Silgrad Tower from the Ashes

Now all those poor fishermen in Ebbedin can have a leaky roof over their heads! I've enclosed a TES4 NIF and four screenshots of different angles. Some notes and caveats:

- TES3 textures are used to provide a better comparison; obviously TES4-friendly substitutes would need to be found,
- No collision mesh yet,
- The reference model is ex_de_shack_03.nif.

Feel free to comment on all aspects, but suggested approaches to perceived shortcomings are even more welcome.

Here goes nothing,
Steve

YAY! now we just need NEW textures...to help make them look real LOUSY!
great... I mean... great lousy model sacarrow! :lol:

Wow, that is a nice lousy shack. :yes: The roof is a little low poly though, I don't suppose I'd be asking too much if it could have a few more poly's and more roughness? Can we have a lousy interior too?

BTW: Good job, sacarrow!

Hooray for lousy, cheap lower-classed housing units!

I have no comments on it that TID and KuKulza didn't have.

Good job!

I wasn't really happy with the roof either, but I was tired and needed other people to look at it. I also tried to err on the side of low face-count, figuring I could always go up. Can anyone tell me the following:

- A way to get face count outta NifSkope, and
- What a reasonable face-count is for a model like this?

Thanks,
Steve

PS for TID: By "roughness" do you mean the texturing or do you have something else in mind?

Just a more thatch-y shape rather than tile shape I guess... but hey, the rest looks great! Maybe with some tricky normal mapping techniques, we might be able to cover that up. As I said earlier, it is still really nice.

Not bad at all, sacarrow! Mapping goes a long way, and yours is perfect as far as I can tell. With good replacements and normal maps I bet your shack wouldn't be far from Bethesda's quality.

There should be adequate replacements for several of those textures in the latest version of Reich Parkeep. Replacement textures that can't be found there can surely be found in Morrowind Visual Pack or Vibrant Morrowind.

There are two meshes called "ThatchRoof". One of them is the roof, the other is the hay along the roof sides. The latter mesh has 'stuff' that collides with the real roof mesh, causing fine lines on the roof. I don't know if they would be visible in-game, but it would probably be good to delete them.

Your model has 998 faces. I'd say it could probably have 5,000 - 10,000, which isn't to say the current facecount wouldn't work either. I agree that the roof could be softened a bit though.

That looks great! not lousy.

Thanks for the kind comments and the pointers. I'll check out the roof, the sub textures, and the thatch discontinuity first, and then other issues as people bring them up. And it's good to know that my face count was not too high; the shacks are so angular I was thinking that it should be pretty low.

Leaves me more for the roof.

Oh, and a favor I'd like to ask: could someone throw this shack into a TES4 game and post a screenshot? It's be cool if it were next to another dwelling so I could get a feel for scale.

Thanks,
Steve

That's the best looking lousey shack EVER!

Good job. Very faithful to the Morrowind shack. We just need textures to awesomeify it. Unfortunately, this is the kind of texture I can't make. My talents are more towards making variations of dirt. :-D

EDIT: I imported it into 3DS Max. It's kinda inefficient... I was able to bring the vertice count down from 1602 to 513... It might have been nifskope that did that. I kinda doubt it though. I noticed you didn't weld anything.

Your roof had 119 polygons in it... I shrunk it to 17. But I had to redo the whole thing, something was preventing the vertices from welding properly and I'm blaming Nifskope.

I redid most of it using polygons and welding, exported it, and reimported it. I have not the slightest clue what this did to your texturing job (As I didn't elect to import the textures from my Morrowind folder), but it got the vertice count down to 429. I also added a 32 vertice collision mesh for you, and I applied radiosity vertice shading.

Download it if you wish.

In any case, this was a really good mesh. Just needed some cleanup, and you will notice all of my vertices are in the same place as yours. You did a swell job putting them in place (And I'd assume putting textures on them, which is hard), so don't think I'm faulting you there. You have good artistic talents, you just need to expound upon optimizing your stuff.

Edit again: I noticed you wanted a size comparison. Well, I'm not putting that into TES4 yet, as I don't have the textures set up or anything. However, here's a 100% scale-accurate Redoran House. This is a pretty big building, as a person is as tall as the door. Your shack, IMHO, is just a tad big. No big deal just resize it down a little. First, convert it to an editable mesh, then select all of the vertices, then scale them down. This will keep it from getting messed up in the export process, as shrinking a mesh without shrinking each vertice doesn't actually do anything ingame for some odd reason. :/ Scale pic attached.