Hi!
I have wasteland worldspace with nice LOD working etc... Now I have added some buildings that do not have LOD models in the game, for example some Megaton buildings, since these were probably designed to be used only a very small separate exterior worldspace (MegatonWorld). Since these buildings are missing both LOD model and texture, I cannot check "Visible when distant". This is not a critical issue, but obviously buildings popping up suddenly looks bad.

Actual questions:
- Can I use NifSkope to add missing _lod.nif and texture or do I have to learn Blender (or some other 3D modeling tool) ?
- If I get the model / texture files, what steps need to be done in GECK to use these new files?

Any suggestions? Thank you for your time.
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Mikkis

An LOD model is just a normal, low-poly model with a _lod.nif extension. You can cheat and just copy the original model and rename it originalModel_lod.nif but that's really inefficient and having a lot of these models will cause a fps hit. Real lod models are severely stripped-down versions of the original model or created from scratch and use smaller texture files (since none of the fine detail will be visible). You'd have to use a modeling and an image-editing program to do that. NifSkope lets you edit the 'nif' part of the file (the part that tells the engine what the model is and how it should be used) and can be used to switch out models and textures but doesn't give you the tools to create them.

I haven't tried to set up lod nifs for FO3 but if it works like Oblivion there should be an option to select Visible When Distant on the static object. Then you'd need to generate LOD objects for your world space to get them to show up. The details for LOD object generation are on the wiki with some notes on the LOD Poll thread.

I just tried what you suggested: copying the original model and adding "_lod" to filename. Geck now allows to check "Visible When Distant". Now I have to try the LOD generation.

Must admit I never guessed the solution would be this simple. Apparently the functionality is coded into Geck & FO3 engine. I was afraid that the LOD model definition would be somewhere in the original model file.

Thank you!
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Mikkis

Fail! :sadvaultboy:

The the building (MegatonCommonHouse) now shows correctly on my wasteland from far away. It also causes several other building LOD textures to be messed up (watertower, church, wasteland houses...). Removing "Visible When Distant" check in Geck from MegatonCommonHouse and then regenerating LOD textures / objects restored all correct LOD textures. My anolysis is that since that MegatonCommonHouse is not a actual LOD model and therefore it uses multiple textures (MetalScrapShingle03, 04, ...etc). Actual LOD models use only single LOD texture. When generating object LOD textures there is a phase "Atlasing textures...". My guess is that Geck assumes that there is only a single texture for each object but it loads the multiple textures anyway and overwrites some of them. So, the end result is that some of the LOD object textures are wrong.

Seems like I have to learn Blender or some other modeling after all
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Mikkis