Level Design - Skywind #1

I will add that if people want to experiment or have a go at editing a particular part of Skywind that they go ahead. I feel that its only through actually attempting changes that true ideas will immerge for how we can apply same level of detail to the rest of the world.

I myself will have a go at a small section of Red Mountain, and post some before and after pictures. I would like other people to do the same.

Looking at various aspects of the Skyrim world, although vastly different in terms of what the vistas provide, still carry many things that can be utilized for the Skywind landscape. It’s the fact that so much of the effort is into making everything looking seemless. That is to say it’s very hard to detect where ground and the objects that sit on its surface actually meet and also along various different models that connect.

The sparse nature of the original Morrowind design means that rocks and such have a very noticeable difference between their surrounding surfaces. Even where same texture sets are used between rocks and the surrounding surface. Much work needs to be done to match color/shadow shades so that they blend in more.
TES3 has big 20ft rocks that stick out from the ground with little to no surrounding objects. It can be argued that this is how the landscape is supposed to look like and so that it should be left as is. However the proof is in the fact that it currently doesn't look very good, probably because we are used to much more detail in games that aim to make environments look as real as possible.

Some obviously techniques that are used are surrounding larger objects with smaller ones. A rock sticking 20ft in the air is going to have some surrounding smaller rocks, with probably some foliage as well. Making sure the color/shades match up between objects goes a long way. Hard contrasts show up model differences and look unnatural with shadows and light not being realistic.
Also in terms of where we have height map as the primary means of the featured landscape, my impression from looking at Skyrim and various mods that having bumpy surfaces is key to making them believable. Without much experience with the Creation Kit I experimented with adding noise to the height map, but it seems that this only helps a little bit. There is no substitute for placed objects that have designed surface bumps.

These are just my ideas; I really need people with experience to lead the way here.

Finally the point of getting people to talk about ideas, rather than just doing it, is that there is a chance that we can write scripts that do broad alterations. This will not be easy, but in terms of getting major results with some simply level design techniques, may move the project along much faster. My first example of this is to write scripts that place more rocks and foliage. Say the quantity and radius of these placed objects are determined by the objects they surround; taking size, type and anything else into consideration. Same with merging land textures, with some guidelines we can further enhance what we have; alleviating much need to hand edit everything.

@anthelius - Wow, those look amazing! This is exactly the sort of landscape wizardry I was hoping for :)

@gerard - All great ideas. Just trying to come up with the quick and easy way to apply some of these results is the key I think.

1. A simple template model of 2 blocks can be used to make a plain hill look more natural:

Skyrim has the dirtcliff set of models, but I'm sure there is a wealth of other ones out there as well. This is dirtcliffs01.nif with redmountain textures:

2. There's a texture in Skyrim with small rocks covering the surface similar to grass. It can be used to hide those chess-like land textures.

Not quite as simply as that. Any texture set that is not covered is still going to have a tiled look to it. Its still a repeating pattern and the brain picks it up even when the textures are cleverly joined. Plus we have a lot of different textures, so applying rocks textures isn't always going to be the solution when we are in need of having unique surfaces. However we might be able to create sets of rubble rock models that can be easily applied to the surfaces.

@Mehh - This is not really a polish thing, I'm surprised that more time hasn't been be done around this as its such big tasks. If you look at the detail of the Skyrim landscape you will understand that this would have been a core focus on their development and I think that Skywind should be no different. But it doesn't take away focus from other areas as we are actually going to need to get level designers working on it. I'm not sure how many people who are currently working on the project have the inclination or skill to do this, so recruiting people who have done mods before will be key.

anthelius if you could upload a plugin for some of these landscapes you have played around with that would be cool to look at some of your techniques :)

Can you tell I want to talk about rocks?

Without a doubt the "secret" to how we are going to make our landscapes is to sculpt a lot of empty space surfaces with rocks, cliff-faces, mountain sides. Especially Molag Amur, Ashlands and Red Mountain.

So the next mission is to make as many rocks available to people who want to get stuck into landscape editing. This means that all available Skyrim rocks will be available in textures appropriate to particular regions.

There are about a 110 of them and not all of them are going to be useful for every region, but for the purposes of systematic adding I will just do them all. Its just extra forms so no real cost to anything, and once the project is completed ( well release 1.0 ) we will remove any that have not been used.

To answer the question; "but shouldn't particular rocks be not available for every region?", the answer is common sense dictates what looks appropriate.

The interesting thing is if you actually look through the Morrowind rocks, they aren't particular different from region to region. Sure we have some big differences between our Molag Amur and Ashland ones. But on the whole they are practically copy and pasted rocked meshes, with different textures. I'm not going to say a fault of Morrowind, but a lot of them have a rectangular shape. I guess you could say from years of being battered by ash-storms and rainy weather? Ok more the fact it was appropriate for the TES3 engine to handle, so as a side project I'll create a little plugin which changes some of the more common rocks to some other available resources.

It is possible to have too many rocks available as resources, but with a bit of a careful selection we should be able to cover a nice variety.

Hey Gregthegen, its more to do with using rocks to build up surfaces in the worst areas, like Molag Amur. Try cell 26, -8 and take anthelius example in the post above yours. These are the differences between applying actual rock models or what it currently looks like. Smoothing textures is part of it. But getting the rocks in there is the bulk of the work. However if you have time, its really quite fun. Its just going to take lots of people with lots of time to get it all done!

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I am creating a version of most of the Mountains, Cliff faces and Rocks, that will have textures appropriate for each region. I have done the Red Mountain region resources already. It takes about 2 hours to add the re-texture models for each region, so I'll just keep plugging away until they are all done. Unfortunately if you use the default Skyrim ones without the re-textured version, we would need to write a script to replace all the references. A little tricky, but not impossible.

Here are some before and after shots of some subtle rocks adding for Ghost Gate. Things can be done in ways that really don't take away from what Morrowind is, but still will break up the grid smooth landscapes.

What regions are you having a go at? Once I've done the Molag Amur and Ashlands, I'll upload a new master file with the references. What it will be is that for every static rock/mountain/cliff object there will be one for each region. So for example you will see the editor id for "rocks01.nif" will have 0RMRockS01 for Red Mountain and 0MARockS01 for Molag Amur.

There is a new texture, that I haven't done properly, and this is a custom texture that replaces the default "landscape\rocks01.dds" texture. It is essentially going to need to be a mix between the common land texture and the rock texture, depending on the region. I have created placeholders until some genius on the 3D Modeling team does them :)

Its all just going to be trail and error stuff...some methods will work, some won't. I'm keen to see what other people have success with. There are lots of ways areas can be done, so communicating different techniques will be the key.

I should have clarified; by doing I mean adding the new forms into the master so that we have the variant (textured) models. I've done Red Mountain, but still need to add the other regions. I was going to add the forms for Molag Amur and Ashlands before posting up the new master. I'll do the other regions, but I will just need to access what resources should be available. I'm using the base objects and using the texture variants, like zilav and machine pointed out :)

I'm not going to landscape any region, so people are more than welcome to go for it. I'm just experimenting for my own curiosity.

It will get to the point though that we will need to co-ordinate which cells have been done, or worked on. I'll have a quick spreadsheet up for this so people can put their names against them.

[EDIT] Here is a spreadsheet for anybody that is working on cells please put their name in the appropriate cell: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Alvwmz6hbHGPdEloRTMyRFJzby10UGlnQjhleFpuTFE#gid=0

anthelius you really need to upload something so that people can have a look at your stuff in game. Its looking fantastic, but would be great to get in game examples to find out where we can head with overall landscaping. Oh yeah and if you have already added new forms for the model variants then we will need to either get your forms, so that other can use them, or write a script that converts them to some new reference that are created. As I said above I'm going about the business of making them all so that everybody is on the same page with adding new form references to the world.

Thanks for that anthelius. Its looking great.

What I am going to do is to create all the various references so that you wont have to create a separate model for each region. The Creation Kit has the functionality so that you can have variant texture models based off one particular mesh. But rather than use the base Skyrim ones, I have copied and pasted to the Morrowind meshes folder, for the purposes of porting for future TES games. Yes we are thinking about that stuff already :-P

So for example you won't have two separate models like: acdirtcliffs04moss.nif and bcdirtcliffs04moss.nif.

It all works the same in the CK, you will still have the same form names to select from, its just less models that need to be downloaded and created.

Don't worry keep doing what you are doing, but I'll need to make sure that your forms are merged. If you can hold off from adding any more models for the next week, we can get everything inline first. You can keep on landscape editing of course.

No redoing anything :) I've had a bit of a play around with applied effects to models in CK, so I'll see what we can do about getting an ash effect. Maybe Dragonborn has already done this? I'll check it all out.

Right the latest Skywind.esm has dirt-cliffs, mountains and rocks taken from Skyrim but altered with appropriate textures for every given area.

Download here: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B1vwmz6hbHGPa25uMFpEM0ZtZjA/edit?usp=sharing

This will be the base models in which all landscape level design will be done.
I have also added ztrees rock resources, which has 13 new rocks.

You will be able to find all these new models under "static\morrowind\landscape\dirtcliffs", "static\morrowind\landscape\mountains" and "static\morrowind\landscape\rocks". Each is prefixed according to area; 0AI, 0AL, 0AC, 0BC, 0GL, 0RM, 0WG.

There is only one variety of every given landscape model, meaning that all the rock surfaces for a given area will be be the same texture, as well as surface texture. If an editor wants to add another model variant for variety they are more than welcome to do it. I simply wanted to get the ball rolling with at least one set so that editors have a firm start.

The next step is to add the Morrowind rock resources "On the Rocks", which has an update to all the Morrowind rocks. Unfortunately our NifTools don't convert them, so 3DSmax import/export is required.

Hey Veltoss,

Yeah you can go for any other place you want, just let us know so that we can book it in as being worked on.

No real rules I think, just maybe look for some concept art that originally came out with Morrowind, in the case that you might find some inspiration.

If you want to use an item from Skyrim that you think perfectly fits in with or is a better replacer than Morrowind (Skywind) one, then post them here. They will need to be added into our custom folder, so that we future proof for further porting.

We have a need to replace/alter as many of our models, so one more good eye looking through them will help.

Veltoss, in regards to the Skyrim objects that you use, copy and paste them into the "meshes\morrowind\" and "textures\morrowind\" folder and make new static objects in your plugin. Please prefix them with a zero so that its easier to identify that its a morrowind form. We will then need to to merge this with our Skywind.esm master at a later date. However it is always good to make these available to everybody as quickly as possible.

We can add Oaristys resource pack. We can add as many resources to Skywind during this development phases, as long as the don't seem to be too out of place with Morrowind environments. Once we are looking at a release version then those models that are not be used (or even maybe only used a couple of times), will be removed from Skywind. I'll work on adding that pack this week if you think its worthwhile.

SquallyDaBeanz - The spreadsheet I've got linked is actually wrong, its the original Morrowind cells, not the Skwind representation, but I will fix that tomorrow. What it will have is in each column (x) and row (y) the name of the person who is working on the cell.

As a quick temporary list here is a list of cells that are being worked on: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Alvwmz6hbHGPdEtjREJzcEc3WlFhNGJtNlc1bEJjUHc&usp=sharing

When you edit the world just save it as a plugin. Once everybody is happy with it, then can be merged in with the master. We will do this.

If you have a modders resources then suggest it to us, and we will add it into the Morrowind data folders and also add the forms.

For actual editing tutorials look at:

http://www.darkcreations.org/forums/topic/3506-ioniss-landscaping-tutorial/?hl=tutorial

http://www.creationkit.com/Bethesda_Tutorial_Layout_Part_1

The Alchemy jar resource I don't think is good enough for Skywind. We have used some Skyrim models already for various bottles, so I think for Alchemy jars we could do better :)

As far as the resource packs goes it might not be until you have added them into the world that you get a feel if they are going to work or not. What we can do, is change over the model references retrospectively for people. Meaning if you don't want to add all the models to the Morrowind folders and just use what has already been setup from the resource mod, then that is fine. We have scripts that can change the references from one model to another, so no problems with losing work.

Does that make sense? We don't want to restrict creativity, and have people spend too much overhead in getting models into the game. We have other people who can do this. We'd prefer if you concentrated on actual landscape changes :)

SquallyDaBeanz nice work on the Salakariin mod, you got a real talent for it :)

Veltoss I played around with Saviik City about 4 months ago, so already know your work is awesome, cities will be much more authentic once you get onto them :)

I'll get both of into the chat that we use on the website for most of our project talk. [EDIT] You have been added, so feel free to join in the conversations.

This is a lelek drawing, so doesn't represent Bethesda, but certainly shows the concept of trade. I like the hangings and railings, prefect. Might be worth trying to splash a little color into the city. Most of the dunmer places have that monochrome colouring, so having one city with a splash could be fun. Its possible that Vivec might have a similar concept of open trade stalls, but don't let that stop us from making Balmora something cool.