I'm trying, right now, to make Yet Another Tree Replacer, in which I take actual USDA studies about the diversity of trees in the Washington DC area and make a bunch of 100-200 year Beeches, Callery Pears, and Tulip Trees with which to populate the wasteland. The idea is that I will use various Speedtree seeds to make various different looking trees with various heights, spreads, and tree arrangements. This is already mostly working, and looks very nice. But I have some issues I need help with:

The only version of Speedtree I have to work with is Speedtree Lite. It works, although I can't see what the trees look like exactly until I import them and start the game up. That's only a minor point of contention, really. The problem is that I cannot make a tree with a collision mesh. All the trees can be walked right through! Is there a different version of SpeedTree I could be using? I have tried the Lite version, and the 5.0 version that comes with the Unreal Development Kit. Lite works for Fallout 3, but doesn't export collision. 5.0 exports collision but does NOT work with Fallout 3.

Failing that, is there some way to fake at least a tree trunk for a collision mesh? Being able to walk through trunks, and them not blocking bullets or line of sight, is kind of a deal breaker.

The leaves are all very bright. I'm not very knowledgeable about textures in this game, but it seems like they are recieving too much ambient light and glowing very brightly at night. They look alright during the day tho. Am I missing some texture maps or something?



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The biggest, most pressing issue is the collosion maps. Without a .nif file to add a collision mesh to, the tutorials I've seen online are less than useless to me.

The 'collision' is created in game, based on the 'size' of the tree. Small trunked trees are walked through, like bushes. Try making the tree bigger.

You need 'normal maps' for the textures. Or you made your normal maps with a high reflectivity alpha channel.

Okay then, I'll try making the trunk bigger, tho honestly it looks fairly large already.

As far as the normal maps, I had assumed this. How should I go about making a normal map, tho? I've seen what they look like but do not know how to make one. They look like a bunch of blue to me and nothing more. The image I'm using is that of a ficus leaf, since it is close enough, and... honestly I got the file from an Oblivion resource pack and then edited the tree to look more like a Beech, but I have to use Ficus leaves which yes, are very shiny. However, I don't see any normal maps at all in the pack I got.