Conifer forests and rivers

I realize that it has been a while and that's be course we are busy working on regions and new resources :)
Here is a small update on what is going on right now.

The Hoddminir forest region is now looking really nice, with moss covered rocks and logs, nice Scottish pines and mushrooms. In Swedish this is called a troll forest, a thick dark conifer forest with spruce, blueberry bushes and lots of moss covering everything. I can really see a Nordic troll peaking around one of the rooks :)
Then there will be parts that are a bit lighter with Scottish pine, white reindeer lichen and grass.

There is a large river running through the forest, and on the edge of the river there are birch, alder and willow. The shore will have dirt banks and some new water plants, like reeds and bulrush.

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The Forest of Hoddminir

Great things are happening :)
Two weeks ago Noirdesir contacted me and asked if I needed any help with region generation for Hoddminir. And yes I most definitely did, but I hadn't planed to start with region generation until all the plant resources where done, probably sometime next spring :)
But most thing were finished  for a conifer forest, and I had just the spot, the great Hoddminir forest. Ztree also volunteered to make some more models for the forest and he has now made several beautiful scotch pines. I'm still working in branch textures so I'll show them later on.

I have just got the first test region, and I have walked around and looked at everything.
It looks fantastic :)
I thought I would give you all a sneak peak too.

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Moss and Shaders

One thing I have really wanted in Hoddminir is dark conifer forests where there is a thick cover of moss on every rock. With the help of ElijahHouck I now how to do that, thanks :)
The solution is called shaders, this is for example how snow is applied to buildings and stones in the game.

First of I had to extract the right nif model from the Skyrim.BSA. (Data/Meshes/shadertests/tundramossshader.nif). I then re-textured this shader nif with one of my mossy ground textures. I had to adjust the UV mapping by scaling it up 4 times so the texture would appear smaller.

In the Creation kit new shaders can be added under Material Object. I'm not completely sure yet what all settings will do, but if I want the shader to be applied on to of the object, Z should be -1. The Falloff Bias will change the thickness of the texture applied.  With higher values more of the underlying model will show. 

To associate a shader to a model, just edit and select the material in the Directional Material menu.
Now as you see unfortunately the shader will not be seen in the CK, but it will show up in the game :)

The observant watcher will see that this rook is not an original one. This is one of the rocks Ztree made and I have been re-texturing these with my rocky ground textures. And around the rock is a new Lingonberry plant I just made :)

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Hoddminir Grasses

I'm finished with all the grasses I had planed to do, for now at least. You can find them on Nexus here:

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/24735

There is 37 different grasses, some with yellow variants. I got permission from the creator of Lush Grasses mod to use his models to have a more lush variant model as well. Thanks SparrowPrince :)

There is grasses with just blades or blades and plumes, and there is small and big grasses.  I'm pleased with the details in some of them. Hopefully this will give all that variation that I have been hoping for. I really look forward to mixing some of these together with the summer flowers I will do next. There is potential to create some beautiful meadows, or vast grassy plains :)

Until I can let you all play with this, here are some pictures on some of the different species.

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Promoting the Adabala Building system

When I was making this world for my role playing game, one of the core ideas was new civilization living in the ruins of an old one. I have mentioned before that there is a ruined road system through the land, called Heimdallr's roads by the Seylanders. I got some ideas for this from the Ayleid ruins in Oblivion, and I always pictured them built like those bridge and arches models. But these structures where one of many thing not present in Skyrim. I tried building with other models, but nothing looked the way I wanted...

Then some time back Varlaisaran said that he was remaking the Ayleid ruins for Skyrim, and I was overjoyed. He needed help with textures, so I helped by making some of the plain and carved stone and marble textures.
Today the ruins was released, and I'm playing around with them right now. There is a lot of potential to make some great things with this :)

You can download the resources here:
http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/23828#


I'm especially pleased with these two textures, I had to figure out how to do the carvings in PhotoShop and it turned out really nice, if I can say so myself :)

Varlaisaran, THANK YOU so much for making these!
The models are beautiful, and now, the vision I have in my head can finally come in to the Hoddminir world :)

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The many projects

I have been sick for the last two months, nothing too serious, but it has left me tired and lacking energy. As a result I have not been so active with the modding as I would have liked. But whenever I found some extra energy I've taken new photos of all the nice summer plants and flowers I could find :)
Now I have more then enough texturing work to last me through the autumn and winter...
I thought that I would share what's in the pipeline. But don't hold your breath, it will take some time to finish all of this :)

Projects

Climbing plants

The idea is to make more climbing plants to have something else than ivy climbing up houses and walls. So far I have made some variants of Morning Glory, but I'm planing on doing Clematis and Honeysuckle as well.

Spring plants II

I have some additional spring flowers I would like to have, some are present in the first release, but most are new. For example I will be making new bluebells and at least four new variants of Lily of the valley. There will be around ten new flowers including Forget me not, Hellebores, Violets and Fritillary.

Summer plants

This is by far the largest project right now. I have calculated that I have photos of 64 different species of summer flowers, and for many of them I have several different photos (with some color variants) to add some variation to the world. As of right now there are 170 textures I will have to clean up, and the summer is not over yet :)
I have only started to work on this, and I'm done with 3, a large Bellflower, Lady's bedstraw and one Heather.

Grass

I have talked about this earlier, that I'm making more grasses for the game. Now I think I have all the textures I need, about 50 different ones. I had no idea there where so many different species of grass growing around here. The idea is to have both different blades and grass "flowers", short and tall grass, as well as green and yellow variants. I will also include oat, wheat and barley among the grasses.

Water plants

When I first had a look at the different plants in Skyrim I was struck by the lack of water plants. It really makes the water feel like a wasteland. So far I have photos of 15 different seaweeds/kelp, 3 fresh water plants. I will also be making some above water plants like water lilies, bulrush and reed.

Walls and houses

I have already shown some of the re-texturings of houses I have made. So far I have re-textured Whiterun town and farm houses. I'll also look at Solitude and Riften houses and see if my new textures will look good on them.

And the more I build the more things gets a new texture variant :) Like stone walls and wooden fences.

Update 2012-09-05

Rocks and Cliffs

When I build with rocks and cliffs they are only one color available and it looks rather odd togetter with my rock ground textures. I applied the same texture to the a rock and around 20 of the ground textures looks good. I'll also have to match up the grass/dirt part of cliffs and banks to my ground textures. 

And then there are some projects I haven't really started yet, like new cobblestone ground textures and new bushes and trees. I have a feeling there will not be many things with the original textures when I'm done...
I'll keep you all posted on the development of these projects and more :)
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House Foundations

I've been building the city, and there is a problem. The height map is not even, and the Whiterun houses have no foundation. I tried making a stone foundation using ImpStoneBlocks, this looks nice, but takes forever to build.

I figured it was time to try my hands at 3D modeling, and a stone foundation should not be too hard, it's basically just a box.The first tempt is a foundation for the WRBreezeHome, and making it was not that hard. Granted the model has no finesse at all and is very blocky :)

I made a texture I think will look nice for the base (purple), the corners will be solid stones (turquoise), and then there will be smaller wood beams as support (brown).

Next task is UV mapping, and I'm really at a loss here... back to browsing tutorials for 3ds Max to see if I can figure this out.

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