Yep, that one worked better.

Still not great though, it put the wrong land texture.


There obviously is a trick to making the CK generator work....that trick though? no idea.

Haven't been around for the last couple of days but you guys are making progress, tx!

Of course we are! (And by we I mean them because I've done little here but helped with one or two minor things. )

For science!!!

Yep, LOD water is not showing up for me either. I have LODs working fine in my test worldspace, but distant water doesn't show up at all.

~DE

Sorry for the delay, i have been though several try and i think CK generate corrupted textures, the diffuse look all the same 1/4 done and normals are flat...?

So i think combine tes4qlod and Oscape is the best thing to do for now, by that i mean, genreate all diffuse with tes4qlod and all normals with Oscape, Oscape crash for me when i make diffuse and i don't know for sure if tes4qlod is capable of reading height data in the esp so i use Oscape.

Since it require more testing i will continue... to test...


For tes4qlod the better is to add unrecognized textures like described in the readme :

4b. If you have custom textures:

If you are using any of your own textures on your landscape (i.e. not the ones with Oblivion or Shivering Isles or the original Fallout3, FalloutNew Vegas or Skyrim games), you'll need to convert them into 4x4 BMPs (either 24-bit or 32-bit) and copy them in to the tes4qlod_tex directory. TES4qLOD does not understand the DDS format, so needs them as BMPs. You can very easily convert all your DDS textures to 4x4 BMPs using the free utility, nconvert (http://perso.orange.fr/pierre.g/xnview/en_nconvert.html), which is very, very fast. Alternatively use DDSConvertor.
To convert all your DDS files to BMP, copy the textures in to the same dircetory as nconvert and type:

nconvert -out bmp -resize 4 4 *.dds

Then copy those .bmp files in to the tes4qlod_tex directory. You should preserve the directory structure that they exist in the Game's textures structure


Also, i don't have tried at this point to delete the .lod file generated when you generate texture with CK since i haven't seen that it was created, but i will. Maybe this is what the CK means by files already exist...
(In game with CK texture every thing LOD1 is quite purple, like their is no diffuse but lot much softer)
(far LOD render grey like their is a huge fog over textures)
(i'm currently finalising generating with Oscape and report when it's done)

Yep, far better with this combination. CK for meshes, tes4qlod for diffuse textures and Oscape for Normal map.

I might be being dumb, but where do you need to put the renamed Tamrial.lod for it to work?

Perhaps in the same folder structure you extracted it from? Data\lodsettings\

did you try using tesannwyn?

http://projectmanager.f2s.com/morrowind/TESAnnwyn.html

Sorry, I'm feeling really stupid.

I extracted it from the Meshes.bsa in the Data folder. Does it need to go back in there as I don't have a lodsetting folder just in Skyrim/Data

Make the lodsetting folder manually.

Been lurking about this and the old thread since their existence, though I might chime in, as maybe my trials and errors with this might help some of the others who aren't quite on the cutting edge. Apparently I'm not allowed to post links though... presumably a first-post thing.

After a whole lot of trial and error I've got at least a working worldspace island (http://img191.imageshack.us/img191/112/screenshot3df.jpg) with what looks like is almost LOD.

The worldspace is only 512x512 (so I suppose 16x16 cells), and with my i5 4gb RAM machine I was eventually able to generate both the LOD mesh and texture in the CK without a crash. I regenerated in Oscape as well, just to make sure I got the same result, and ended up with nothing different.

I'm still seeing significant errors with the LOD appearing, however: http://img210.imageshack.us/img210/2176/screenshot4ko.jpg, http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/836/screenshot2px.jpg/
It looks like the distance LOD (level 4?) is appearing no problem, but the closer LOD only appears in the current cell, which totally defeats the purpose. Is anyone else experiencing this, or experienced it in their endeavors?

I'd like to agree with da mage's previous assertion that the ability to work the CK without crashes is based on memory; I am only able to generate LOD for my little island if I have absolutely nothing else running. If I even have a couple of tabs of Chrome open, it'll crash. It appears the kit was made on machines with ridiculous amounts of RAM, so they probably never had to even consider coding in parts to deal with users like us.

So far, for anyone else who's been struggling as much as I did, here are my exact steps:

• Create heightmap in Geocontrol 2, export as .bmp
  
• Load .bmp in Photoshop, give 1 px gaussian blur (for overflow/underflow errors), change colour mode to greyscale, change colour depth to 16 bit, save as .raw with IBM coding
  
• Run TESAnnwyn with following command:
  
• TESAnnwyn -i Skyrim -w [worldspace] -d [XxY] -s [height (keep low)] -x [negative 1/2 your total cell width] -y [negative 1/2 your total cell height] [heightmap file]
  
• Mine: TESAnnwyn -i Skyrim -w TestIsland -d 512x512 -s 0.07 -x -8 -y -8 geotest2.raw
  
• Load tesannwyn.esp into CK and generate LOD - DO NOT SAVE; generating LOD with the creation kit mucks up your heightmap data, but LOD isn't saved in the esp anyways so it doesn't matter
  
• -or- generate LOD with Oscape
  
• Put TestIsland.lod in data/lodsettings

That being said, the process is obviously not perfect because with both Oscape and the CK LOD generation I get significant errors and discrepancies in some cells, and I am utterly baffled as to why the near-level LOD doesn't show up...

Good work on this everyone. The ingenuity in this thread is impressive.

You monster!

Hey... Whenever you guys get all this figured out, someone needs to record a tutorial video. That would be very useful.

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/27/2012021100001.jpg/

Left is Oscape texture and right is tes4qlod

As you can see the diffuse of oscape don't come up i don't know why. But tes4qlod don't make all my diffuse i don't know why....
Mesh are from CK
Normal map are from oscape
For water lod, i think i made it appear by setting the hieght of land and water + water lod in worldspace windows from the CK before generating mesh, you must verify the hight of water is correct ingame before generating
(I'm amaze by what everybody is comming up with such little info from bedestha on their tool...)
thanks every one again.

aah, so i need to set up water heights in the CK BEFORE generating lod, that makes sense, i'll try that later

And heres a little progress report






[img]http://i.imgur.com/ygV1b.jpg[/img]

Well this morning I managed to get the CK to generate LOD textures again.....it did the whole thing....but in-game I couldn't see any LOD.

I recorded every step I took....then I start over and tried doing the same thing again.....you know what? I couldn't generate the LOD textures (fail cause it said they already existed). SO obviously there is some kinda of inconsistent bug with the LOD Texture generation. I know there are external programs for this, but I'm really trying to find how the CK one works.

I am happy to report the CK is now generating it's own .lod file. It seems once you set up a boundary region, the CK gets the idea and makes the file for you. This file does work, I was using CK generated .lod files all last night.


For the water, you need to set that before you start doing any LOD......otherwise you run into problems.

That's quite beautiful

For what it's worth, I noticed a few things today when generating LODs with Oscape. Firstly, I can verify that not all textures are generated. I noticed this by opening a NIF to correct a texture path, but the expected texture was not in the Terrain folder. This brings me to my next observation. In my case, the texture path recorded in the NIFs was not correct. it was showing Data/Textures/myworldspace/terrain. After pointing the texture path to the same location without the Data/ path in the beginning, the textures show up in game.

Btw, I keep seeing comments about setting up waterheight. What's the deal here? I did need to adjust my water height and land height settings for things to work, but how is that relevant to whether or not LOD water shows up? any explanations?

hmm, to me it seems that the visible when distant (distant trees, rocks, ect..) generator for skyrim is completely broken, it crashes imediately after i hit generate. has anyone else had success with this. looks like we may need to rely on yet another 3rd party tool, this realy is dissapointing.

I'll second that.

I'm jealous. I'm currently making my heightmap by hand very specifically based off a map I've been drawing for 4 months and I fear it won't look nearly as good. T.T

Thanks Guys

Here's my progress, if anyone cares. This is after about 2-3 hours of work, but everything is so harsh and it's still missing a lot of details and mountains. I figure if I spend ~10 more hours this weekend, I can have this thing finished and ready for use on Monday.

http://i1118.photobucket.com/albums/k609/AlexanderJVelicky/Shot2.png

When I'm done I'm going to need some serious help getting it into a Skyrim esp/m and getting some basic land LOD generated so I can view it as a whole continent to make sure the scale feels good. (Since I basically took a shot in the dark when 'sizing' it on my map...)

So I think my other mod got corrupted at some point....so I started from scratch and plan to copy over the region stuff a little later. But I did get the LOD generator working like I is supposed to.

My process for only using the CK's LOD generator, this only works once...see details lower on why.

Pre-Running: You have your worldspace set up with a heightmap.

1. Delete your .lod file (keep the folder though), an LOD meshes and LOD textures
2. Create a border region (You have to do this first)
3. Generate the LOD Meshes (Since you have a border region now, the generator makes you a .lod file)
4. Close the CK. There is a bug sometimes if you try to generate staright away, but re-opening the CK fixes it.
5. Run "Generate Max Height Data for World" options "Yes, "Yes"
6. Save. Close the CK. There is a bug sometimes if you try to generate staright away, but re-opening the CK fixes it. If the CK freezes when you save, thats still fine, your mod was saved.
7. Generate the LOD Textures
8. Test

If everything went correctly, you should have LOD textures now.

It does seem though I can only make the CK run this generation once per mod, once it has run the first time and generated stuff it simply refuses to run again erroring that the LOD textures already exsist (even when they don't). This happens even if you backtrack to a version of your mod that hasn't generated textures yet.

You can however, rename your worldspace and it will generate the textures again, so obviously the CK keeps a running record somewhere of what has been made.....instead of you know, just checking the folders for it.

How long is the CK's memory? Well it seems like forever. I am looking for a solution...one I've found is if you rename your worldspace (MyWorld renamed MyWorld1) it will then generate again (one time)....but it's hardly a good solution.

My guess is maybe there is something in the .esp (or .esm) that records that textures are generated? Maybe something TES5Snip can get at.

Ideas I've tried that failed:
Renaming .esp
Loading .esp into TES5Snip and saving it as another mod
Converting .esp to .esm
Creating a new .esp as a child of the .esm and attempting to generate LOD on the worldspace inthe .esm


Other notes:
The LOD texture gen doesn't work on any of the Skyrim worldspaces either...so its not something we are doing wrong.


So Bethesda....the bug with your LOD generator. The LOD Texture generator will only let you generate textures once for a worldspace name, once per mod. This only happens with the textures, the meshes LOD genertor checks the folders.

I have spent the last 2 days working on this, repeating actions and finding exsactly what was wrong. This is it, I can repeat as many times as needed.


EIDT: I'll also chuck this in. While I can use it to generate LOD...running the texture gen part has flattened my heightmap every time.....not sure if Im doing it wrong, or that another bug....most annoying part when testing though is that since I've run it the texture gen, i can't delete the LOD and reload to a previous version and do it again....since the CK says it's still there....very very annoying.

Well I have got as far as finishing the heightmap. I have put this into Skyrim via TesAnnwyn and here is the result:

http://mesogea.spruz.com/user/380826/members/A7EDA3B7-F0E8-43D9-86CE-5576CA91B0E6/big_201220807012148.jpg

As you can see, its as big a heightmap as the game can possibly handle. I managed to get LOD started in Oscape but had to cancel it owing to the 340 minutes it will take to generate and that I cant babysit it owing to work commitments. Tonight I will set it to generate and see what it produces. My figuring is that if Annwyn and Oscape will produce for my map then they can cope with anything. I will then have to try to work my way through texturing etc.

I am just hoping that BETHESDA ARE READING THESE THREADS AND NOTING THAT LOD IS BROKEN, HEIGHTMAP IS NOT USABLE. PLEASE FIX THESE. THERE REALLY IS NO EXCUSE WHEN PEOPLE ARE ABLE TO MAKE TOOLS THAT ARE MORE EFFECTIVE IN THEIR SPARE TIME. THIS REALLY IS A SERIOUS CUSTOMER SERVICE ISSUE THAT WILL SURELY HAVE AN IMPACT ON FUTURE INTEREST IN TES TITLES.