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Meshes and optimization

Submitted by Champion of Hircine on

I was wondering, where the f did you get some of your meshes? I was checking a few of them out in nifskope and I happened to notice that the baskets are OVER NINE THOUSAND (LOL) polys. I think I could make them look almost as good at about one thousand. I also looked at the urns and just the neck alone is about 4k polys. It looks to me like 3/4 of them don't even affect the shape of the mesh. From what I remember, the average building in a Skyrim city is about 10-15k. I think these are in need of some optimization.

I'm currently working on some high-poly Telvanni meshes. I've increased a few of them from about 500-1k polys up to 3k-4k, and with only a dozen or so in loaded cells it can drop fps by as much as 5 (on Morrowind's engine). Obviously Skyrim's engine is a lot more powerful, but having that many polys is certainly going to impact performance.

I'll likely be lurking aroud these forums from time to time, and when I release my mesh pack on Nexus I'll post here so you can use them if you want to.

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Last edited by grumpycat on 14 Mar 2014 - 17:46.

Yeah, a lot of the clutter isn't optimized, that's why bottles ctd people when they enter buildings and such.

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Yes, Champion of Hircine you are absolutely right, many many objects have way too many needless vertices. We are working on optimizing these.

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yeah I was originally working on a project like this for morroblivion, but I lacked the knowlege to really do anything back then.

I would strongly suggest focusing on  the  small things, the cups.plates, platters and bottles, those really should be no more then  a 1,000 polys.  as it stands the current meshes are almost 16.000 vertices.

 

also the spoons and forks, very common no more then a few hundred as it stands they are 5,000 polys  large.

 

good luck, I wish I was better at modeling, I will try to get better at it so  there are more people do  this task, it can be very tedious 

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Double post stupid internet lag

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I'm working on a couple of my own projects right now but I might be willing to work on this when I want to take a break from them. How do I upload files when I'm done with them? How do I know what has been done already? I don't even remember how I got the meshes I have. Should I be getting updates for the meshes from somewhere?

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try medifire  but google docs is probably better (google seems to hav fixed it)

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i can optomize them if needed, i know how to reduce poly count on 3ds max so i could try it out i supose

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If we edit the meshes then they're not actually the same as the ones bethesda or zenimax (or whoever else) made. Does that mean that we we're a step closer to becoming legal or do we have to make them all over again from the ground up.

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Supreme,

If we edited all of the meshes and textures,then I guess we would be another step nearer legal,but that would mean that no Oblivion or Morrowind stuff could be used,only the skyrim stuff [difficult],but that is why I made the SkyWind.esm as that is dependent on skyrim.esm.

Our morrowind_sk.esm can`t be used to add skyrim assets,but even if we could re-make everything [more difficult] if any of it was skyrim biased it would have to be merged into skywind.esm [like I have just merged the doors.esp into it] and hope that it works.

 

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Skywind will probably never be 100% legal. If we wanted it to be, we'd have to replace a lot of things, meshes being the hardest part. We'd also have to remove the voiced greetings(not a big deal, but think of Oblivion without voiced dialog for a second).

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Well the qual's texture pack has us covered for most of the textures and it also has higher quallity meshes packed in it as well. with it more then half the Oblivion stuff is new. So that make puts way closer to making Skyblivion legal. and I'm sure there's a static mesh improvment mod for morrowind(probably a couple) that we could use(as long as we give credit of course).

If we use mostly new stuff then I guess bethesda won't feel the need to ban us again. After all they banned us the first time because they had to not because they wanted to.

 

P.s. Is there a tutorial on how to conver oblivion meshes to skyrim Because I was having some problems with that.

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The Unofficial Oblivion Patch contains many fixed & optimized meshes.

Plenty of free modders' resources here

For the best possible Oblvion visual experience, as a complement or alternative to Qarl's there are other excellent texture replacers indexed here 

If authorized, Unique Landscapes would be a huge improvement over vanilla.

To optimize Oblivion meshes there's NIFopt and/or Pyffi , but I guess modders here know these already ;)

Hope this helps, cheers!

 

 

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I Remade the unique landscapes mod in my 4th era cyrodiil overhaul mod, but I haven't released it yet. I was planning on recreating the hammerfell and deserts of aniquina mod but: 1.)I don't know how to convert meshes from oblivion to skyrim. and, 2.) I can't seem to find the real meshes for the aniquina mod.

Edit:

@ Jedi I wanted to use some of those retexture packs but they have meshes tagged on to them. I'm new to 3d max (haven't even used it yet). So do you know how to convert them. or do I even need to convert them. The qual's texture has new meshes for mountain rocks but I installed it anyway and it looked okay, so do I always have to convert the new meshes or what.

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I have been wondering about why we have to convert the meshes too Supreme,because we just unpack the SIs textures and Oblivion textures [the bsa`s] as part of the install,so if the writer of a mod has given permission,I don`t understand why the meshes can`t just be copied over like the textures,or am I missing the point somewhere.?

 

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I think it has to do with the texture map. but I have really no idea. I beleive the texture map for the hi res textures are slightly different then the ones bethesda made so the textures wouldn't be on the right areas ( example: the chaple glass texture would be over the stone bricks). Of course thats just random speculation. All the custom meshes in mods that I made were really made by my friend Drew.

Or it could be that oblivion's meshes are in a completely different format then skyrims and as such won't work. like how certain game have different engines then others, well shouldn't they render 3d stuff different as well. IDK

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https://github.com/skyfox69/NifUtils/downloads

I think this program was used. I could be wrong though

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Yes,that makes sense,but if the formats are different,it seems odd that we just copy over extracted textures from the Oblivion bsa files.It appears that textures are ok but meshes are not for some reason.?

But I can extract the skyrim meshes bsa files to find out what format is used,and if there is a tool out there that can convert the file format [.nif in oblivion] to the skyrim format it should be easy.?

Correct me if I am wrong,but even the converted meshes that we add during the install still use the .nif format.?

 

 

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Yes Mehh,that was used,but we had trouble using the ChunkMerge bit I think.?

 

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Oblivion and Skyrim nif formats are slightly different, so skyrim can't use oblivion meshes directly, but the dds textures are the same, so they can be just copied over. At first nifskope team made niftools plugin for 3ds max which allowed to import meshes in oblivion nif format in 3ds max and export them in skyrim one. Then Macorn made his niftools converter, which automated the process by converting the whole directories with meshes. After conversion ChunkMerge can be used to add collision to the new meshes (i think, never tried it myself). The problem with Macorn's converter is that normal map textures do not work for the converted meshes. (The directory leading to normal map textures is set correctly in the nif files, but BS Num UV Sets parameter in each NiTriShape group is set to 1 instead of 4097, so normal maps do not show up ingame and the textures look a bit washed out and blank). I'm currently trying to manually correct this for each converted oblivion mesh. I'll upload oblivion+SI meshes with fixed normal maps when done. Skyrim meshes (to my knowledge) use 3 main types of different textures: standard; normal map, which describes how the surface reflects light and parallax, which makes the mesh look very volumetric (that's what Quarl's texture pack adds to oblivion along with replacing standard textures to higher res ones). So the meshes are the same, they look so amazing because of parallax textures (check project parallax for skyrim). That's what Eloth is doing with morrowind meshes: restoring normal maps and adding his own parallax textures. But for oblivion the task is simplier, because we could just use parallax textures form Quarl's pack. The problem is that parallax texture must correspond to the standard one, or it will look like a mess, and the standard textures in Quarl's pack have 4096x4096 res which imo is too much. Hope someone will find a solution for this, maybe skyrim texture optimizer or something.
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Thanks! for explaining that Gothryd!,I understand now,and that could also be part of the reason why we are not getting certain things showing up in the CK.?.Like parts of Balmora etc.?

 

 

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I really don't know much about it, but in the last tes5edit thread I've found that "depending on the record, the CK will strip out subrecords that are not in the order it wants" (posts 123-124). http://forums.bethsoft.com/topic/1419201-relz-tes5edit/page__st__120 Wrong order of subrecords could be caused by Anruin's converter, Tes5edit or any other program we used on morrowind_sk.esm. Hope that Tes5gecko (with working mod merging feature) will solve this problem, but unfortunately it's on hold until December :(
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The current TESVGecko won`t work on my XP system,but what I would like to be able to do is to port the whole of morrowind_sk into the SkyWind.esm,as then we would have what we have always wanted,access to skyrim assets.

The ideal setup from my seat would be just SkyWind.esm and a few BSA files.[dreaming again].:)

 

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Gothryd [...] the standard textures in Quarl's pack have 4096x4096 res which imo is too much. Hope someone will find a solution for this, maybe skyrim texture optimizer or something.

The original pack is rarely used, as with QTP3 Redimized version you get much better performance with very little visual difference.. Hope this helps!

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Thanks, btw i was wrong: Quarl's pack includes some optimized meshes as well.

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I was gonna convert the meshes in Quarl's texture pack but I wasn't really sure what I was doing. So... yeah, that might need to be done because that might lessen our work a bit when it come to meshes and what not.

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It will be great. If you could upload converted meshes somewhere i'll be able to manually fix normal maps.
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I'll  start with the architecture  for quarls redimized as I  have the pack sitting on my computer, just give me some time to figure out skyrims  collision for statics

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