Yeah it'd be great to have a guide with definite details. I think even if the process was pretty tedious I'd be up for trying to get hi-res distant landscape textures and normals for the UL areas. And the Shivering Isles. Why hasn't anyone done this with SI? heh

It just seems like with what people have accomplished so far with high quality distant landscape textures and normals you'd think there'd be some high quality documentation, I dunno.

Actually, there is at least one "improved" landscape LOD pack that includes Shivering Isles. http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=17300 It's not the be all and end all of high-res LOD, but ain't bat either. I install it early so my higher-res Tamiel-only landscape LOD mod overwrites it as needed. I suppose I could create a Complex BAIN package that would end the need for overwriting, but haven't felt the need.

-Decrepit-

CSE can now generate LOD diffuse maps at a resolution of 4098x. Just thought I'd let you folks know.

PS: IIRC, the CS does generate high-resolution normal maps (4098x). You generate them with the tool in the Heightmap editor.

Oh wow, not sure how I never came across that. Looks pretty decent, though of course http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=32451 (and http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=32709) are higher quality. Anything's better than nothing for SI, though, and "decent" makes me pretty happy anyway, heh. Hopefully I can easily isolate the files for SI in the archive since I install everything manually, and I don't want to have to reinstall the Tamriel distant landscape textures and normals and the UL stuff again after checking this out. Lazy, hehe. But not lazy enough I wouldn't pump out some killer custom distant landscape textures if I knew how!

A question:

I've hit a snafu with "color" maps. Construction Set wiki directions for producing high res colors (via the heightmap window) say to first load a cell in the render window, then press SHIFT+C to remove everything but the landscape itself. Only, it doesn't quite do that. I still see what I'll call "chalk marks" all over the place. Yellow circles. Blue rectangles. That sort of thing. I assumed these wouldn't show up on the finalized DDS file. They do! Makes 'em unusable except for experimental purposes.

Surely there is a way to get rid those marks. But how?

Any input is much appreciated!

UPDATE:
I might have found a solution. Only, at the moment it too has issues... different issues but issues none the less. Gonna try a few things later. Wanna test several self-created "normals" in-game first. (I already saw 'em on my secondary install, but will not try 'em on my primary computer, where I actually play the game.)

-Decrepit-

DISTANT LANDSCAPE LOD
Progress Report





Well now, we're finally getting somewhere. Here are a few screenshots of the Imperial Isle area, showing off self-created 60.00.00.32 dds, nf.dds and nif files for that quad. Note that surrounding quads use downloaded high res LODs of a better quality than mine.

http://i307.photobucket.com/albums/nn303/Decrepit_Waste/TES%20IV%20Oblivion%20Landscape%20LODs/ImpIsleLOD1.jpg
The good: I pretty much nailed the road from Red Ring to Arthmoor's East Bridge and Guard Tower. Likewise the sloping dug-out road from the North Bridge is clearly visible even at this distance. The road partially circling the Prison District is also quite viewable from far away. I spent hours on the quad's roads. As created they showed WAY too much tiling and some mis-colored segments . Drove me crazy ....errrr, crazier. I hand edited 'em all in Gimp, creating a stamp from one smooth main road section and going over every inch of road with it. Tiling is still visible in spots, but it's livable now. Note that I removed all "editing marks" by hand too. That was a pain. And naturally I missed one. It can be seen in this capture. Think "yellow". (I'll of course remove it next time I work on the file.) I'm not done with this map by a long shot. Those ugly dark circles where large rocks should be have to go, for one thing.

http://i307.photobucket.com/albums/nn303/Decrepit_Waste/TES%20IV%20Oblivion%20Landscape%20LODs/ImpIsleLOD2.jpg
A closer view of the afore mentioned bridge with dug-out sloped road visible, as it never was before even at this distance. The roads near that Ayleid ruin look better now too.

http://i307.photobucket.com/albums/nn303/Decrepit_Waste/TES%20IV%20Oblivion%20Landscape%20LODs/ImpIsleLOD4.jpg
As can be seen, these files of mine aren't the best. But I'm rather pleased with some aspects of them. LOD textures don't look half bad at near distance, the transition point just prior to near-view files kicking in. Conversely, they are at their worst at true far distance, where they are rather low-fi. Early on I created a "normal" with much better detail at far distance. But that out looked like crap at the transition point. I hope to eventually hit on a better compromise.

Sadly, I can't recall exactly how I created the "normal" FN.DDS seen here. I've not been happy with any recently created normal. This is one of my earlier efforts. I neglected to write down how I filtered it, other than the notation "noise". No, I don't consider this "normal" acceptable except as a placeholder until I hit on a better formula. It started out at 4096 and was reduced to 2048 DXT1.

The "color map" is crated at very high resolution, then reduced with no special treatment (other than my hand edits) except clicking "dither" during the Gimp save process. Oh yeah, the file in my captures in 4096 DXT1. None or my 2048s suffice.

The mesh is....well, it's a mesh. Doesn't seem to be much you can do about that except load it and hope for the best. I had hoped it would correct more mismatches than it does. But hey, at least I got the nice sunken road!

There isn't much good written documentation on monkeying with Landscape LODs. Two Construction Set Wiki tutorials is about it. Those cover the basics and little else. Readmes provide with downloaded landscape LOD packs provide food for though but little by way of actual instruction.. In any case I'm gonna keep slugging away at it until I manage to wreck my Oblivion installs beyond redemption.

-Decrepit-

The problem with the LOD meshes is simply the CS reduces the quality of the mesh by so much when it generates them you are losing a lot of rather important details through the reduction process. Oftentimes this requires the modder to go in with a CS only plugin and make huge edits to the terrain in order for the Landscape LOD generator in the CS to be able to pick up on those details you want in the actual LOD mesh.

*Silently awaiting for shadeMe to finish his tweaks to the LOD mesh generator*

I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but one trick that's very handy for generating the LOD texture is to use a worldspace other than Tamriel.

Say you're doing one by Anvil. Instead of having to fight the objects in the main worldspace, switch to AnvilWorld instead. Generate the landscape for that quad. The only thing you need to do when it's done is reame the file so the first digit is a 60 instead of what it comes out as. Plus the usual 00 glitch handling. You'll avoid the risk of bumping into the 2GB barrier, plus the whole process will sail by much faster because it's not trying to preload 400,000 references.

This only works in child worldspaces though. If you have another huge worldspace in a mod, you'll just have to hope you don't run into memory issues while generating them.

Also, I'm not sure if it's been made clear anywhere, but due to CS bugs, you can't process more than one LOD mesh per session. The first batch will come out fine. Subsequent batches are nothing but jumbles of missing triangles.

I have decent luck creating "color maps" via the Create Local Maps function, which produces VERY high res output. I suspect the ultimate "color" solution lies there. It has drawbacks, the chiefest of which might be due to my ignorance with CS. Those map are full of what I term "edit marks". Yellow semicircles. Blue semi-rectangles. An occasional pink dot. I remove them by hand with GIMP. It's doable that way, but takes hours per quad. Tiling can also be a issue, but that too can prolly be tamed with some sort of GIMP filter applied to a brush. (BTW, I DO press SHIFT+C as directed by Wiki. That's supposed to remove everything but landscape from maps. It looks as if it works in the render window, but the final produce shows "edits".)

"Normal Maps" still elude me. No matter what I try, CS always produces the same four quads (at once): 60.00.00.32, 60.00.-32.32, 60.-32.-32.32, 60.-32.00.32. ( I called myself following your advice this morning but still no go. I'm sure I'm just making some dumb CS newb mistake. But it gets frustrating.

Haven't had a chance to work on this project these past several days, beyond creating a raw high res "color map" of the Leyawiin-Elsweyr quad. Oh, and removing those dratted edit marks from it. That map will, I think, be my guinea pig for tiling removal experiments.

What is everyone's thoughts on filtering and such? I'm thinking more and more that stuff like "noise" should be reserved for "normals", and that the trick with color maps is to hand "paint" 'em for looks in GIMP or Paint.net and then don't do much more than reduce 'em to a manageable resolution before converting to DDS (if they aren't in that format already). I'm also wondering if it's better to go with lower-res uncompressed map as opposed to higher-res compressed maps, all else being equal? Or does it matter much one way or the other? (Right now mine are all DXT1 compressed, mostly 2048s, and the one 4096.)

-Decrepit-

@Decrepit
Have you tried using http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/TES4qLOD to generate your landscape LOD textures? It is a command line program but there is a GUI addon available, though the only place I have found where you can download it is http://www.silgrad.com/wbb2/thread.php?postid=149421 on the Silgrad forums. The only real problems I can see with using TES4qLOD with it's GUI compared to the CS is that:
1) You need all of the landscape textures used by the game to be converted into 4x4 bitmaps. The author does tell you how to batch-convert the files though.
2) All plugins specified must have no spaces in their name. I'm sure there are ways of batch removing spaces though.

Thanks for the reply!

I do indeed know of TES4qLOD. (It can be found at Nexus too, btw.) I studied its documentation and elected to forgo it for the following reason. I quote:



Since my goal is to produce better-than-vanilla quality, I think it best to keep on plugging away as I am. Well, I DO use the LOD Generator linked in my initial post. But that handles only "color maps" so doesn't solve my "normals" dilemma. Or meshes. I've not even began to study meshes seriously yet. A shame really, since they are the foundation for all else.

-Decrepit-

I'd also figure that with CSE able to do higher resolution color maps that TES4qLOD is now obsolete since it's main advantage was the ability to do that.

True, but there is the problem of the half-black texture bug (which my PC is a victim of too, it seems). And that the CS is (much) slower than TES4qLOD. Hopefully ShadeMe can continue to impress and fix the CS's LOD generation bugs.

I wonder what relation hardware has with the half-black texture bug. My PC's specs are the following:
OS: Windows XP SP3 with all major updates installed
CPU: Intel Pentium D 820 @ 2.8 GHz
Motherboard: Intel D945-GTP
RAM: 2 GB DDR2 RAM (assorted modules)
Graphics: Nvidia Geforce 9800GT 512 MB

Hardware specs don't seem a likely culprit:

Processor: AMD Phenom II X4 955 3.2Ghz
Memory: 8GB Corsair Dominator
Motherboard: Asus M4A79T Deluxe
Graphics card: PowerColor Radeon HD 6970 2GB
Sound card: Sound Blaster X-Fi
Windows Home Premium 64 bit.

Whatever the issue is, it's during the stage where it would be stitching the small squares together that are in the "partial" folder.