I've updated TESAnnwyn and TES4qLOD for Skyrim. Both now support Skyrim (as well as Fallout NewVegas, Fallout3 abd Oblivion). Only TESAnnwyn supports Morrowind. I'm calling them 'betas', just in case people find issues.

http://projectmanager.f2s.com/morrowind/downloads/TESAnnwyn-0.23beta.zip: Heightmap importer/exporter for Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout3, FalloutNV, Skyrim.

Can export the height, vertex colour and texture layer placement maps from any game ESM/ESP for reimporting in to an ESP for the same or another game.

1. http://flic.kr/p/aFdg17
2. http://flic.kr/p/aFd7gj

The TESAnnwyn http://projectmanager.f2s.com/morrowind/TESAnnwyn.html is a bit old, but the feature set is the same. Note that texture replacement between games (importing the land from one game to a different game when you still want it textured) is still only directly supported between Morrowind and Oblivion (e.g. Exporting Oblivion's textured landscape in to Morrowind, TESAnnwyn will change the placed textures with the original nearest equivalent already available in vanilla Morrowind, and the opposite will happen if exporting Morrowind's textured landscaped in to Oblivion). However it isn't hard if you wanted to move textured worlds between Oblivion/Fallout3/FalloutNV/Skyrim - you can change the FormIDs in the text file TESAnnwyn creates to use different textures. I won't describe this unless someone wants to port land between games.

http://projectmanager.f2s.com/morrowind/downloads/TES4qLOD-0.58beta2.zip: Texture and normal LOD quad and full map exporter for Oblivion, Fallout3, FalloutNV and Skyrim and Visible When Distant generator for Oblivion.

3. http://flic.kr/p/aTfafn
4. http://flic.kr/p/aTfbrP

By default TES4qLOD will create DistantLand LOD images and place them in the appropriate folder for the game to process. You can now disable this behaviour, so it just generates BMPs (and doesn't move them in to the textures folder) by adding a '-B' (BMP only) option. Under Skyrim this isn't of much use until we have an LOD mesh generator too.
Visible When Distant functionality still only works for Oblivion atm. I haven't looked at the newer formats yet - but AFAIR Fallout3's CS (the GECK) was quite reasonable at this so there's no point in TES4qLOD doing it.

I've only really added the Fallout3, FalloutNV and Skyrim support for TES4qLOD so you can get complete maps out if you're curious. If as a comunity we can get a mesh generator for Skyrim out soon (I know one is in the works) then we're in a position to generate all the landscape LOD whilst waiting for the CS. If the Skyrim CS comes out with the appalling performance of the GECK (i.e. weeks to generate a mesh on a top end quad core processor - a task that should take minutes!) then our modding experience can be dramatically improved.

The (not particularly tidy or good) source code for TES4qLOD is included for the curious, or plain masochistic.

Lightwave

P.S. I plan to add these features to TESAnnwyn soon:

1. Water height exporting/importing (this is important for preserving inland lakes and rivers and also important for landscape LOD mesh generation for Skyrim). Morrowind won't support this, but Oblivion and above should.
2. CELL data exporting/importing. To reimport all sorts of useful information about a cell (such as region, water type).
3. Some options to allow appending of an imported worldspace on to an existing worldspace (it's sort of always been possible with TESAnnwyn but requires a bit of extra cleverness on the part of the modder).

Hey It's LightWave

Thank you for updating Tes4qlod for Skyrim support,

I assume we can still make 2048 or 4096 DistantLod Images..

Hi Corepc,

You're welcome - TES4qLOD can still make them at those resolutions just as it did for the previous games, and should put them in the right texture directory for the Skyrim LOD system, though I haven't actually tried them in game - I've had 3 weeks of throwing wild dance parties at my home until 7am each Saturday night/Sunday morning which kinda interferes with my concentration quite a bit!

It may be worth me adding an additional resolution beyond (8192x8192 at 32-cell quad level) since modern hardware should be able to handle it. There are some missing textures in Skyrim.esm (LTEX records) that aren't present in the landscape textures directory, but this isn't uncommon - AFAIK all the games to date have had some texture records in their ESMs but the textures themselves have not been used on any landscapes landscape, nor distributed with the BSAs.

Ethatron has also just written a LOD texture creator which works straight from the BSAs, but otherwise (I think) produces similar results to TES4qLOD. I don't know if his supports anything beyond Oblivion yet, but it shouldn't be much more work if he wanted to, everything from Oblivion through the Fallout3 games to Skyrim use the same texturing system, they just distribute the files in different locations. Not sure whether the end result of using one or the other will have any notable advantages though and it might just boil down to user's choice.

I also know someone who is looking at a much improved landscape mesh generator for the vanilla Skyrim LOD system, he'd already released a generator that worked with the vanilla (32 cell quad) Oblivion LOD, profiling the mountains and river edges much better and doesn't have those stupid gaps (and runs in one go). Skyrim still has popup LOD meshes that vanish as you get close and could do with improvement. I'll be looking to scale up the Skyrim exterior world soon, which won't be worth playtesting without the accompanying LOD; I just worry from experience that the CS will still have buggy or performance problems and we'll be forced to keep creating our tools ... better to be safe than sorry maybe.

This is a step forward to seeing OB in SK, I guess?

Skyrim support depends on CBash and niflib, I'm not in for writing yet-another ESP/ESM/NIF parser & writer but prefer to be connected to the greater network of frameworks around the Elder Scrolls games. This also hopefully creates a sort of pressure and connectivity to those frameworks, allowing them to grow a bit faster. There is no further reason, I'm certainly willing to implement the front-end code.
I'm currently thinking about writing a NIF-renderer to place objects into the color-map, like rocks and trees and cities and so on. The CS does add the rocks and the buildings, but not the speed-tree foilage.


My tool also makes meshes, and normals. It comes with an optimal DDS-compressor as well, and can store the normals in 16bit if you think about using uncompressed small normal-maps. It's also tightly coupled with the LOD-extension of OBGE which allows any range of LOD to be rendered. I'm looking at adding trees to that system currently.

The tool is http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=41165.

I've successfully exported vortex and height maps. However, I was wondering if there was a way to determine the landscape type (meaning: what is water and what is land), because the height map seems to take the depth of the water into account as well.

BTW, amazing tool, kudos!

You have the possibility to abuse TES4qLOD texture-lookup to color the color-map based on type. There is no explicit information in the ESP/ESM which says what type a place is. But the texture-names can give you a hint. You can replace the textures TES4qLOD utilized by colorized versions which for example produce black for underwater-textures and white for above-water textures etc. pp.

I could be mistaken, but I don't think that it renders anything but the landscape to the color map. At any rate, I just fixed that issue - All objects, including speed tree foliage, are rendered to the color maps now. There are a couple of clipping/lod issues that need to be resolved but that shouldn't be too hard. I'll send you the updated build (if you wish to test it) once I squish them all.

Coincidentally, my fix seems to have improved the CS's stability during the operation - Memory usage doesn't sky rocket up anymore now that the model loader is actually give enough time to release its resources b'ween cell switches.

My interpretation could be incorrect, but if you compare this http://projectmanager.f2s.com/morrowind/TES4qLOD.html (click to enlarge each), the left image - the vanilla Oblivion quad around the Imperial Island distributed with the game - appears to have foliage and city walls rendered on it, whereas the the right image is the same area generated by TES4qLOD at its lowest resolution (1024x1024 - which is the same res as the Bethesda one). It is possible the detail difference is simply a case of layer blending, but it just seems a little too good for that. There doesn't seem much point in rendering things like walls though since VisibleWhenDistant LOD meshes will obscure it

TES4qLOD has always replaced each texture layer with the texture of the uppermost layer giving a slightly blander image (the colour map is then applied on top). There's no reason why I couldn't try adding them at their given opacities over the colours below, I'm just not certain how much weight should be given to each overriding layer. Maybe I should just add the colour at the specified opacity and keep averaging it and see if starts getting close. When played in game, higher res quads generally look better than the vanilla quads anyway so I never saw this as a major problem. If the foliage is really being drawn as it appears to be, then having the foliage rendered and drawn on high res LOD textures could look really good.

Vortex maps sound kinda cool. The heightmap is literally the height of land relative to 0 game units of height (which in all games apart from Skyrim would be sea level). The default image export is a 16-bit BMP. You can't do much more than look at it, or reimport it as I don't think any other program will make sense of it. But if you look at http://flic.kr/p/aFd7gw the yellow and areas are below height 0 and hence sea water. The Skyrim heightmap there has been exported with '-h 18040' which raises the height 18040 game units; for some reason unknown to us as yet the sea level is -18040 game units in Skyrim.

I'll be adding a water height export to TESAnnwyn anyway, because Skyrim uses a lot of cells with specific water heights (for rivers and lakes, as well as the very low ocean) and it would be useful to reimport this information especially since in Skyrim there are a lot manually adjusted water cells.

It's rather complex. My default output rendering via the batch (not the context-menu cell render)is this:
http://paradice-insight.us/stuff/oblivion/60.-11.-13.256.png
Rocks render, foilage not, you see the vertex-color fake-shadows there. But when you loaded a cell into the render-view and some resources are in some cache I suppose you get this:
http://paradice-insight.us/stuff/oblivion/60.-1.-75.256.png
The trees render but they are mixed with billboards and totally broken, I suppose speed-tree breaks on that occasion.


Awesome, can't wait.


I had something like that in mind, when I wrote my autokey-script I had to give it a delay before doing the cell-render because the resources were streamed in, and when you immediatly try to trigger the cell-rendering (via context-menu) you get just half of the objects rendered. One learns the hard way ...


The blending is here:
https://github.com/Ethatron/Oscape/blob/master/Oscape_CBash.cpp#L866

That quad's color map has definitely got objects (and foliage) rendered to it. I could never get the vanilla CS to do that for me. Was that generated with the latest build of the CS (v1.2)?

On a different note, how does your tool work? Does it generate partials, like the CS, for each cell/2x2 grid and stitch them together at the end?

Batch? Could you clarify? I was under the impression that the context menu tool was the only way to generate them.

I have one word for this, "Excellent." Well fabulous and great also.

Hehe, I mean vertex of course

Could you perhaps copy the code (TESAnnwyn ... -w Tamriel Skyrim.esm) which you've used to get the results from the export example you've shown there? If I add '-h 18040', I don't really get the same result as you do.

I think he picked shaja's http://www.oblivionmodwiki.com/index.php/Landscape_LOD_Texture_Replacement, http://www.fileplanet.com/162615/160000/fileinfo/Elder-Scrolls-IV:-Oblivion---Landscape-LOD-Texture-Replacement-Border-Regions package has it integrated. Don't ask how shaja managed to render them, but it must have been a total pain, because you can get that just by doing it cell-by-cell. You can use some macro-tool to automate the clicks though.


It's a menu-point "World->Create Local Maps". There you can define the rectangle you want to render. Those are the "low" quality color-maps. In the renderview the context-menu "Generate LOD Land Texture->This LOD Quad" corresponds to the same algorithm I believe. Just the "Generate LOD Land Texture->This Cell" picks up everything it can grab from the cache. If it's not loaded into the cache it skips the "missing" objects. That's why one has to wait untill all assets are streamed into the render-view to have a complete render.

They come right from vanilla Oblivion - it's in "Oblivion - Textures - Compressed.bsa" - the landscape LOD distributed with the game. Truthfully I have not the faintest clue what an LOD texture generated in the Oblivion CS looks like - I assumed it would be the same quality as in the BSA, so for nearly 5 years I'd assumed the CS might have an edge over TES4qLOD, but you're saying it doesn't?!! The CS was such a terrible piece of software I never managed to generate a single landscape LOD texture - when it didn't crash it would simply give totally black textures - I had to knock up TES4qLOD and TESAnnwyn because I had no option - trying to use the Oblivion CS for those tasks was a very very very bad joke. This is why I gave up working on Oblivion several years ago - I could never got any creative modding done, just lost that time writing programs to fix fundamental things that were broken or flawed in the CS.

TESqLOD works similarly, it creates single cell sized images. 3 BMPs per cell: Textured land, Vertex Colour Map and Normal. They're written to temporary files so it can work on monumental size worldspaces without having to worry about RAM, but it's slower to process than storing the images in memory.
After the partials have been generated it stitches the cell images (blending the texture and vertex colour map images) to create the quads and the full worldspace map. The LOD2 system I abandoned for Oblivion used the single cell DDS images for LOD (it rendered 100% accurate LOD landscape using VWD meshes, but Oblivion wouldn't display more than 1000 VWDs). TES4qLOD can still generate the textures and normals, and TESAnnwyn the meshes, but it was another waste of time really.

I've just peaked at the Skyrim LOD DDS files - the largest (32x32 cell quads) are really low quality at 256x256. There doesn't appear to be foliage on the ones I've looked at. Honestly I am surprised. TES4qLOD won't generate them at anything less than 1024x1024. All the landscape LOD textures distributed with Skyrim are 256x256, it doesn't matter if they're 4x4 cell quads, 8x8, 16x16 or 32x32 cell quads.

TESqLOD generates the LOD files at the same detail level. The lowest detail produces 32x32 quads at 1024x1024 (Vanilla Oblivion), so 16x16 quads will be 512x512, 8x8 are 256x256 and 4x4 are 128x128. So to equal and improve on the default game's detail, "-q 2" or "-q 4" should be specified with TES4qLOD "-q 2" gives 256x256 pixels for 4x4 cell quads, 2048x2048 for 32x32 cell quads, "-q 4" will produce 512x512 for 4x4 cell quads and 4096x4096 for 32x32 cell quads.

If you do this:

tesannwyn -c -T 5 -h 18040 -w Tamriel Skyrim.esm

It will give you the 16-bit image of the landscape in "tesannwyn.bmp". The vertex colour map is in "tesannwyn-vclr.bmp". If you then do:

tesannwyn -c -T 5 -x -57 -y -43 -w MySkyrim tesannwyn.bmp

You can load the generated ESP (tesannwyn.esp) as a plugin into Skyrim, load up the game, type "COW MySkyrim 0 0" and it will take you to cell 0,0 in a cloned worldspace, which will contain the fully textured Skyrim landscape - no objects or LOD. Each cell position will be the same as that in the Tamriel worldspace. You can do a similar thing with Oblivion and import the Oblivion landscape straight in to Skyrim - but don't use the "-T 5" option as the texturing FormIDs won't match. Without "-T 5" it'll be an untextured world, using the default brown textured landscape, and the vertex colour map.

If you wanted an 8-bit black and white heightmap (which is of poor quality for importing, but easy to interpret with the eye):

tesannwyn -r -p 2 -b 8 -w Tamriel Skyrim.esm

If you wanted a 16-bit RAW (the best format if you have photoshop and want to things like scaling up the landscape):

tesannwyn -p 1 -b 16 -w Tamriel Skyrim.esm

((1.0f - (B/* * A / 0xFF*/)) * a) + (( (B/* * A / 0xFF*/)) * B)

Lol, that made a hell of a lot more sense with the comments removed! i.e.

 (1.0f - B)*a  + B*B 

I'll try something similar - I've Googled up a common method for blending the alphas and RGB channels and the alpha code seems similar to yours. Thanks for the pointer.

Btw Skyim comes with textures in places such as Textures\Landscape\Trees which are similar to the images you posted - they're not (BTXT, VTXT) landscape textures, so I wonder if the new CS will render these on to the lanscape LOD images, somehow ...

Should TES4qLOD be able to fix this?

https://unofficialskyrimpatch.16bugs.com/projects/7078/bugs/207705

Has anyone tried it yet?

Just keep in mind (or read from the code) you always blend the next incoming layer with the result of all operations before.
I experimented with taking the alpha of the texture itself into account as well (as Detailed Terrain does), but 1x1 mips of alpha-channels svck. No way to use the 1x1 alphas, you'd have to render it in original super-resolution to work. That's why the comment above and in the equation.

That is how the engine works, you'll never see a fix till SKGE implements the same LOD-system I did for Oblivion.

Why would we need to wait for a graphics extender to fix that? Didn't they just forget to include the LOD for that square cell in the game?

No, what you see is a limited water-plane and a low z-far plane.

That should be fixable by regenerating the LOD mesh, but TES4qLOD won't do it as that only generates the LOD textures. I understand that Skyrim the landscape LOD meshes now contain the water mesh too, so what you're seeing should be fixable by regenerating the mesh when the CS comes out, or in one of the other 3rd LOD mesh generators that are in the works (and might even beat the CS to development).

I've seen worse examples north of Skyrim and suspect it could be LOD that was generated before those cell's water level was fixed in the ESM: if you swim somewhere to the south east of Winterhold you will find a cell that doesn't have any water in it - right in the middle of the sea. Until someone fixes the cell, any LOD mesh generated from it is bound to be wrong there too. So I wouldn't be surprised if some of those water cells hadn't been fixed by a developer at the time the LOD was generated. Whatever the cause, it's amazing the LOD got released with the game like that though, or would be if we weren't used to it by now.

Works like a charm, thanks a lot mate!

I managed to teach CBash the TES5-format, at least a little bit. This means Oscape is Skyrim-capable now:
http://paradice-insight.us/stuff/oblivion/Oscape-Skyrim-Features.jpg
http://paradice-insight.us/stuff/oblivion/Oscape-Skyrim-Colors.jpg

LOD-mesh, normal-map and color-map DDS generation work as well. The LOD-meshes are still in Oblivion-format, U'm working on that. I think the full feature-set of Oscape is available after the weekend.

Great! any chances that TESAnnwyn will be able to export the localmap one day? IIRC the CK had problems exporting it. When virtual memory reached 2GB it crashed. I'd be surprised if it's fixed for Skyrim's CK.

Okay, this is the state of it:
http://paradice-insight.us/stuff/oblivion/New%20%28left%29%20vs.%20old%20%28right%29%20LOD.png