Is it reasonable to make a _far.nif that uses more than one texture - or does that totally defeat the object of a _far.nif?
Reason for asking: I'm making city walls and it would be simpler to use parts of the wall and tower textures rather than trying to squeeze everything into the gatehouse texture.
Yeah, I think it's reasonable.
There are vanilla Oblivion _far.nifs that do the same thing, such as....:
meshes\architecture\bravil\bravilarcherparadox_far.nif
Koniption
Thanks KP
Bit puzzled now, though: I can't find bravilarcherparadox_far.nif - it doesn't seem to be in Oblivion - Meshes.bsa or Oblivion - Misc.bsa. Where is it stored?
Quote:Originally posted by morcroft
Thanks KP
Bit puzzled now, though: I can't find bravilarcherparadox_far.nif - it doesn't seem to be in Oblivion - Meshes.bsa or Oblivion - Misc.bsa. Where is it stored?
Ack, you're right. I looked through the BSA's, and it's in Silgrad_Tower.bsa.
I don't think it'll hurt things too much though, to use more than one texture. I saw that the bravilarcherparadox_far.nif, also had all the NiBinaryExtraData's, deleted from all NiTriStrips and NiTriShapes. This helps dramatically lower the filesize of the _far.nif. The NiBinaryExtraData is only really needed so see the effects of normal map (bumps, peaks & valleys, etc - in the color texture). But a _far.nif is so far away, that needing to see the effects of normal maps, is a moot point.
Koniption
Thanks - I've read that the engine doesn't even try and compute the normal map for VWD. In any case the game ships with really tiny normal map files for the far nifs - so I'm just re-using those. I think with no normal map at all you get funny effects with things like fog and rain.
I'm making new far nifs with reduced polycounts and high-to-low poly texture baking to get the final textures. I'll have a look at the nifs produced though, there's probably more optimisation to be done, so thanks for the tips.
Quote:Originally posted by morcroft
Thanks KP
Bit puzzled now, though: I can't find bravilarcherparadox_far.nif - it doesn't seem to be in Oblivion - Meshes.bsa or Oblivion - Misc.bsa. Where is it stored?
It was custom made for ST.
OB usually has one texture for their far nifs.
The polycount amongst others is the part that determines the in-game efficiency.