LE Useable Solitude (and other major city) Architecture Components

[Draconicone]

I was wanting to build a dark mountain-side castle with the styling of Solitude as a player home, possibly with an ebony mine in the near vicinity. Those dark, imposing, hard angles that just made you go "wow" the first time you set foot there would really make the place pop. Its such an awesome set. I was surprised when I got in the editor. Solitude's walls, keep, and towers cant be used as building blocks for anything beyond a solitude clone. The pieces are already all pre-connected to the courtyard with missing portions where they are intended to sync up with other pre-connected portions, even the individual houses, and smith buildings all have major gaps, or random castle pieces attached where they are supposed to fit into their specified niche. Instead of many small parts its like a dozen big chunks of castle exterior, I imagine this is done to help the consoles limited graphics load only one big piece instead of lots of small chunks, but it really makes it hard to use any of those portions in any kind of original modding.

 

A little browsing showed me that its not the only fortress with that flaw, it seems most of the really stunning palaces and city forts were constructed the same way. It's very disappointing, leaving only the old crumbling fort pieces to build with, which are already rather overused in the game. I cant count the amount of times I've climbed up the wide circular stairways while slaying bandits.

 

I know its probably not allowed by Bethesda to break the models into useable parts, and re-upload them, even with patched up holes so they work as building blocks. However, I think it would be possible to build a set of castle construction components that emulates the architecture that is so distinct to the major cities, but I know I can't do it. I am completely lost when it comes to 3d modeling, I tried blender a long time ago and I just don't seem to speak its language.

 

There are a couple custom solitude texture mods out there already, so at least those could probably be used with their creator's permissions. Though it probably still requires building the walls/towers from scratch and some tinkering with textures? I imagine that is very time consuming and difficult, but I think it would be a huge boon to the modding community to be able to build such a variety of different castles. I can't imagine I would be the only one who would find this useful.

Edited April 23, 2012 by Draconicone