\Objects. no DDSTextures directory gets created and nothing in my data directory changes except commonwealth.LOD. I've even gone so far as to remove my mod from the mix and the crap lod still shows up, so there are files going ... somewhere. Can anyone from the secret LOD cabal clue me in?

[BlahBlahDEEBlahBlah]

BIG IIRC, they are tga that gets created and they get out in the steam/source folder, and you have to convert them back to dds, and move them to the correct data folder...but it's been about 7 months since I last did it.

[Dillenger69]

I fixed it! I had to clear out every last loose file to find out where the fershlugginer files were getting put. your path may vary depending on your steam library location.

C:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Fallout 4\Data\LODSettings\Commonwealth.LOD

C:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Fallout 4\Data\Meshes\Terrain\Commonwealth\Objects (ALL the objects) ... note the complete lack of LOD mention in the path or file names. That tripped me up.

Last ... but not least. This is the step that the creation kit skips.

Three TGA files get generated in C:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Source\TGATextures\Terrain\Commonwealth\Objects These files need to get converted to DDS and copied over to C:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Fallout 4\Data\textures\Terrain\Commonwealth\Objects I did that with the GIMP and a DDS plugin.

Once I did THAT, the LOD textures were 99.9% normal. Around the edge of the map there are still trees in the skybox. They look a tad wonky, but looking at the rest of the commonwealth from vault 111, you can practically see the whoooooole thing.

For the life of me I can't figure out why the creation kit skips that last vital step. maybe it's some DDS compression licensing thing. Who knows.

Here's the view downtown from vault 111 @ 2560x1440

http://i.imgur.com/aQQq7pu.jpg

[Arcanant]

Looks amazing! I hope you continue with your work ^^