5-32-Red

Post by **Swiftoak** » Mon Dec 27, 2010 10:36 pm

Claim type: Exterior
Claim ID: TR_5-32-Red (#2451)
Faction: Redoran
Claimed by: Parted User
Status: Not Available (Progress: 90%)
Location: (-37,12):(-34,10), Size: 12
Files: TR_5-32-Red_Rienieboy_2.esp; TR_5-32-Red_Swiftoak Woodwarrior_1.esp

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Uld Vraech, wilderness

Please download the merged map 5, meshes and textures found here: http://tamriel-rebuilt.org/old_forum/viewtopic.php?t=19347 - and work from the esp. Smooth/fix and change landscape if necessary, preferrably not so much at claim borders.

Note that cleaning irrelevant cells may create land tears, so backup your work regularly and often. It is advisable to keep neighboring claim cells while working on your claim IF they are in a acceptable finished state, as to keep static/texture/style consistency in our work. If in doubt, look to earlier finished claims for reference.

The program TESAME is ok for cleaning.

5-32 should continue the snow/icy style of neighboring 5-11, creating a hostile and cold environment. Also, on large flat stretches of land (there aren't that many though), make sure to make a couple of sink holes.
See this pic: http://i.imgur.com/9Q1yh.jpg for reference on what a sinkhole should look like.

A few snow/ice caves should be made as well, and make sure to make something really interesting in -36 12 (daedric/dwemer or even nordic ruin?). These are the alpine parts of the Velothi Mountains, much snow is to be expected, covering stuff. Border mountains are supposed to be unscalable by foot.

Nemon · Post by **Nemon** » Wed Oct 03, 2012 12:23 pm

See this picture for regional borders, roads and rivers. Some roads are a little "off" in the Uld Vraech part, but the merged map file has the layout we're aiming for.

[url=http://i.imgur.com/4bpa4.jpg][img]http://i.imgur.com/4bpa4s.jpg[/img][/url]
Clicky me...

Mealkar's outpost, this settlement serves as a redoran outpost, raised in the memory of the great cliffracer hunter Mealkar (or something not so silly) - now just a run down, badly kept minor fortress inhabited by uninspired dunmers. The local mine has claimed several lives the last few years but the few locals doesn't seem to be bothered by its state. NPCs: Dunmer, some local nords. Main trade: Mining, although not profiting from it. Architecture: Redoran for the outpost, skyrim-set for the locals.

Rienieboy · Post by **Rienieboy** » Wed Dec 05, 2012 8:27 pm

I would want to claim this. I'll make it a hostile place with many mountains, in the sense that there won't be much paths or roads, the player will have to search his way around to get to the Nordic ruins that I'll put here. I choose Nordic because the rest of Morrowind is already filled with Dwemer/Daedric ruins.

meaby Some abandoned shacks/cave for the hunters who come here hunting in the summer?

how does a sinkhole comes to be? what is it exactly?

Nemon · Post by **Nemon** » Wed Dec 05, 2012 11:16 pm

Granted, good luck.

See the neighboring claim 5-11 for exact reference as to how this area should look like. Also take note of the fact that the current heightmap file you're required to work from : http://tamriel-rebuilt.org/old_forum/viewtopic.php?p=226981#226981 is crude and not completed. Landscape smoothing is required to avoid spiky ugliness.

Sinkholes are explained by the picture in the claim description: http://i.imgur.com/9Q1yh.jpg

Please use a couple of the bm_ex_iceberg statics, see the claim 5-13 cells around -34 9 for reference. I have thrown statics all over map 5, don't expect anything I've put in the unfinished claims to be perfect in any way. Oh and with nordic ruins we mean the barrow things you find on Solstheim, just more elaborate.

The vertex shading thread is also required reading: http://tamriel-rebuilt.org/old_forum/viewtopic.php?t=23316

Whew, that's a lot of words.

Why · Post by **Why** » Thu Dec 06, 2012 12:34 am

I support the idea of a Nordic barrow/ruin in the far west of this claim. Feel free to try something creative with standing stones, or try to make it more Skyrimy.

Rienieboy · Post by **Rienieboy** » Thu Dec 06, 2012 11:42 am

Do I have to download some internal version of TR_Data/TR_Mainland?

Mwgek · Post by **Mwgek** » Thu Dec 06, 2012 12:06 pm

Yes, you can download the latest tr_data when clicking on the 'objects of tamriel' button above the forums. And the latest tr_mainland file in the internal forums on the mainland update thread.

For management

:
Worsas made some great custom barrow ruins for the skyrim project. Any change we can use them? I don't know the quality of those, but I will gladly check them out.

Terrifying Daedric Foe · Thu Dec 06, 2012 4:11 pm

But don't load TR_Mainland alongside this claim. It is only to be used for quest claims in the area up to Sacred East.

Mwgek · Post by **Mwgek** » Thu Dec 06, 2012 9:18 pm

Right, that is why I should not interfere with exterior business

. Just wanted to ask about Worsas his barrow models. I won't litter your claim further, have fun with it!

Rienieboy · Post by **Rienieboy** » Tue Dec 11, 2012 12:38 pm

Done some basic landscaping, hope this is what you're looking for.

Nemon · Post by **Nemon** » Tue Dec 11, 2012 2:27 pm

Looks ok, I'm not a huge fan of the pointy tops you've added - they tend to look better in the CS than how they're portrayed in game. I would advice you to smooth them slightly.

The ruin stuff looks promising! Remember to watch out for steep hill sides, as they tend to get their ground textures stretched. Adding stuff (rocks, snow) to them usually sorts out that issue.

Rienieboy · Post by **Rienieboy** » Fri Dec 14, 2012 2:32 pm

I've done some work on a glacier that I would like to add + a frozen river canyon detailing is still to be done everywhere, I tend to put the large terrain pieces first and when I feel everything fits nicely I detail everything.

I will lower the mountain tops when I'll detail them.

Nemon · Post by **Nemon** » Fri Dec 14, 2012 3:20 pm

The frozen river canyon looks really neat and original, if you do in game testing make sure to test how walking on the icy canyon bottom works out. The Collision Wall - INVISO mesh could be useful to even out rugged terrain (which often is hard to walk properly on, especially NPCs).

Nemon · Post by **Nemon** » Wed Jan 09, 2013 10:40 am

Happy new years, Rienieboy - any updates on this claim over the holidays?

Rienieboy · Post by **Rienieboy** » Wed Jan 09, 2013 8:47 pm

oh god no, i'm very sorry but you know how Holidays go...
I'll try to work on this tomorrow

hapy holidays to you to guy's!

Nemon · Post by **Nemon** » Fri Jan 18, 2013 7:50 am

Please update claim.

Rienieboy · Post by **Rienieboy** » Mon Jan 21, 2013 9:13 pm

please revoke

I can't get to work on it with schooltasks, work,...
meaby I'll get back to it when things calm down

Post by **arvisrend** » Mon Jan 21, 2013 9:20 pm

Is the second file you uploaded your most recent one?

Nemon · Post by **Nemon** » Tue Jan 22, 2013 11:53 am

Revoked as per modder's request.

Post by **Swiftoak** » Sun May 12, 2013 8:06 pm

An ancient red squirrel appears, ready to eat up some cells for the good of Tamriel Rebuilt! :P

It's been quite awhile but I'm on break now, and I've been itching to do some exterior work. Hope you look past my mega-absence. I'll do as much as I can, but if I have to scoot away again, I'll be sure to pass a WIP for the next modder.

I'll work on top of what's already been done. Looks really promising, I've always wanted to work in the BM tileset.

Nemon · Post by **Nemon** » Mon May 13, 2013 8:26 am

Lolwut, blast from the past!
I remember your stuff, it's fun to see ancient members return now and then - granted!

Remember the vertex shading guidelines for these areas: http://tamriel-rebuilt.org/old_forum/viewtopic.php?t=23316

5-11 should provide some inspiration/guide as how to make this icy/snowy thing work. Have fun!

Post by **Swiftoak** » Mon May 13, 2013 8:08 pm

Ancient?! Pft. It's all relative

I have been keeping up on and off, so I'm not completely in the dark in terms of how TR's been moving forward. I am aware of how things have changed drastically (for the better) in terms of exterior-making among other things. I've already looked at "Map 5", which is fantastic. It will be fun to match what's been done in my own way.

That being said, I'm left with a few questions.

I'm not entirely sure how I should be working on this in terms of border-matching. In times past, I would simply load neighbouring claims next to mine, setting only mine as the active plugin. But now we're working on top of a heightmap. So should I just download the latest version of that and clean my cells out, THEN load it (as the non-active file) along my own plugin?

I've also read the stuff regarding land tears, but I'm still a tad confused about what that entails. We're working at much higher altitudes (good!), so is there anything in particular I need to be aware of to esure this doesn't happen?

And finally, first update! Gotten rid of the pointy tops. I've worked up the frozen canyon (mind the floaters for now). I really love those new snow cliff meshes! Played around with them until I got what looks like a frozen waterfall cascading down the mountainside. http://imageshack.us/a/img585/1349/17779190.jpg

Any feedback would be nice! I'm quite rusty, so getting myself up to speed with current standards is my top priority. Check the file up top!

Nemon · Post by **Nemon** » Mon May 13, 2013 8:50 pm

Border matching: As of now, it's sort of a game of "what is the most developed area?". For instance, your claim is bordering my 5-11, wollibeebee's 5-12 and my 5-14. Only 5-11 is finished, so you have to base your style on what 5-11 has used, as long as the claim description says so.

With the new heightmap formula, I sat down with the grid map, started coloring it with where I wanted altitudes ~4-5000, ~7-8000 and so on. Different colors (I swear some of them are left as giant dots in the .esp) for different heights. Then I started a rough land raising effort in the CS - ugly as hell but useful in order to raise the landscape quickly. It's difficult, because the flatten tool only wants to raise the land so and so, too high and it just won't do it.

After this came the manual smoothing, making the landscape more reasonable and finally placing relevant textures (snow or not, road etc) where it should be. The idea of the heightmap file is that it's a basis to work from. Main landscape features are provided, and it's up to the individual modder to detail the heck out of it - add flora (if applicable), snow, rocks, ruins, caves, settlements, secrets, small stories told by stuff (example; up north, in the watery grave off a random cliff I placed a skeleton with an arrow to the knee).

The borders of a claim is mostly "sacred" - don't change too much so that we ensure that neighboring claims are easy to border match in terms of height. The latest heightmap file should serve as a decent starting file, unless - as in this example, you have an already cleaned version to work from. Note, however, that land tears* has a tendency to occur more often than I like when working on cleaned files with epic land drop offs at their borders. I find that a "volcano" landscape doesn't have this problem happening that often, meaning that outside the claim border itself are gradual descent of the landscape. It's easily deleted in TESAME afterwards anyway, and only serves as a "safety" measure while working. Also it is useful if the outside cells are developed so you can see, in a bigger perspective, how things are turning out. Useful when you want to know whether or not your epic dwemer ruin will look misplaced one cell from a neighboring dwemer ruin not in your claim

.

*Land tears. These occur when reloading an .esp. They are terrain fuckups where it seems like a either a part of the landscape has been raised perfectly to the same height across an entire cell, or it might have sunk a set amount of distance units - with tons of statics left hanging in mid air. Usually cells affected with this is just to be deleted, as fixing mostly fuck more stuff up. That is why I recommend backing up, multiple files along the progress. More than once I have used an earlier finished cell to replace an affected cell later in the progress because the CS went apeshit on me for no good reason.

On progress; Very nice indeed! Make sure to snow the hell out of that place, though. It's in the highest regions and that needs to show! Adding layers of snow on rocks are very encouraged.

Post by **Swiftoak** » Mon May 13, 2013 9:55 pm

Haha, thanks for the insight. I just wanted to know if I should cut a hole where my claim is in the existing Map 5 file and load that beside my current file, or just download the neighbouring claims seperately and use them instead of the map 5 file for bordermatching. Since this file I'm working on only has my claim's cells in it. I ask only because IIRC, loading 2 files with conflicting landscape data isn't a good thing.

As for more snow, I plan on doing that. The new snow cliff meshes are awesome, but it looks like there's only a very thin, uniform dusting of snow on the top.

I also wanted to break up the monotony by adding snowdrifts and "icicle" like formations drooping off the cliff edges. But I'm unfamiliar with the bloodmoon tileset, so it will take some playing around to see what's possible

Post by **Swiftoak** » Tue May 21, 2013 8:48 pm

Question regardling flora in this part of the Velothi Mountains.

I'd love to put some weathered pines (I'm talking only a few here and there, scattered around the claim) growing from certain places, but they'd look out of place given that I don't see any trees in the surrounding claims. In fact, I don't see much flora at all. Is this intentional, or is it just due to the rather unfinished nature of the area?

I know these are very snowy, high altitude areas. Unforgiving, but from my experience, even the highest peaks have something growing on them.

Right now all I see is rocks, cliffs, ice, snow, and moar snow.

Progress is decent. I've concentrated so far on detailing that lovely frozen waterfall. I'm going to see if I can get a file up this week.

Nemon · Post by **Nemon** » Tue May 21, 2013 9:53 pm

No pines in this area, sorry but this is a really really cold freezing snow covered area

. Most map 5 claims have flora to a certain extent, 5-32 is unfortunately not one of them.

Post by **Swiftoak** » Fri May 24, 2013 10:19 pm

Update tiemz.

I got sort of sick of doing the canyon so I decided to play around with making a Skyrim-esque pointy mountain. File up.

Nemon (and others), could you take a look and see if it looks too moddy? If you like it, maybe we can use this style as a benchmark for the westernmost points of your claim and wolli's claim.

Edit: I just thought it would be a neat thing to consider because in TESV, you could see the Velothis were very pointy. Not saying we should go out of our way to copy Skyrim's art direction in any manner (this is still TESIII after all), but IMHO it would be neat to have the tallest, most alpine parts of the range to be more jagged and unforgiving, next to impassable. Done right I believe they would look really nice for people using MGE.

Aeven · Post by **Aeven** » Sat May 25, 2013 2:38 pm

I took a look and I like it!

Nemon · Post by **Nemon** » Sat May 25, 2013 5:56 pm

Looking very good, just remember to try having the ratio of snow vs rock leaning towards mostly snow, i.e White > Colored. And that might be my most racist sentence at TR so far, not intended...

The reason is that this is supposed to be in a climate with mostly snowy weather. The snow statics and actually some of the rock statics (that are essentially snow) will help achieve this.

The icy valley is epic, I can understand getting tired of that - seems very thorough!

Post by **Swiftoak** » Fri May 31, 2013 4:16 am

So this is going nicely! I was aiming for another file this weekend, but I'm probably going to go all out on those Alma ints in reviewing.

There's some major casperage going on towards the edges of the cells that are not ours. It's sorta my fault because of the crazy rotations I made with the snow cliff stuff. The stuff I did with the cliffs looks nice, but hiding those caspers on the other side would look extremely moddy without claiming an extra row of cells west and a south of my claim. I wanted to make those mountains fall off naturally.

I believe it's evident in my latest WIP.

Now I figured I would leave the caspers as they're on the very edge of our map, and wait for the SHOTN folks to bordermatch, but I figure that's not happening anytime soon.

So should I do my best to cover those caspers now with what I have, or is there wiggle room in terms of getting my claim extended by three cells (1 row) to the west? If that is the case I can make the mountains slope off a little more naturally. I could try raising the landscape to compensate but I don't know how much higher I can pull it.

The other (less desirable solution for me personally) is to tone down those snow cliffs and simply use BM rocks and snow the hell out of them.

http://imageshack.us/a/img13/7010/lecasper.jpg

Post by **Haplo** » Fri May 31, 2013 7:51 am

As I recall, the current TR policy on edge-of-the-mod claims is to add a buffer layer of cells, to avoid this very issue. Nemon can speak more on this topic.

Nemon · Post by **Nemon** » Fri May 31, 2013 10:10 am

Feel free to add new cells that you need, Swifty. Shotn will border match with our stuff later on.

Looking good!

Post by **Swiftoak** » Sat Jun 15, 2013 12:04 am

Progress:

Painstakingly trying to raise land in extra cells. Other than that not much. I now appreciate Nemon's heightmapping skills.

I'm claiming an extra row west and the three cells due south. (I believe the fourth cell is part of 5-14). So basically 7 cells. Hopefully that will do.

Also been fiddling with landscape in lieu of snow statics to give the steeper slopes some an avalanch-ey (for lack of a better word) feel to them.

I'll get a file up ASAP (within this weekend for sure).

Edit: File Up. Dirty. Still raising the land but took a break and started working on the mountains, little bits around the pond, and the nordic thing. Check out those skyrim-ish nordic arches I attempted to make.

Also thinking of adding a snowed-over, ice covered dwemer ruin somewhere around that pond. Thoughts?

Nemon · Post by **Nemon** » Sat Jun 15, 2013 3:44 pm

It looks great! And yes to your plans.
Do note, though, that cell -34 10 has been a victim of the dreaded land tear issue.

But, luckily, in the May 25th file this cell is ok, with the same amount of statics in place.

(now you know why I say backup, backup, backup, incremental backup... and then backup)

Post by **Swiftoak** » Sat Jun 15, 2013 6:33 pm

Yeah I noticed. I guess you're not a true exterior modder until you've suffered your first land tear

I have backups though so no worries.

Though it only happened when I started f'king aorund with the landscape on the adjacent cells. I've been reloading without issue until i started touching those adjacent cells.

Should I just delete the Landscape data of the offending cell in TESAME or would it be safer to just axe the entire cell?

Nemon · Post by **Nemon** » Sat Jun 15, 2013 9:58 pm

I would rename the cell DELETEME, load it in Tesame, delete both the cell and the landscape data, then load that cell from the old file + the remaining ok cells from the last file and merge.

Yeti · Post by **Yeti** » Sun Jun 16, 2013 1:42 am

Out of curiosity, will these land tear issues end up being a problem for us NPC modders when we start working on these areas, or is it a problem that only crops up when you're editing a lot of terrain?

Post by **Swiftoak** » Sun Jun 16, 2013 2:12 am

So far it's only happened when I started raising the extra land outside my claim. Nemon will probably know more.

Also, [url=http://imageshack.us/a/img163/1948/hu41.jpg]screenshot[/url].

Post by **Haplo** » Sun Jun 16, 2013 6:21 am

Very pretty!

Post by **Swiftoak** » Wed Jun 26, 2013 6:26 pm

A smidge of progress, but I'm uploading mostly because of the fixed land tear and the fact Nemon is going to be making a new merge of Map 5 so here's a new file.