xLODGen - Terrain LOD beta 130 for FNV, FO3, FO4, FO4VR, TES5, SSE, TES5VR, ENDERAL, ENDERALSE

[soupdragon]

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Ok its read though I'm not sure I understood all of it. These are my findings:

 

Program generates fine, no problem. Rather quick too though that may be because I'm using the default settings as recommended in Post #1. Meshes all generate fine no apparent issues  the results are amazing no drops at cell boundary there are places its hard to spot where loaded grid ends and LOD begins like I say, amazing.

 

All the issues I am having are solely to do with textures. Like Dave0523 all my snowy LOD's are darker than the surrounding and darker than vanilla (did Bethesda manually lighten them?) "Improved" Snow Shader has been off since forever (bEnableImprovedSnow=0) the game is too hideous to contemplate otherwise, I even went further and disabled everything snow related in the .ini's, no difference.

 

Generated,  Vanilla

 

So. Following recommendation I tried both sample noise.dds as suggested with mixed results:

 

noise one,  noise two

 

TBH vanilla still looks better to me. The problem here it seems to me is one of brightness, or rather the lack of it it, in the generated lod textures (or is it meshes? I'm not sure how its controlled). Or rather the real issue here is one of perception: the generated textures may be more accurate in terms of matching the original texture but it doesn't look natural: real snow at a distance often looks blindingly bright due to sun glare, so much so that you really need a visor or you risk snow blindness and maybe thats why Bethesda overbrightened these areas if indeed they did do that, it definitely looks more natural, from a distance at anyrate.

 

 

 

........................................

 

 

The other issue I'm seeing is a mismatch between generated terrain LOD textures and DynDOLOD's object LOD textures, if you take a look a look at this view from Whiterun with my regular noise.dds you'll see what I mean: terrain LOD looks fantastic but the object LOD objects that stick out like a sore thumb are DirtCliffsIsland01FieldGrass01, DirtCliffs03FieldGrass01, DirtCliffs01FieldGrass01 etc, etc.

 

example

 

Now if I again with one of the example noise.dds files supplied in Post#1 I get a different result again: the dirtcliff's are blended in perfectly with the terrain LOD but the terrain LOD doesn't match the loaded grid area anymore! Infact terrain texture looks no better than vanilla and possibly worse. 

 

example

 

n.b. I might be able to do a DynDOLOD run with Grass01 textures darkened or something so they'll match better with my original noise.dds then remove afterwards. Hmm.

 

(Theres also the issue with LOD 32 having rather blocky edges to lakes etc which if I read previous posts right I'd have to play around with settings, lower them to generate finer details. To be honest they're a lesser concern I'm currently deleting all LOD32 meshes/textures, they conflict with A Quality World Map anyhow)

 

In conclusion: if I can figure out how to remove the generated LOD's that affect snowy areas and leave those vanilla (seems like a fair bit of work looking through files with Nifskope) and darken the lod textures on the dirtcliff's and anything else I notice I'd probably do that, otherwise its still a bit too beta in its current state for anything more than testing for me.

[sheson]

  On 10/21/2019 at 3:38 PM, soupdragon said:

Ok its read though I'm not sure I understood all of it. These are my findings:

 

Program generates fine, no problem. Rather quick too though that may be because I'm using the default settings as recommended in Post #1. Meshes all generate fine no apparent issues  the results are amazing no drops at cell boundary there are places its hard to spot where loaded grid ends and LOD begins like I say, amazing.

 

All the issues I am having are solely to do with textures. Like Dave0523 all my snowy LOD's are darker than the surrounding and darker than vanilla (did Bethesda manually lighten them?) "Improved" Snow Shader has been off since forever (bEnableImprovedSnow=0

 

) the game is too hideous to contemplate otherwise, I even went further and disabled everything snow related in the .ini's, no difference.

 

Generated,  Vanilla

 

So. Following recommendation I tried both sample noise.dds as suggested with mixed results:

 

noise one,  noise two

 

TBH vanilla still looks better to me. The problem here it seems to me is one of brightness, or rather the lack of it it, in the generated lod textures (or is it meshes? I'm not sure how its controlled). Or rather the real issue here is one of perception: the generated textures may be more accurate in terms of matching the original texture but it doesn't look natural: real snow at a distance often looks blindingly bright due to sun glare, so much so that you really need a visor or you risk snow blindness and maybe thats why Bethesda overbrightened these areas if indeed they did do that, it definitely looks more natural, from a distance at anyrate.

 

 

 

........................................

 

 

The other issue I'm seeing is a mismatch between generated terrain LOD textures and DynDOLOD's object LOD textures, if you take a look a look at this view from Whiterun with my regular noise.dds you'll see what I mean: terrain LOD looks fantastic but the object LOD objects that stick out like a sore thumb are DirtCliffsIsland01FieldGrass01, DirtCliffs03FieldGrass01, DirtCliffs01FieldGrass01 etc, etc.

 

example

 

Now if I again with one of the example noise.dds files supplied in Post#1 I get a different result again: the dirtcliff's are blended in perfectly with the terrain LOD but the terrain LOD doesn't match the loaded grid area anymore! Infact terrain texture looks no better than vanilla and possibly worse. 

 

example

 

n.b. I might be able to do a DynDOLOD run with Grass01 textures darkened or something so they'll match better with my original noise.dds then remove afterwards. Hmm.

 

(Theres also the issue with LOD 32 having rather blocky edges to lakes etc which if I read previous posts right I'd have to play around with settings, lower them to generate finer details. To be honest they're a lesser concern I'm currently deleting all LOD32 meshes/textures, they conflict with A Quality World Map anyhow)

 

In conclusion: if I can figure out how to remove the generated LOD's that affect snowy areas and leave those vanilla (seems like a fair bit of work looking through files with Nifskope) and darken the lod textures on the dirtcliff's and anything else I notice I'd probably do that, otherwise its still a bit too beta in its current state for anything more than testing for me.

The color tone/brightness of the vanilla terrain LOD textures is changed so badly that they never match the terrain textures in the loaded cells regardless of weather/lighting.

The snowy parts are the worst, regardless of the enabled/disabled improved snow shader setting. 

 

If you leave brightness, contrast and gamma at default, then the generated terrain LOD textures match the terrain textures in the loaded cells exactly (with the disabled improved snow shader setting not artificially messing up things).

If terrain LOD textures seem darker or brighter then the terrain textures in the loaded cells, then it is because of the noise texture.

 

Note, that the terrain textures in the loaded cells fade into the terrain LOD textures without the normal map, so at the edge of the loaded cells, the terrain does not look as good as it could unfortunately.

 

Your screenshots seem to show the difference between object LOD textures (snow sides of the road for example) compared to the surrounding terrain LOD textures.

Different textures have different brightness. Noise is not applied to object LOD textures.

 

Use TexGen to update a select list of object LOD textures before generating object LOD. Their brightness/contrast/gamma will always be the same as the full textures that are used as object LOD generation does not have a feature to change it.

 

In minimum a single terrain LOD mesh/texture covers an area of 4x4 cells.

 

Forget about using the ridiculously wrong vanilla terrain LOD, it can never match the load order. Instead make sure that terrain LOD textures match the loaded terrain textures by using a neutral noise texture and update the object LOD textures with TexGen before generating the object LOD atlas.

 

Remember that grass is not part of terrain textures and currently also not part of terrain LOD textures, unless you use specially prepared terrain textures for terrain LOD texture generation (like a couple of mods do)

Turn off grass to check if terrain LOD textures match the loaded terrain textures.

 

Use the already often discussed optimize unseen drop down to improve coast lines of the terrain LOD meshes, especially for the map.

Edited October 21, 2019 by sheson

[Disannul]

  On 10/19/2019 at 8:37 PM, sheson said:

Give xLODGen beta 57 a try, see if it is any faster.

 

If it still seems to take long, set 888 texture compression for both textures and all LOD levels to test if it is any faster. You can then use a third party tool to convert textures afterwards.

The beta 57 x64 has greatly reduced generation time. This is with the same xLODGen settings as previously set. I now fall within the time range estimated for the modlist setup (2-3h).

 

Thank you sheson, much appreciated!

 

Edit: out of curiosity what did you change to make xLODGen faster? I probably wont understand, but would be chill to hear nontheless

Edited October 27, 2019 by Disannul

[sheson]

  On 10/27/2019 at 3:23 PM, Disannul said:

The beta 57 x64 has greatly reduced generation time. This is with the same xLODGen settings as previously set. I now fall within the time range estimated for the modlist setup (2-3h).

 

Thank you sheson, much appreciated!

 

Edit: out of curiosity what did you change to make xLODGen faster? I probably wont understand, but would be chill to hear nontheless

It now utilizes bulk conversion of textures with TexConv instead of starting a new TexConv for each texture separately.

[Soulmancer]

Hello, I followed your suggestions and recommended settings and my world map is still completely borked.   This was with lod quality settings 5/10/10/10. "roads vanish and water gets screwed up"

 

I am using quality world map classic.  Is it unseen optimization maybe or something else? 

Edited October 29, 2019 by Soulmancer

[Soulmancer]

  On 10/29/2019 at 3:45 PM, Soulmancer said:

Hello, I followed your suggestions and recommended settings and my world map is still completely borked.   This was with lod quality settings 5/10/10/10. "roads vanish and water gets screwed up"

 

I am using quality world map classic.  Is it unseen optimization maybe or something else? 

 

Ah, it would appear there is a known conflict with quality world map... quality world map has to be extracted to be loose and overwrite the xlodgen terrain output, alternatively the 32. terrain output files need to be deleted for tamriel and solstheim... Setting the quality of lod 32 to "5" instead if "10" seems to fix the visual borkedness of the water... although I also had unseen optimization for lod32 on instead of 550 previously "which I changed along with quality" ... but you can tell the unique quality world map terrain textures are lost/overwritten to xlodgen output and the roads are also missing.

[sheson]

  On 10/29/2019 at 4:31 PM, Soulmancer said:

Ah, it would appear there is a known conflict with quality world map... quality world map has to be extracted to be loose and overwrite the xlodgen terrain output, alternatively the 32. terrain output files need to be deleted for tamriel and solstheim... Setting the quality of lod 32 to "5" instead if "10" seems to fix the visual borkedness of the water... although I also had unseen optimization for lod32 on instead of 550 previously "which I changed along with quality" ... but you can tell the unique quality world map terrain textures are lost/overwritten to xlodgen output and the roads are also missing.

As explained in this thread before, by default the map uses LOD level 32 terrain LOD meshes and textures.

 

If you want to use a mod with manually painted roads onto the level 32 LOD terrain textures, then do not generate LOD level 32 textures or delete them or have the mod overwrite the output.

 

See the first post how to automatically create better coast lines with the optimize unseen setting or use the manually edited vanilla terrain LOD meshes for LOD level 32.

 

The fact that loose files always load after any BSA should be basic modding knowledge.

[Soulmancer]

What I did was generate 32 lods, but after generation I just deleted the conflicting 32 generated textures, I kept the normals and meshes that were generated because there was no conflict with quality world map... and it seems to look just great in game! no issues with preserving the generated 32 meshes and normals, with the quality world map textures that I'm not aware of?

[sheson]

  On 10/29/2019 at 6:06 PM, Soulmancer said:

What I did was generate 32 lods, but after generation I just deleted the conflicting 32 generated textures, I kept the normals and meshes that were generated because there was no conflict with quality world map... and it seems to look just great in game! no issues with preserving the generated 32 meshes and normals, with the quality world map textures that I'm not aware of?

There can only be visual issues with LOD meshes/textures, no save game issues.

[Abendaron]

Hey,

 

Very impressive work on the Terrain Lod

 

Everything works fine (pretty fast and no error/warning).

But for the NormalMap generation, two cells appear to be broken:

https://imgur.com/a/nYT3aOE

I have checked the other cells and only these two have the issue. I also tried various settings.

 

Only the upper cell is broken when I use my full mod list to generate the Terrain Lods (With USLEEP, SSE-Terrain, DynDOLOD etc.),

The picture uploaded is taken after a generation on (what I think was) a vanilla clean install.

 

My poor understanding of the problem doesn't allow me to have any idea on what causes the bug here.

It's not a huge problem though, I can edit the 3 files to put back the vanilla normalMap for the cell, but maybe other people can have the same problem (not the most obvious one).

 

Cheers-

[sheson]

  On 11/1/2019 at 8:36 PM, Abendaron said:

Hey,

 

Very impressive work on the Terrain Lod

 

Everything works fine (pretty fast and no error/warning).

But for the NormalMap generation, two cells appear to be broken:

https://imgur.com/a/nYT3aOE

I have checked the other cells and only these two have the issue. I also tried various settings.

 

Only the upper cell is broken when I use my full mod list to generate the Terrain Lods (With USLEEP, SSE-Terrain, DynDOLOD etc.),

The picture uploaded is taken after a generation on (what I think was) a vanilla clean install.

 

My poor understanding of the problem doesn't allow me to have any idea on what causes the bug here.

It's not a huge problem though, I can edit the 3 files to put back the vanilla normalMap for the cell, but maybe other people can have the same problem (not the most obvious one).

 

Cheers-

Already asked and answered here: https://forum.step-project.com/topic/13451-xlodgen-terrain-lod-beta-for-fnv-fo3-fo4-fo4vr-tes5-sse-tes5vr-enderal/?p=221719

 

There is no need to do anything about it because the terrain LOD for these 2 cells is not visible.

[Abendaron]

Thanks for your reply, and the explanation in the link.

Sorry for bothering you on an already answered question though...

[Himself]

First and foremost, thanks for this amazing tool! 

 

I've been having an issue with LOD for TTW, if somebody has time to lend a hand, much appreciated 

 

What the issue looks like:

https://i.imgur.com/RsJ1oWC.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/k3v7u9G.jpg

 

xLOD settings:

https://i.imgur.com/DrW03c3.jpg

 

Tried a few times, with Base TTW and also with NMCs textures on top.

Sorry if this has been covered before, the thread does have a lot of pages...
Also, if any additional info is necessary, ask and it shall be provided. 

 

 

[sheson]

  On 11/13/2019 at 7:01 AM, Himself said:

First and foremost, thanks for this amazing tool! 

 

I've been having an issue with LOD for TTW, if somebody has time to lend a hand, much appreciated 

 

What the issue looks like:

https://i.imgur.com/RsJ1oWC.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/k3v7u9G.jpg

 

xLOD settings:

https://i.imgur.com/DrW03c3.jpg

 

Tried a few times, with Base TTW and also with NMCs textures on top.

Sorry if this has been covered before, the thread does have a lot of pages...

Also, if any additional info is necessary, ask and it shall be provided. 

Edit: Check if redoing the terrain textures with beta 58 changes anything. Updated Texconv, the older version might have had problems converting some textures to desired format.

 

Which worldspace and locations are shown in the screenshots?

Which version of xLODGen are you using?

Are you using MO?

Did you generate into a dedicated output folder first, then installed as a mod?

 

Are you sure you are not running into some kind of memory issues using such high terrain texture resolutions?

No idea why you set such high default diffuse/normal sizes, doesn't really make sense for outside areas that have nothing defined use such large textures.

Edited November 13, 2019 by sheson

[Himself]

  On 11/13/2019 at 7:16 AM, sheson said:

Edit: Check if redoing the terrain textures with beta 58 changes anything. Updated Texconv, the older version might have had problems converting some textures to desired format.

 

Which worldspace and locations are shown in the screenshots?

Which version of xLODGen are you using?

Are you using MO?

Did you generate into a dedicated output folder first, then installed as a mod?

 

Are you sure you are not running into some kind of memory issues using such high terrain texture resolutions?

No idea why you set such high default diffuse/normal sizes, doesn't really make sense for outside areas that have nothing defined use such large textures.

 

It is the area right outside vault 101 after FO3 starting events, when you escape the vault.

https://imgur.com/XCGfmzg

 

Just tried with the beta 58 and seems to work (through MO2, on a dedicated folder).

https://imgur.com/BJv038W

 

In this new test, reduced the diffuse/normal to half the the previous values (became 512/256 for LOD4 and 256/128 for the others).

Shouldn't be a memory issue, game was doing fine with most textures from this guide https://ttwoee.com/#textures, altough for this test I'm using base TTW, no textures on top (btw I was using the LOD section from the guide).

Did follow base instructions for TTW LOD gen https://taleoftwowastelands.com/viewtopic.php?t=7132, I'm also using FNVLODGen Resources from here https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/58562, dunno if I should leave the FNVLODGen.esp ticked after generating LOD, but I'm leaving it ON.

 

 

I'll do more test until I'm fine with the results, may report back if I find what was causing the issue... or run into new troubles 

Thanks immensely for the help 

You peeps that mod and release stuff and do all the support are awesome!!