Just take your time; we all will be waiting for the new stuff.
We really like you already made the rain and snow effect possible.

I hope you don’t forget the sandstorm and fog effect.

I've been working on my falling leaf nifs all of today and haven't really been paying attention to much else. With regards to ad hoc adapting them to other trees; it's certainly possible, but at this point I have hand-tailored each nif to its tree in the CS.
What will be more problematic is that after staring at these things for so long, I've hunted down and adapted higher resolution textures for the leaves I'm currently working with and have asked trollf to provide simple meshes for them. The simple planes were ok, but whenever a leaf drew perpindicular to the camera it essentially dissapeared for a few moments. It's not awful, but it is noticeable. I suppose all the more so when you're staring at them for hours on end like I've been doing, but still. On the other hand the very simple curved mesh he gave me yesterday for one leaf looked much more realistic and could be followed by the eye properly as it fell and spun.

Missed this one, sorry:
OK then, I won't push you.Time's the thing I don't have enough of, unfortunately.
And, uhh, do you mean the dust devil? Did someone request an actual sandstorm? I think someone already made one, didn't they? I thought Elsweyr - Anequina had one. And a fog effect? I missed that request too? What fog effect?

I think I need to take a note of the requests on my scratch pad or I'll lose track of them.

Thanks for the fish resource, by the way. Having it rain fish while I was learning how to use the particle meshes gave me a laugh.

Vac

Holy Smoke! Those leaves look amazing, I never ever imagined particle effects could achieve such a pretty picture! *gasps*

If you think it's pretty in a picture, you should see it in action! When the leaves spin around, float upwards for a few moments, then descend and literally flutter in front of your face... it's quite something.

The really great thing is that they're actually very small nifs: the largest ones for the biggest trees and shedding a rather excessive number of leaves are 21KB, the smallest ones, over a third of them, are under 10KB. Seriously! No excuses not to use them in your mods, people!

Vac

I will certainly use them for Valenwood, as well as the bubbles.

Will you make a package out of all the particle effects?

I want to see that!I hadn't really though about that, to be honest. This isn't really a single project other than all being particle-related, despite me giving it a single title (forward planning to save me spamming release threads that would all rapidly sink). I am kind of expecting/aiming to be creating atmospheric effects, weather effects, creatures, magic effects and various other odds and ends that people will be welcome to attach to their own meshes. Pretty disparate stuff, all told.

Vac

Yo Vacuity,

Those are some yummy leaf particle effects!

Now, to be honest, Blackmarsh has mostly green-leafed trees, that normally wouldn't shed leaves like autumn trees do.

So I was wondering, if you could make at least one leaf particle nif, that has two animations in it that can be called via "Playgroup" scripting function:

"Forward" - would be a looping animation of falling leaves that plays over and over when this animation is called via "Playgroup"
"Backward" - is a clamped, or otherwise nonlooping animation, that turns the fallings leaves off.

I was wanting this, because some parts of Blackmarsh are real stormy, and when it's really stormy and windy, then we can justifiy more of our green-leafed trees losing their leaves in the heavy winds. But we need the feature to be turned off and on, so it's scripted to only play during stormy weather. Sorry for not mentioning this sooner....

Koniption

OK, you're going to have to bear with me here, because I only know as much about animation as was necessary to create VASE, and I know even less about scripting, but...

As the nif actually does *nothing* in the default "off" state you describe, isn't it easier to simply have it disabled? You can then activate it via script as and when you want to. Or is there an advantage of the "Playgroup" scripting function that I don't know about?

Now, I was thinking about something that ties up very nicely with the next technical challenge I want to overcome. Ibsen commented about how glowy lights are always good in marshes and I remembered the rather dissapointing glowing light trails in SI (I hope you know what I mean). They go around on the same path over, and over, and over, and over, forever. Boring. Kinda pretty, but eventually boring because they are so repetitive. How about something similar, but which followed an essentially random path. And of course, no SI assets used, so it's usable for any mod. Of course, it might fly up into the sky, or straight through the ground, into the nearest building, through a city wall, wherever, but I can probably deal with the first two without too much hassle.

Interested? As I said: there's a technical thing I have to see if I can work out first.

Vac

I was referring to the weather effects for looking out of interior windows.

Weather effects:
* Rain
* Snow
* Fog
* Sandstorm

I don’t think they where all mentioned before, just a little reminder.

Vac I dont know where you are with Blender at the moment but LHammonds might be a good source of help there, check out the files http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=12248

Edit: And for tutorials http://www.invision.tesalliance.org/forums/index.php?/tutorials/category/15-modeling/ Blender heads hang out here.

Doh! You're right - I can simply disable and enable them via script. Nevermind about needing to set up Playgroups.

Yes, I am interested in glowing lights with random trajectories. I'm sure Ibsen will like those, also.

Koniption

Update on the snow boxes:

http://img513.imageshack.us/img513/9273/snownight1.jpg
http://img87.imageshack.us/img87/3600/snownight2.jpg
http://img99.imageshack.us/img99/3997/snowday.jpg

The pictures can hardly do this justice.

That looks fantastic, at least for Oblivion "standard". Will the "weather effect" become burden for the PC, though, with all the interior mods thrown around?

I don't see how, the test pics were done with Immersive Interiors loaded and aside from the particle generator's delay in getting started, performance in the shop was not impacted.

Maybe if you're on a lower end machine it might hurt some, but this is going to be limited to small interiors anyway, so it shouldn't be that big a thing.

I installed in on my last OS and attempted to play around with it. It didn't take long before I gave up. A friend offered me his old Max license shortly afterwards (is it legal to transfer a Max license?), but that was a long while back. Not sure if I could still get that, but as Max supports particle systems I can export and AFAIK Blender doesn't, it would be prefered.Great! On the other hand, Saidenstorm told me that the method I was thinking of using for them won't work. That won't stop me trying, not least because Xilverbulet told me he had used this mechanic when we were talking particles a long time back, and after all, there's more than one way to skin a cat.I've felt that's the case with pretty much all the particle stuff I've created.Hopefully not. I've optimised it a good deal already, and although the mesh is not small, it's only likely to be used in faux interiors (and not dungeons populated with lots of CPU-hungry AI-using actors) which shouldn't be too much of a strain to begin with.

Bad news: I'm seeing something similar to the infamous LOD light blobs when testing the leaf emitters. I'm not sure whether that's because of my nifs or something else, but my nifs are pretty simple and I don't *think* I'm carrying unnecessary nodes/branches. I'll test further in any case.

Good news: trollf has sent me a non-planar "universal leaf mesh" which will make it relatively easy for people to retexture. I've tested it out and other than that I have to re-size some of my leaf particles, it looks pretty good. Not quite as good as the custom-shaped mesh he did for me initially, but this is much simpler to work with generally.

Vac

I've just spotted I missed a post from yesterday. My apologies to Sjors.
Fog is probably better handled by the weather mod directly. I've never looked at how they set it up, but I assume they use a small world with a specific set of weather conditions that they script to match up to the weather condition "outside" the front door. If that's true (and feel free to correct me), then they have direct handling over fog values in the weather conditions set for the world space.

The sandstorm's a different kettle of fish, and could actually be quite hard to get to work well because for it to be practical I need to use large particles, but regular particles are billboards, so if they are placed to close to the window, they'll simply stick through it and the surrounding wall when the window's viewed at an oblique angle. If I don't let them get close enough for that then you'll have a big open area (clear sky, clear ground) right in front of the window. Using flat plane mesh particles would avoid both these problems, but might not actually look that good for the effect I'm wanting. I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm just not quite sure how to implement it right now. I'll think about the problem.

No progress on anything at all today and I doubt I have any time spare before the end of today. Tomorrow's not looking good either. Curse the lack of time.

Vac

The fog and sandstorm effect do not have to be a particle effect,
aslong as it looks like there is fog or a sand storm outside the window.

Fake it, untill you make it,

A nice sentiment, but there's a good argument that particle systems are already "faking it".

Anyway, the awesome, amazing and really great thing is that I've successfully made a system whereby particles http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll61/Revanchism/Particle%20Effect%20Resources/Particlesfromparticles.jpg. I haven't pushed it to see how many layers deep I can go (I guess I'll find out when it stops working), but this makes a *lot* of things much more feasible and hopefully much easier to implement than they would have been otherwise.

Vac

Only just found this. Looking seriously awesome. Keep me informed

Each interior is the actual game location. A normal cell in every respect, with the "behaves as exterior" flag turned on, and a special climate attached that only uses non-precipitation based weather. So you get the sounds and the lighting from each different weather, but no rain or snow since those would just fall through the ceiling.

We therefore have total control over fog as weather, and as long as the interior cell isn't too large, that fog should be pretty reasonable outside the windows. Get too big though, and the fog would be inside the building. I don't think any of the standard building meshes are large enough for this to be a problem for us.

The major issue with sandstorms is that the weather effect doesn't use fog distance, it's just everywhere at once. That brings us back to being affected by it inside the building. That's currently not an issue for us since we don't extend weather control out to Elsweyr, but if we ever implement those blizzards then it would become a problem for the snow areas.

Oh-hoh! That actually works, ehh? Sounds good. Seems like there's still a lot of stuff I don't know about.Understood: I suppose blizzard boxes may be useful for people working on Skyrim and suchlike as well, and if I am making blizzard boxes, I may as well do sandstorm boxes as the implementation's likely to be similar.

Vac

Gah, sorry about missing this post - I've been rather busy >.< Well, I was going to just use a weather box, and script it to follow the player around, but I hadn't even thought of making a new weather mesh, and that would simplify things! If you could easily combine it with a rain mesh, (so that it can rain and be really windy at the same time) that would be perfect! Maybe make two versions, one with rain, and one without.

Thank you very much!

Also, amazing work you are doing here Vac! The falling leaves look great! Don't forget to document your discoveries so that other people can learn too (With the bonus of them not annoying you with constant requests )

I am over excited right now. I LOVE these, the potential......I have wanted falling leaves since Morrowind, and weather boxes....HUGE potential for many people to make interior/exterior homes.

I'm probably about to double post as I want to get the announcement done before I reply to the above posts and update with the latest development news.

After some delays trying to make it not just good, but excellent, "trying", you understand. I can't promise I've succeeded...
http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=35590

Currently contains 48 nifs and six textures, providing three levels of effect for 16 autumnal tree types avaiable in the CS.

The six species supported are: http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll61/Revanchism/Particle%20Effect%20Resources/QuakingAspen.jpg, http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll61/Revanchism/Particle%20Effect%20Resources/Oak.jpg, http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll61/Revanchism/Particle%20Effect%20Resources/Silverbirch.jpg, http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll61/Revanchism/Particle%20Effect%20Resources/Dogwood.jpg, http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll61/Revanchism/Particle%20Effect%20Resources/Japanesemaple.jpg and http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll61/Revanchism/Particle%20Effect%20Resources/Sugarmaple.jpg.

More will probably be made at a future date, particularly if people request them.

Vac

Lets start off with the news.

The snow weather box is probably final and is waiting for Arthmoor to give it a thumbs up. There's a 3x wider snow weather box that I am pretty sure will also get a thumbs up, intended for wider windows and rather more reliable than trying to line up multiple boxes inside the CS. I have also created an initial light rain weather box for Arthmoor to suggest improvements to. You know, things like "too light! I can't even see it?" or "you call that light? I've seen monsoons that were lighter than this", whatever.

I'm probably going to be doing the random swamp lights next as it will use the nested particle systems I want to work with, but shouldn't be too complicated beyond that. Essentially, this one's chosen because it should give me the best learning experience. Also, I have a couple of fun ideas for this to make it a little more interesting and keep people's attention a little better. Plans can change, however.

If people are wanting additional trees added to the latest release, just tell me which ones. Retexturing the particle is easy, customising the particle effect to fit the tree is not so easy, so I'm not really expecting people not experienced with particle systems to be making their own versions. If you have your own trees you want the effect for, you'll need to provide me with the spt file and the esp entry (or entries) as the Tree entry contains data necessary for the engine to generate the tree.

They're on my (mental) list.
In a way, the nifs I release *are* documentation. Anyway, it seems I've piqued Saidenstorm's interest in particle systems and he's doing a lot of documentation work, including getting info on a couple of modifiers I could never get to work and one no one knew existed in the library. With some idea what those "unknown boolean"s and "unknown float"s and suchlike are, I have a much better chance of actually using them.

I was wondering when you'd get around to noticing. Glad you like them! If you need particle work done again, just drop me a line. You might want to mention these to people on ORE? I suspect some of the people there will be interested.

Vac