Silgrad Tower from the Ashes

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This is thoroughly a test release, and not intended for anything at all besides testing out how models exported with the CIV4 nif exporter behaves. Thankyou goes out to "Blocky" and to "JB.", for giving me helpful hints on how to export models to Oblivion.

I only started using the Construction Set a couple of hours ago, so it's safe to assume I know nothing. But to 'install' it, extract the files straight to your "Bethesda Softworks\Oblivion\Data" folder.

I wasn't able to export the textures externally. When I tried, the models just turned out looking like pink. Instead, they're baked into the NIF files, which is why there's so few files in the archive. Together, the duplicate set of textures in the two black anther nifs takes up more space on the harddrive, but they seem to compress really well.

Meshes by me.
Textures from the team behind "Morrowind Visual Pack".

please don't use my plants in other mods... thanks!

Let me know what you think

I think it would be presumptious of me to regard these screenshots a way of whetting your appetites but here goes:


They're taken straight from the Construction Set, so, there's no fancy bling-bling shaders and stuff from the game to accentuate what the new models would look like in-game. But I hope you can get an idea of it. Let's call them... previews of my Alpha02 release.

In case you're wondering, Reich Parkeep is a city in mainland Morrowind, about halfway between Silgrad Tower and Blacklight. It was part of the Silgrad Tower mod made for TES III: Morrowind. (Here's a map of the old town, which I'm loosely basing my reconstruction on) The most striking feature are the two large Keeps situated on either hill with a connecting bridge, around which lies a large Redoran settlement.




As fantastic as the Civ4 exporter is, it's quite alien to work with it on an Oblivion mod. As far as I can tell it can't handle transparancies... either that or I'm doing it wrong, but no matter what I tried I couldn't get any kind of transparancy to show up in-game. I also fear it can't accomodate for specular or even bump maps... or again, perhaps I'm using the Shader model wrongly. But still, heck, I would *never* have imagined I would be able to even get the models into a mod this early on, even if it's just color maps and no collision.

I seem to be having a lot of problems with setting up 'bounding boxes' for the models. I'm not sure what the correct term is, but it's those glistening hollow cubes that show up around models when you select them in the construction set. Some of these boxes are so small they're almost invisible, making it very hard for me (and later on others) to handle the models in the cs. This is particularly noticeable on the slough ferns.
It seems to have a connection with the original size of a model. For instance shrinking a large mushroom created in max means the 'bounding box' remains as large as the original mushroom. But with the slough ferns for instance, these were imported from .obj which as you might know need to be enlarged by a couple thousand percent to get their proper size in max - which again would seem to hint at the original size, which in those cases were very very small. Question is... how do I change it. Anyone know?

Gorgeous

OMFG mushrooms! I looove your mushroom varients! Must... see... mushroom... forest...

Thanks guys!

Caligula Superfly: In the past I've heard others mention mushroom forests as well - it seems to be a popular concept. Indeed, perhaps we should have a forest like that. I hope for a better exporter though, because the ones I have now have to be set up manually with collision boxes. Not a problem for the few I have in the test cell, but I shudder to think of setting up hundreds of them

I hope my screenies (reposted on ESF) can play a small part in Bethesda realizing they shouldn't hold out on the real exporter, because modders can already draw the benefits of new models even if they are technically flawed.

Yes, they would need to be generatable. One random question, is there a way to get some light shining on the underside of the mushrooms, or is that just an unavoidable CS problem?

Wow Razor it's eerie how much that looks like Pelegiad or Sadrith Mora without the pod buildings. I did notice how tall Imperial town walls are compared to the old redoran/hlaalu walls. Our new models of the walls will have to be taller this time right because of the separate town worldspace?

That looks great! I wish I could mod.

good work! :goodjob:

Caligula Superfly: You bet. It's just how dark the base color texture is; it can still be affected by lighting in-game. So it'd be very dark at night, bright during the day, illuminated if you fired a fireball up there and so on.

Blocky: Thanks Yes, scale is very much different and more realistic in Oblivion than it was in Morrowind. A single building in the new game takes up about as much space as a whole block in Morrowind did, and a normal wall in Oblivion feels as high as the Ghostfence did. Cities are walled in because they exist in a separate worldspace and a wall-and-gate is the best way to set up a logical portal between the worlds. The portals aren't any different than any other door objects btw. But you could just as easily surround a town with high hills on three sides and have just a short wall on the open side. When you see buildings in a town from the outside you're actually seeing mock replicas placed in the same place as the real houses inside the other worldspace. Those buildings are separate NIFs and much more optimized.

X23, KuKulzA: Thanks!