Silgrad Tower from the Ashes

Recently I fired up the old Construction Set together with the old Silgrad Tower TES3 mod, and loaded it to center on the Argonian statue on top of Legio Argonis. I selected it and started swinging the camera around, and couldn't help myself from humming Morrowind's main theme as I gazed out over the swamp, with it's plethora of harrowingly familiar trees... *sigh*... good times, good times.

In my opinion the Bitter Coast just wouldn't feel like it used to without trees like that, and Oblivion doesn't have any suitable replacements (nor a decent swamp) either... so personally I'm rather eager at the possibility of modelling trees, though they wouldn't have the fancy animation the stock trees do, but they would look closer to what Bitter Coast trees should look like. And who knows, maybe someday we can replace them with custom SpeedTree trees after it's possible to export that kind of models. But that's my opinion, and if you guys feel differently I'll have no problems with that. =)

So the question is, to represent Morrowindy trees, which do you guys think is better:
1) unanimated, custom-modelled trees that look like they should, or
2) animated, stock-model trees from Oblivion?

Custom modelled. They can be animated later on, and they would fit better than the stock trees.

Most definitely number one, screw animations, I want my Bitter Coast Trees! We should be able to animate them at some point, if we find someone who can animate Should we maybe model 5 or so trees like the ones found in the Ascadian Isles as well? Those are a big part of Morrowind too.

Yaay! :banana:

People here felt differently about it when the question came up last summer, but then again, that time the example was a pretty ugly apple tree and we were hoping Oblivion would be better suited to provide useable assets (in that regard).

Siegfried: No need to find an animator I think. The SpeedTree plugin should be able to do that automatically, seeing how much they're charging for it. I bet that once it's possible to export those kinds of models, we'll see all kinds of tutorials and such which would make it easy for us to turn our custom static trees into SpeedTree trees.

Mm, we should model all of the TES3 trees hehe

Hmm... *thinks*

What I mean is, hmm, could someone headhunt a modeller on ESF? Because we could sure use another one on the team, as Caligula is busy with the Redoran buildings and gundalf is busy with furniture and me, well, I'm always busy with one thing or another ( right now, fixing together the ext + int tileset for... *waves his hands mysteriously* ... the village of Dren Ramoon ).

But if that doesn't pan out, I'll append a paragraph concerning the tree job in the future RP alpha readme + ESF posts and maybe start a request thread in Visual Dev. And maybe a news item would be a good idea too.

You can always find someone with a lite version of SpeedTree and is skilled with it.
I say make duplicates of some Oblivion tree world objects, and when we have custom tree models, we simply edit those objects and make them use the new models. Old-fashioned 3D trees look out of place in TES4.

i believe it is posible to make new trees in speedtree or something... making em fully animate....


but im no expert, and not up to date on the facts besides.

[edit]

i mean the trial speed tree that can be found somewhere.

how would we import custom speedtree trees?

Oblivion uses SpeedTree objects (.spt I think) for the trees rather than NIF's.

I also vote for option 3: the old-looking trees, but animated.

As an aside, I'm finding a whole lot of "stuff" that Oblivion doesn't have. eg: I'm trying to make a little mountain village, and find it nearly impossible to find a group of buildings, walls and clutter that look well together.

Custom modeled for sure. Whomever did the landscape for the old ST bitter coast was a genius. It ran at 10 fps, but it was heaven. I want that again.