Its been a while since I have done anything with Oblivion and I was wondering if anything has happened on the VWD front. Has anyone come up with a replacement tool for wz_'s GenerateFar? Are there other options out there beside his tool?

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=15781

Hmm, I did 't see anything in the description stating that it will now also cerate the _far.nifs. We used to use GenerateFar to do that, then run TES4LODGEN. Am I missing something, have things changed?

You can't make a perfect (or even good) far nif with an automated program. At least not if it has more details than a rock. A program will never know what is needed for the mesh to look good and what is not needed. If you want a really good far nif you need to make a low poly mesh in a 3D app and eventually make a lowres texture if there is a new UV map needed (or even a new 'all-in-one texture, which is needed for many far nifs since you cut off mesh details that otherwise would not show up). For hundreds of nifs that would take a huge amount of time obviously. But either that or rather bad looking meshes that still have more triangles than they need.

In that case, you have PyFFI if you want a free tool, or you can go the route Arthmoor used for RAEVWD and use a trial run in Milkshape 3D to reduce the meshes.

Using the DX tools in Milkshape 3D is going to be as close as you'll get to doing this on a mass scale. You'll need patience though because even with tools like that it took me weeks to cut through everything. Yes, it probably has polygon bloat, but since I just can't deal with Blender that's as good as it's going to get unless someone else wants to help

GenerateFar is junk and always has been, plus it doesn't work in 64 bit systems. The PyFFI method for generating them isn't much better than GenerateFar.

Either that or do what Phitt said and learn Blender and hand produce suitable _far.nif files that way.