Letho

I don't understand what "generate LOD from scratch" means. Before I try another LOD setting, I do as your M.C.M. and the manual say: 1. I go into an interoir (Morvunskar), save there. 2. deactivate and delete dyndolod_output.esp using Nexus Mod Manager. 3. Load my savegame created in 1. 4. Save again. 5. Create new LOD with DynDOLOD using different settings. (this is where the bug occured) 6. install the new dyndolod_output.esp 7. Load the game Isn't this "from scratch", as I do not overwrite existing LOD settings? As the 7 steps show, the .esp that is getting updated by the new one is always deleted before I install new LOD. I will give it a try, thx!

Forum search did not find this error, so I am posting it here. 1. Preset: High 2. Custom mesh rules: both on top of the other preset mesh rules ("order matters") landscape\mountains\ LOD 4: full model LOD 8: static LOD 4 LOD 16: static LOD 8 Visible when distant: checked Grid: blank Reference: unchanged landscape\unique\ LOD 4: full model LOD 8: static LOD 4 LOD 16: static LOD 8 Visible when distant: checked Grid: blank Reference: unchanged Problem seems to appear with vwd checked. If unchecked the result seems to ignore the custom mesh rule options (= using no full model for LOD 4) and removes LOD entirely for all mountains. Log attached to this post. DynDOLOD_TES5_log.txt

Ok, i will finally give up on trying to use DynDOLOD's advanced settings to my advantage. Sometimes LOD is not showing at all, sometimes the creation process takes forever when using custom mesh rules for mountains. I will stick with the high default preset and suffer the engine's bad and unmorphed object replacement. Thx for all your time!

Ok, forget it, both options produce the same now, did it 6 times and its always the same. Must have made a configuration mistake :)

I tried using both variants and they give different results :D Using HIGH preset + "landscape\mountains" + "landscape\unique" gives 1340 files in 62 folders @1.15GB Using HIGH preset + "landscape\mountains\" + "landscape\unique\" gives 1488 files in 62 folders @1.4GB Probably a bug? Do you want the logs?

Thanks for all the explanations! I will use your method, setting "landscape\mountains\" and "landscape\unique\" with LOD4 to full model and let you know how it worked out! Btw. in your manual you refer to Michael's tutorial for learning how to make mesh rules. Michael explains, that mesh rules ending with a backslash will PREVENT DynDOLOD from creating LOD for the files in that folder. So I reckon either you mistyped in your first post and it should be "landscape\mountains" (= no backslash at the end) in order to generate LOD for all mountain files, or rather Michael got it wrong^^

Tanks for your detailed reply again, it helped me a lot to correct some wrong concepts in my mind! Since Skyrim Realistic Overhaul is a pure retexture without any other files than *.dds, I don't think it uses new or undefined texture sets. Quite strange :/ One last thing though: I would rather call them "labeled"^^ My main problem is that I have never moded and I don't fully understand the exact difference between dynamic LOD and static LOD and how both come into play. This is from the manual, regarding DynDOLOD configuration: If I understood Michael correctly, dynamic LOD is exclusively used for models, that are animated (water falls, wind mills, etc.) or those that are added to the game world while in the middle of a gaming session (e.g. a completed quest adding a new tree in whiterun, after geting the small tree from that ancient tree in the green cave). If this is correct, a rock or a mountain is always static and as such precompiled on loading a savegame or starting the game (don't know where precompiled stuff is loaded). So the only options of interest when creating Rock/Mountain LOD are The LodGenOptions: LOD 4,8,16,vwd. The DynDOLOD options: 'grid' and 'reference' have no impact on those and can be left blank, right?

Thx for the fast reply! I erroneously thought lighting/shadows/decals/snow shader were all part of the texture information and changed alongside the texture and hence using the same model for every LOD level would make the switching invisible to the player's eye. Bad mistake, obviously :( Base records and references are like classes and instances in coding, is that correct? What exactly does it mean to not have LOD in a specific level? Let me give an example: In the vanilla game an object "abc.nif" (base record) has a model defined for LOD level 4. Higher levels don't have a LOD mesh. Whenever I walk out of LOD4 range ingame, the model should totally vanish, right? So the engine will not automatically use the lowest LOD models as models for higher LOD levels. Would you mind explaining that a litte more? I was thinking that every LOD model has it's own LOD texture attached to it and that TexGen would create those textures for every LOD level (btw.: base on what rules? If there is no LOD8 for a specific model, will TexGen create no LOD8 texture? If not, can we make it happen by using DynDOLOD to create LOD8 meshes and then rerun TexGen? How can mods use undefined replacement textures? This touches another aspec of DynDOLOD that I did not understand from neither the manual nor Michael's video: Let me take the example from above: "abc.nif" hase a LOD4 model, but no LOD8/16/... 1. What will visible when distant exactly do in this case, when checked and all LOD levels are set to Full Model? I would assume it would only replace the LOD4 by the full model and ignore 8/16 as the LOD4 is the only one that has a predefined LOD model. 2. What exactly do the _FAR model and billboard options do? 3. The other options are the DynDOLOD options and they only apply to dynamic LOD, that being animated objects like water falls, etc. and those that are dynamically added to the world during a game session, correct? Sorry for all my questions, but I am very curious and always want to fully understand stuff (I am not a total coding beginner for I am writing lua based addons for ESO, but that doesnt help much with gfx related things :))

Hi Sheson, I started using DynDOLOD a few days ago and I love this mod and your great work for the modding community (memory patch, etc.). I have recently run into a few issues though. Let me go through it step by step. 1. I have RTFM and watched GamerPoets (Michael's) tutorial DynDOLOD from start to finish. I'm still having the general problem, that I don't fully understand some things from a technical side, so my issue probably originates there. Nevertheless I am posting some screenshots of the problem itself instead of writing a n00b's wall of text of questions related to DynDOLOD in general^^ 2. What I have done so far I have installed the tree billboard and the DynDOLOD ressources after installing the scripting dependencies (SKSE+Papyrus Utils). After that I have installed SMIM, ELFX and my retexture (Skyrim Realistic Overhaul) mods and overwrote everything. After that I ran TexGen and DynDOLOD /w @high, using the default mesh rules and all extra shinies (lights, windows, glow, etc.) 3. The issue I am having There is a mountain with some snowy rubble outside of Whiterun (circled red in the screenshot), and a mountain rock (circled blue in the screenshot), that will make a great example. The game switching from LOD to the full model makes an extremely visual difference and thus kills the immersion heaviliy. I have screenshoted both variants and wrote the refId next to the objects: ___LOD___ ___FULL MODEL___ 4. There is still one general question about LOD I have to ask, because I find it very confusing: The rubble part (refId=0004d6ff) only has 4LOD assigned to it - 8LOD+ is blank. Nevertheless I see the LOD model from high distances, shouldn't it fade out as soon I leave the 4LOD distance? Is DynDOLOD assigning wrong textures to the LOD mesh? I know this happens to windmills and farmhouses as well, but they are - if I understood Michael correctly - stored in a prerendered texture-Atlas and hence uneditable for DynDOLOD. How could i "fix" my problem? I tried using LOD4/8/16 FULL models for the backslash-rule but DynDOLOD froze after 2,5hours after having created 80k of 257k references for DynDOLOD in the log. Thanks for this forum and for still supporting DynDOLOD! Cheers, Letho