Silgrad Tower from the Ashes

Quote:Originally posted by morcroft

Quote:Originally posted by Koniption
*peeks through the door & waves*

Hi KP - always welcome! Stop for a bit - have a cup of tea and a bikkie!

Are bikkies like cookies? Cause if so, I'm all for that!

I love tea, too, btw. Drink it in real life every day. Whole family makes two gallons or more of tea a day, and it's gone by the next day.

KP

Quote:Originally posted by Koniption
*peeks through the door & waves*

Hey all, I just read of your all's endeavors on the heightmap...that is an insane journey you all took, it sounds like.

I read what Morcroft wrote about the ordeal, and I was like "Hot dang!"

But I'm glad everything is working now.

Koniption

Well it's not only working, but we've essentially got the perfect heightmap, it's 100% in scale with Cyrodiil, and it's 100% accurate to the oringinal Cyrodiil landscape for LOD, and Ja-Kha'jay has done an excellent job perfecting the Elsweyr region from indepth convos about the geology and formation of Elsweyr's landscape, and then that's all been preserved by Morcroft's excellent importing/exporting of the heightmap (using various black magic).

Quote:Originally posted by The Old Ye Bard
(using various black magic).

hh: You're giving away my secrets!

I've successfully created a set of LOD files from the new Elsweyr ESM, so you can now get a sneak preview of the new improved Elsweyr.

Here's the full panorama from a high point near Riverhold on the Cyrodiil border:



... and from another peak above Leyawiin - clearly visible in outline to the East:




Finally, everything always looks best at sunset:

It looks so, so, so, so pretty.

AND NOW WE CAN REGION GEN (or atleast get ready for region gen!)

Bring it on! My PC is ready and waiting as soon as you've decided what it is you want me to generate.

I think this is going to be my final visit to the problem of the Heightmap transfer. I'm not sure whether this is a great idea or if I've just wasted my day, but here we go.

I've managed to use TESAnnwyn to export the vertex shading and texture mapping from Tamriel, then resize the image so it fits onto the Elsweyr worldspace - not even as easy as that sounds, given that the texture maps are actually larger than the heightmaps.

Anyway: These are the screenies. Here's the Imperial City from approximately Riverhold:



You should be able to see a few stretches of the ring road. Those mountains may look grey, but viewed from the IC itself, they're actually fully textured:



Here's Bravil, and a view further down the coast, with Leyawiin just visible to the right



You can see how blocky it all is, and all the splots under trees and rocks - and therein lies the dilemma: is it better to region gen the lot and paint back the roads and beaches? Region gen just objects over the transferred texture and clean up after? Take just the textures? Just the vertex shading? Hand place objects exactly into their shadows so they're a perfect match to Tamriel? (Er, maybe not...!)

I'm really not sure.

I'm amazed you've managed to do this! Not only was it larger than the height map import, but also the position of tamriel is differnt from the oringinal world space, so I assume you had to scout out which cells to off-set the vertex and texture import too (but being it's so perfect, also have to actually consider if you mistakenly imported the tamriel world space itself!).

But anyway, the texture import should be kept, however it does mean that we'll need to manually go over the Elsweyr cells and delete the textures, so we can re-region gen (okay for the rest of Tamriel, as we can just region gen without textures included(but with vertex shading included)). Which is semi-easy enough to do, I'll make a day of just doing that. However what I can do for the vertex shading is this, create a file in Photoshop which just has the roads of Cyrodiil, and also those of Elsweyr, and then you can import that (making doing Elsweyrs road extremly easy).

:pop: :worship: :worship: :worship: :worship: :worship: :worship: :worship: :pop:

Holy Shit!

I should have assigned this to you in the first place. man that is incredible. Morcroft, that is spectacular! Practically speechless. Words cannot accurately express the elation i feel at seeing all this work. I can't wait to mod on it! I'd better get to work! Seriously this i way better than what i could have done. Freakin awesome!

Just, just....WOWEE!!!

Glad you like it! Really trying to get a proper modding release out in the next day or so - as long as TOYB stops springing Lore surprises on us!

The latest delay has been his discovery that the landscape between Riverhold and Rimmen - the Rim mountains' watershed - is heavily eroded into gullies. I've recut the landscape in this area to approximate the desription we have and here are some screenies of my test region-gen. The gullies extend way too far into the northern grasslands at the moment and will need to be softened in the CS, and the remaining area will also need a lot more smoothing work.

Still, I think it's like nothing seen before. Trying to cross this landscape is deeply frustrating - you'll only really get the idea when you try it - and there are plenty of hiding places, to make up for the plains being so open.



And this is a view across the badlands from the Rim highlands. Just because.