World LOD
Revision as of 16:47, 15 March 2009 by imported>Yossarian22 (→Notes)
Overview
The World LOD dialog is used to generate LOD terrain and LOD building geometry for the world.
Data Fields and Buttons
- Worldspace list: List of all Worldspaces.
- Worldspace Stats: TBD
- Generate Terrain Meshes: Creates terrain meshes for the world from the local land geometry.
- Generate Terrain Textures: Builds texture and normal maps for the LOD terrain, also from the local land.
- Chop Terrain Texture: Allows you to instead build LOD terrain texture maps from a handpainted texture up to 8192x8192 in size. It does not build normal maps. (This might be changing - TBD)
- Generate Objects: Creates LOD geometry and texture maps for all refs in the world that are marked visible distant.
Notes
- The mesh generation process increase in time with the amount of chunks of your worldspace. It takes only a few minutes up to 20 chunks, then it increases to around 30-60 min for 20-50 chunks and increases again to more than 5-6 hours above an amount of 50 chunks. For generate a entire Heightmap with 1360 chunks it will take around 2-3 weeks of generate non-stop.
- During the mesh generation process it could be that GECK seems to be crashed, this is only in some cases true, but mostly it still generates new meshes and only the process bar is frozen.
- Currently, all of the functionality that creates textures creates source TGA textures that need to go through GECK build process to actually be visible in the game. When generate of landscape LOD textures is finished, you will find the generated DDS LOD textures outside your Fallout3 Game Directory in source\textures TGA\landscape\LOD\(Directory named as your worldspace)
- Source TGA textures for generate LOD-Objects dont extract automaticly out of your textures.bsa Archive. Open your textures.bsa archive and extract the required DDS textures for your LOD-Objects out of this Archive. Then convert those DDS textures into source TGA textures. Use a Programm like http://www.irfanview.de/ for it. Now copy those converted TGA textures into source\textures TGA\(now use the file structure of textures.bsa Archive here). Source\textures TGA\ is located outside your Fallout3 Game Directory.
- For successful generate of LOD-Objects not only the required TGA textures are needed in the correct Path, but the required *_lod.nifs too. Open your meshes.bsa archive and extract the required *_lod.nifs out of your BSA-Archive into your Fallout 3 Data\Meshes Directory and use then the file structure of your meshes.bsa
- The capital wasteland worldspace is located at a coordinate of around 10500z. You should always create a new worldspace far above this z coordinate, what means at a minimum of 3000z above 10500z. In other case you will get floating trees in the sky or above the ground when you change worldspaces.
- Be aware when creating LOD for worldspaces with worldspace autowater that you will get in some cases big surface holes in the Water-LOD and it's not easy to fix them.