The CS can be daunting at first, and while we love it's frequent crashes and fiddly controls, there are some things that can make editing with the CS much, much easier. I made this topic so that everyone can share their tips in the CS. Post anything you've found that has benefited you, and that could benefit others.

One thing that annoyed me in the CS was its limited draw distance. Objects would fade out at a rather short range, making editing really difficult and cumbersome. I found that if you go into the ConstructionSet.ini file (My Documents/My Games/Oblivion/ConstructionSet.ini), and find the following lines:

fLODFadeOutMultActors=
fLODFadeOutMultItems=
fLODFadeOutMultObjects=

The higher you set them, the farther the draw distance is for actors, items and objects. For example, I have a fairly powerful PC, so I have set them to:

fLODFadeOutMultActors=50.0000
fLODFadeOutMultItems=100.0000
fLODFadeOutMultObjects=100.0000

I see no slowdown, yet I can see every item and object wherever I am editing. This makes editing in large exterior areas so much easier.

So, what are your tips?

Another means to the same end is the Preferences> LOD tab - sliders to the right.

A thing that can make editing with the CS much, much easier is http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=25031 :cake:

There are various other threads on this topic, http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=1027015&hl=.

I sometimes find it necessary to disable a single object in the Render Window so I can see (and edit) something beneath it. I used to delete the object and then add it back after I was done, but I found an easier way. Select the object you want to disable and press the "1" key (the one just above the letter Q, not on the one on the Num Pad). This puts the selected object (and only that object) into wireframe mode. To reverse this, you will have to select it from the right hand column of the Cell View window, and press "1" again after re-selecting the Render Window. I've found this particularly useful for finding and removing pathgrid nodes from underneath buildings that I've added. Just "wireframe" the building, turn on Path Gridding and remove the unneeded nodes.

Could someone help me out?

I have been away for 2 years now and i come back to modding.
All my posts are gone though i had been answered to my problem here 2 years ago.
Now i dont remember the solution n cannot fix it.

When i am landscape editing in a snowy region, i cannot see the actual height of the small bumps on the snowy surface.
if i open the lights, it is all bright white (cant see the shadows) but if i turn off the lights, then the sky is too dark to work. i mean it is like afternoon-evening.
I remember someone had told me to change a setting somewhere, and i remember the HDR keyword. But not quite sure since it was 2 years ago.
Could you please help?

You can sometimes get a brightness level between the default lighting and the "bright light" lighting by turning on the sky (cloud button next to the light), but this can also make things worse if the weather region is a cloudy one. Setting your display brightness or gamma correction down within your graphics card options often works better at toning down the brightness.

The other option is to place large radius light sources in the areas you're editing, like ARWhiteIntense1800. As long as it's not too far away, or too close, it should add some contrast.

Ultimately, you just need to do your best to read things by using the circle outline of the landscape tool to hint at any high parts, and to lots and lots of panning around to smooth out those areas. Most of it is just because the texture is such a solid white, so under any consistent light, it just looks flat.

Making a modified texture override for snow, with an obvious grid pattern would solve the problem, but is a bit of an excessive solution.

This is all part of the reason why I havn't gotten to my own arctic area yet... Too easy to become snowblind.

thanks for the reply
but i remember that it was a grapihcs issue and it was solved by changing a setting in constructionset.ini file
when one of the variables in the file was switched from 1 to 0 , the problem was solved.

I solved it.
in My Documents\My Games\Oblivion\ConstructionSet.ini
at line 422
change
bDoHighDynamicRange=1 to
bDoHighDynamicRange=0
and viola!

This is a problematic image with lights off:
http://i107.photobucket.com/albums/m318/mightyatlas/1.jpg
This is a problematic image with lights on:
http://i107.photobucket.com/albums/m318/mightyatlas/2.jpg

problematic without lights:
http://i107.photobucket.com/albums/m318/mightyatlas/3-1.jpg
problem solved:
http://i107.photobucket.com/albums/m318/mightyatlas/1-1.jpg

another scene
http://i107.photobucket.com/albums/m318/mightyatlas/2-1.jpg
and again with sky:
http://i107.photobucket.com/albums/m318/mightyatlas/3.jpg
As you can see bumps can be seen in snowy texture.

One thing I found, which is less of a CS trick, but still a "holy crap that's useful" trick comes into play when you are wanting to define a few dozen statics within a mod. Just have the CS with the statics window open, in a different window, have the directory containing the resources open, and just drag the .nif files into the CS pane. All of the objects you drag will be defined in the CS and named according to what the .nif is named as long as the name is unique. It'll automatically setup the folders too. The same feature works for most objects that link to a .nif, including clothing, but it's only with statics that you really need to add several dozen at once and don't need to define anything else. Unfortunately it doesn't work on folders.

I found that saving obcessively kind of is a good thing at times. Then again I somehow "lose" items when I close and then re-open the active mod. Go figure.

I've found the opposite to be true, especially when working on landscapes, and exterior pathgrids. Although you still want to save often, it's usually best to do so when you're at a point where the save you make won't end up totally screwing over your mod if you happened to make a mistake somewhere.

Something I didn't know about at first that proved to be insanely useful. If you happen to be working with subspaces, by default all you get is a blue frame. You can't click on this frame, and getting the subspace to move was always a hassle. Until I discovered the option in the view menu.

View->Solid Subspaces

Now you can click on the subspace and drag it around like normal. It also makes it much easier to tell exactly what the subspace will cover. Once you get it into place, it's best to go back and uncheck the option or you won't be able to work with stuff that's inside the subspace.

I have occasionally lost/misplaced a single PGRD and being warned about this while loading a mod, it's coordinates will be given. For those who do not know how to find them in your cell, create an XMarker and name it "FindIt" and give the same coordinates to Xmarker. Click twice on the marker in the list of the cell, whoila! It takes you to your lost PGRD. There are other ways but if you're in the cell presently this is quick and easy.

Dialogue writers! Don't you just hate it when you give an NPC a line of dialogue, but the sentence is too long to fit in one 'response text block'? Especially annoying when adding new rumors which can't have multiple response text blocks.
You can cheat the limit. Add the line as far as you can with the normal method. Click OK. Now under Response Text click on your line once. It will be highlighted. Click it again (not too fast, otherwise you doubleclick) and you will be able to edit the line and make longer sentences than that the normal method allows, though there is still a limit. It has saved me from lots of headaches.



You do not need the reference ID of an NPC if you want to do things with him if you're making it happen in the result script of dialogue he speaks. For example, if the player completes a quest for an NPC, and the NPC says 'thanks'. You do not have to do 'NPCRef.moddisposition player 100' to make the NPC like you. Just 'moddisposition player 100' will do.


When editing an NPCs face, instead of using the sliders you can right click with your mouse on the head, hold it and drag to change his face. With this you can go http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b120/iamerik/MW%20and%20Oblivion/ugly.jpg the normal boundaries. Why you'd want that I don't know but there you go.

Esming files saves a many hours of aggravation and heartfelt agony. Not to mention saves many initial problems when building. Wryebash's copy to esm or esmify are godsend uses.

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

Tip : If you want to know what your town or building exterior building looks like at night or any different time, go to File>Preferences, click Render Window Tab, and simply drag the slider. The worldspace's time will automatically changed whenever you move slider.

If you need to assess distances in the CS, use http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=27291. Very useful.

I find a modded light to be a bit more useful for radius checks, can change to any radius without having to make extra object definitions for each, or link up and try to find meshes. Apparently the devs also used lights at some point. Phitts measures are still useful, but are more for figuring distances when creating custom models to fit a very particular spot.

You mean the light radius that shows when you press the L key? Good tip. I've never thought of that.

I use Phit's Measures a lot when determining distances to set the radius on Ai packages: just pull the bulls eye to the marker and it is easy to determine radiuses. I usually have 2 or 3 (scaled differently) in the cell I am working on.

holy crap, thats probably the best CS tip ever. I frequently have to add tons and tons of files and have spent hours doing it by hand. and now i just added 20+ files in half a second.

huge thanks

I don't know how I missed this after hundreds of hours of landscaping but I just discovered that if you select an object and press the S key you can scale an object by holding down the left mouse button and dragging the mouse. Much faster than double-clicking the object and editing the data manually. Great for tweaking rocks and trees so they don't look so uniform.

Fairly popular tip : You can hold the F11 key while opening the script editor to modify the default font style for that session. Holding down F12 will automatically st the font face to Lucida Console ( or your OS's default font form the command line )

Since compiling vanilla scripts with the extended CS doesn't make it dependent on OBSE, you could do so to avail [OBSE's] error catching feature, which identifies extra endIfs and mismatching parentheses.

When you are working mostly in a few cells, connect them with doors to make it easy to navigate from one cell to the other in the CS by double-clicking on the yellow boxes.

Also, positioning the yellow box gives you an 'entry point' of your choice, to the cell in the CS.

Don't forget to delete the doors when you finish your mod, thou.