Lighting Overhaul

zilav

Looking good so far, need to add some shadowcasters, and maybe be reduce overall ambient lighting and saturation. Want to see something like this in the end

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I think this will require adding transparency texture for windows (and add NiAlphaProperty in mesh for windows shapes) to place lights outside of them and cause shadows to fall on everything inside. This is the mesh

meshes\tes4\architecture\cathedral\cathedralstenintback01.nif

PM me if you need help with it in NifScope. We will need to fix a lot of such meshes with windows, especially since Skyrim can show sky in interior cells unlike Oblivion.

Also try not to delete lights, move them away, set enabled opposite of parent (Payer 00000014), initially disabled, etc. Just disable them somehow.

This is what i want to do but if i do it the whole mod would have to match. This would include the dungons and caves that seem to have random lights that come from nowhere. Also i was looking into trying to get the light to come from the Stained glass windows. I will give this a try.

If you also wanna see a really bad area for light flickering. Look at the Priory. 

Edit:  Good news, I got transparent windows. Bad News, So are the bars that are textured on. I obviously need some kind of alpha map not 100 sure on how that works. well at least i can see the sky through the window

EDIT2: im experimenting with Lights turning on and off at certain times of day.  During the day in the cathedrals it will be light up with the sunlight, at night it will be light up with candles. 

Wooorking-ish.  Creating the window pattern on the floor from the light coming through is going to need some work. Its colored glass so I'm not sure if I'm able to project the color on the ground? 

enven tho the image says "ENB" the effects where off. I use realvision if anyone is wondering

zilav

Oh completely forgot - when you have a light coming from outside, it will pass through meshes that have a single side and normals are not facing the light source. Need to toggle double sided flag on BSShaderProperty of those shapes in mesh. Check IC city walls for example when inside, I added that flag to them (to one sided shapes) so they could start casting shadows.

 How do you want scripts handled? Iv created a few LightSwitch Scripts to control what time what lights are on and which ones are off. That what when you walk in at night its not light up by sun beams and by day it actually light up by the sun and no candles with a bit of dust partials floating around. That's another thing on top of that. How am i to handle the FX? Skyrim has a few Light beam effects that i probably cant use because well.. its skyrims


Also yeah you can see the sky through the glass when you get closer to it. looks like crap since the surrounding buildings cant be seen. 

1. Too Much Dust
2. Windows Still Suck
3. Light needs some tweaking
4. Alpha Map still needs to be created
5. Specular maps need to be created
6. "fake" light beam assets will be made later
7. Other stuff too but not as important right now
   
   Every Cathedral faces a different direction on the compass. The light will always be pointing North, creating a different lighting effect in every Cathedral making every one unique unlike Vanilla Oblivion. 
   
   Getting closer and closer to my vision. 

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Night
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This is how the otherside looks btw 
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There is also a tool in the editor to debug lights. It shows if you have too many light illuminating an area or objects. Only thing it does not show you is when you use too many Shadow casters in which case only stick to 3-4 at the most. I have no flickering issues and i have used 4 ShadowCasters and 1 regular light. Even with using a torch. this seems to be pretty accurate and functional with the Debugging tool. 

In game you still see them at night, You get a slight moonlight glow going. 

As for the alpha layer, I haven't even looked into it yet but if it's anything like i think it is. I can Photoshop one in like a few seconds. It shouldn't be too hard to maintain the color once i start playing with it. I do like the idea of Painted Glass pan windows, Its a place of warship it adds that effect to it.

Edit: oh i just clued in you where talking about the Ugly blue ones lmfao.  yeah once im done it's just going to be slightly white 

 I still have to do some adjustments to more cathedral models.

Cathedrals seem to be the easiest at least Dibella and Akatosh.  

Weynon Priory is hell on earth. So many candles. :(

Also If its ok with you guys once i get to the dungeons im tossing out all the light altogether (with the exception of most ruins) It will be changed in favour for a Dark RP theme similar to Darksouls. Thing i hate about oblivion is that dungeons felt like happy sunshine rainbows. to bright and colorful. 

So instead of disabling the lights im just going to move them and place them in an unreachable roombox so they wont ever actually load. Hope that's ok

 

OH GOD the edges on everything! Anyone have a fix? Is this skyoblivion or Bethesda being lazy? 

zilav

Hmm that's strange, meshes are 100% the same together with their positions. Maybe some antialiasing issues with your gfx? Try to switch off ENB and any AA including in game settings and drivers (if have any).

Also what's the background color of cell if you tcl outside? If it not AA and you are just seeing a background through gaps here, then change it's color.

i turned on the skylight in the imperial prison (the starting area). after that every mesh was .1 off from eachother. the same thing exsists in oblivion as well. it could just be the tileset wasint made properly. at any rate. I turn ENB effects on and Off while creating the lighting. ENB handles the lights diffrently and iv noticed some disappear entirely. im trying to make this mod as compatible and optimized as possible.   Its really gone a bit beyond a simple lighting overhaul. Iv began optimizing interior cells by dividing them up with RoomMarkers and Portal Links. This has fixed a few lighting issues without even adjusting any lights.  I still feel as though i should go through the game and make everything look more realistic. I hate to say it i hate seeing random glowing lights in caves for no reason other than to make it easier for the player.  iv started added a few torches, some corpses around a campfires, light beams, simple things like that in caves.  Im hopeing to make this more immersive and less colourfull than oblivion was. I really want to take advantage of skyrims engine in this.  Dont worry my goal isint to make this a grey wasteland like fallout was. 

I have begun planing for the future to add envirment models such as cliff sides, 3D road meshes and so on to the game but that is a project for a later date. 

SCREEN SHOT DUMP! 
what you dont see in the screenies is that iv started to use Room markers and portals. Everything is starting to look awesome. 

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Oblivion should have been a DarkRPG from the start. Think about this. You wake up in a prison unaware of your past and ready to die. The guard come in and are ready to cut you to ribbons. The emperor Urial Septim tells them that you are trust worthy. That he seen something in you. The only smiling face you have seen for the time you’ve woken up tells you that he will soon die. Long behold the only ally you knew was cut down in front of you with only leaving vague instruction on what to do. Once you find his heir it looks like the enemy already got to him. Thankfully you rescue him from the oblivion that the city was shattered too. You are then titled the Hero of kvatch.

Long story short. You travel to hell itself, witness countless souls tortured and destroyed along the way. Men, women, children cut down in the streets. All of your friends and people you care about die or get casted into oblivion for all eternity. Even the deadric god that befriended you dies leaving his insanity in you. You become the next Sheogorath. A very dark end to someone who did so much. The one light in the dark snuffed out.

So explain to me. WHY WAS THIS GAME SO BRIGHT? Why is everyone smiling! Fuck even the guards who just saw there city get destroyed in a blink of an eye are smiling while everyone is burning to death around them! Who the fuck developed this shit?! People have no emperor and they just don’t seem to give a shit. They don’t care that the world is about to end. Even martin when he dies is all happy about being turned into a giant fire dragon and dies. Everyone who just witnessed Martin die seem happy about it even after they just witness countless lives ruined and cut down before them. Fuck no one seemed to care that some cult was allowed to run around and summon Satan himself to blow everyone to sunder. You would think a city that is prone to attacks FROM GODS infact prone to attacks from MOLAGBAL would have set some better defenses up. Why did they think this kind of plot should have happy sunshine sparkles everywhere! DARK THIS PLACE UP A BIT PLEASE! 

this is my chance to make this game the masterpiece it should be. Do you think im going to stop at the lighting overhaul? Fuck no... i got bigger plans once i get more acquainted with the creationkit and NifSkope and Maya and Zbrush

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Video coming soon showcasing the 100 Cells iv completed already. 

also i feel this image captures the essence of my goal the most. 

-snips sorry fuck this lag-

-snips sorry fuck this lag-

zilav

100 completed cells??? Already? OMG...

Yeah they are "completed" or at least at a working state where it looks good. Everything will need to be buffed out and polished over time. as i said i wanted to start off simple. going through the models and decided what needed to be transparent and what needed to be solid did not take as much time as it sounds. iv also managed to pull a few all nighters thanks to... some outside influences

Does Skywind have any fire assets i can use? Oblivions looks like crap. 

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I have to redo like 80% of the interiors iv already completed. I just realized i can change the ambiance with every Room marker... GG

in the meantime, enjoy the start of the game. LOL

I'm probably going to take a short break from this. Ill be back Soon™

zilav

Jeez, it looks creepy even on screenshots. Outstanding work [External image]

Here is a cutoff sample of my work. Its only the First two starting area interior cells. (the Prison and the first cave) These are the only ones i consider to be polished and in 100% working state. Might look a little funky without the modded .Nif Files but you wont notice too much difference.   Please note some of the stuff I used from Skyrim is placeholder and will be replaced. Working on making my own assets right now. 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/h78yvds9w0ybzsf/SkyoblivionLightingOverHaul.esp?dl=0

(snip) still haven't learnt not to spam the save button

r912525

Looks fantastic!!! Keep it up!

I don't mind your comments about making it darker, especially in caves.  I will say however that there are certain places that this shouldn't apply. I do get that there is way too much happiness/bright areas but making everything dark might be inappropriate.

Outside (during daylight)

-I don't think its actually a bad thing that the outside is really bright during daylight. To be honest Skyrim sometimes felt like it wasn't bright enough during daylight.

Interiors that don't need to be dark

-Not every interior should necessarily be dark.  Normal houses, non-abandoned castles, etc. shouldn't necessarily be dark.  That being said all images shown have been places that should be darker.  

My only thought besides that is that if you can make sure that its not so dark that even if I raise the brightness I have to use a torch to see everything.  I know this may be controversial as it is not sensible to be able to see everything but I hate using torches with a passion.  If its scalable then you satisfy the largest group possible.

i was talking strictly dungeon. Outside is naturally bright and green but that doesn't stop the scary places to be scary. As for dungeons they are dark. You can see everything without a torch. Everything necessary such as chests, monsters and the pathway are light up. you will see very dark corners and crevasse but these parts are generally empty so you don't actually miss anything if you don't have a torch. 

Houses will be dark, but only at night. During the day you will see the sky outside windows, you will see some of the surrounding buildings as well. 

even in oblivion there are areas that where too dark. The abandon mine had bandits in it. there where people living there! why was it so dark? places like that iv added light but also darken the ambiance and let shadows do the detailing. 


EDIT: If you look at the cathedral i have done its actualy brighter than oblivions Defult however it more controled as well. 

Tweaking the Skylighting a little bit. 

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Way too yellow tho. Kind of look like the natural environment mod IMO 
 

zilav

Exactly, this was done on purpose to look like Natural Environments because I liked it back in Oblivion modding glory days. The same way why you make dungeons dark and creepy because you like it that way. We are all doing stuff our own way freely, this is the difference between Skywind and Skyblivion [External image]

That's the reason why I also removed eyes adaptation from Skyblivion weathers, can't stand it personally. It reduces the ability of creating epic sky lighting effects since it'll become overexposed without HDR adaptation, but whatever.

What? you've already modded the Weather lighting? It wasn't in my version. It was like a dark blue almost green in mine.   The images are from what i changed. I dont think it should be this bright yellow but it should have a yellow tint to it. 

i would like it to be a bit yellow with a brown tint to the Near fog and a Blue to the distant fog.   If i could figure out how to turn the shadows a very very very very very very Dark subtle blue i would. 

zilav

All weathers are completely new in Skyblivion 0.2, don't know why it is dark blue for you. They are tweaked to have seamless horizon water line, spend quite a lot of time on that. Just changing fog colors will break overall balance, weathers are hard to change properly.

You can always tweak weathers to your liking in a separate plugin, the beauty of modding.

Hmm. Ill revert back to before i modified the weather then. honestly everything was set to a dark blue.  If its already changed then no point in me changing it again. :P 

zilav

All weathers are completely new in Skyblivion 0.2, don't know why it is dark blue for you. They are tweaked to have seamless horizon water line, spend quite a lot of time on that. Just changing fog colors will break overall balance, weathers are hard to change properly.

You can always tweak weathers to your liking in a separate plugin, the beauty of modding.

Hmm. Ill revert back to before i modified the weather then. honestly everything was set to a dark blue.  If its already changed then no point in me changing it again. :P 

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Just letting you know, still working on it.  Making progress. Trying to upload videos but its ehhhh.....