Information concerning exteriors.
One of my favorite builders when it comes to textures is Anduraga. He's given some great tips for the Waterdeep project and other projects over at the Weave. He recently posted a great list of tips for people looking to build good exterior areas. Here's his intro:
I find that many people find area building a very difficult task, and when they do make areas, they are often basic, because of the lack of tutorials, tips, etc. I can relate that to somewhat in a different department. Scripting isn’t really my strong suit, but I can manage to do the basics. But anyway, to the point of this post/thread. I have designed this thread to help new builders, adept builders and even master builders with tips and tricks of the trade. I haven’t checked out many of the tutorials on the vault (Shame on me, I know), so all this stuff I’m throwing out here now might already have been covered.
Check out his list of tips here:
http://nwn2forums.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=578694&forum=1...
BenWH over at DLA has posted a great tutorial on creating exterior areas in the DLA Toolset forums:
Trying out the NWN2 toolset for the first time? Here are the results of my explorations on building an exterior area, combined with the wisdom of several others…
Read the full tutorial here:
http://www.dladventures.net/vB/showthread.php?t=3791
Phoenixus posted a great tutorial on texturing a good grassland area. Check it out here:
jlf2n posted a great thread about how to reverse engineer methods for shading. In his post, shading refers to using the color brush to add shadows. You'll also see this sometimes refered to as "grayscaling." Here's his intro:
Being new to the NWN2 toolkit I set out in search of a tutorial to show me a terrain shadowing tricks. I couldn’t find any so I set to dissecting one of the areas that came with the main quest to see what I could see. The process I used was very helpful to me so I thought I would run through it here for you guys.
He goes on to walk you through opening an area from the OC, removing all the shading, and trying to recreate it. A great idea for learning how the people at Obsidian put some of the areas together.
Check out the thread on the nwcitade here:
http://nwcitadel.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1158
The layer with the highest percentage is the one that determines what sounds a creature makes when it walks on that area. Make sure you bake the area in order for the sounds to take effect.
Mike - aka Plane Walker, aka soulraven666 - over at NWN2 Mods has posted a step-by-step tutorial on creating a "roman Colosseum."
I thought I would detail the process I am going through in creating this Arena so this post is going to be an ongoing one that I continue to add to as I progress. Please feel free to reply with comments.
Head over to the NWN2 Mods forum and check it out:
http://www.nwn2mods.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=21
NWNmaster over at nwn2toolset.com has a great set of tutorials for creating areas. His current list of topics include:
Create an area
Interiors
All about Terrain
Texturing
Tips for creating an Area
Grass
About Water
How to add a Start Location
Create a waterfall
Create door transitions
Day and Night Settings
Walkmesh
Baking
Head on over and check it out:
http://www.nwn2toolset.dayjo.org/ToolsetTuts/area.html
NWNmaster over at nwn2toolset.com has a great tutorial for placing a bridge.
After seeing a few people having problems with placing bridges I thought I would give it a go and see what the fuss was about. First thing I did was to create two raised areas like so:
Head on over and check it out:
http://www.nwn2toolset.dayjo.org/ToolsetTuts/placeables/bridge.html
A great tool for making changes to your area is TerraCoppa, by Tani. The most obvious benefit of this tool is being able to rotate areas, so that north matches with north. Here is Tani's description:
TerraCoppa is a toolset plugin allowing you to copy and rotate parts of one (exterior) area to another, including:
- terrain (heightmap)
- tinting (colors)
- textures
- gras
- water
- objects (creatures, placeables, ...)of course you could copy objects via toolset as well, but it lacks the ability to copy or rotate terrain (heightmap).
Go grab the tool here:
http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=NWN2PlugIns.Detail&id=25
Documentation is a bit light, but here is a quick rundown on how I got it to work:
For additional reading, here is a thread on the forum talking about "North Direction" and rotating the area.
http://nwn2forums.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=558621&forum=1...
The walkmesh helper is a tool created by Zarathustra217 and apparently quietly slipped into the 1.05 patch.
I came across this post by TheStoryteller01 asking about making creatures hover above terrain. Grinning Fool posted some really amazing looking screenshots that he created using the walkmesh helper.
The walkmesh helper is a tool on the vault by Zarathustra217. Here's the description:
This is a simple package intended to make a builder's life easier. It consists of simple squared invisible placeables with a walkable walkmesh. When scaled, the Walkmesh Helper objects are handy to use along with Walkmesh Cutters (found under trigger) to have more control of the walkmesh. This especially is evident when using a combination of placeables, like several bridges. Place the Walkmesh Helper just above the walkable plane of the placeables, scale it to properly cover the desired area, and cut away with Walkmesh Cutters as fit. You might get the best result by converting the placeables to environment objects, but it shouldn't be required.
It is intended to work as an override, and doesn't require that the end users of your module have this package in place. They will still experience the effect it has on the walkmesh without it installed.
Here's the link:
http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=NWN2HakpaksOriginal.Detail&id=27
Here's an additional tutorial on using this that Feargus Urquhart posted in the developer blog:
http://forums.obsidianent.com/index.php?automodule=blog&blogid=2&showent...
As far as I can tell, the tool on the vault contains a flat plane and a ramp, while patch 1.05 adds two flat planes: a stone version and a wooden version (I'm guessing these are for the footfalls.)
Warning: At the time of this writing, putting the walkmesh helper files in your override seem to cause problems with the official walkmesh objects that came out in 1.05. Hopefully OEI will add the ramp objects soon.
For those of you looking to use it for those annoying house placeables that don't allow you to actually walk up the stairs, try the ramp with a scale of 2, 10, and 7. Getting in place can be a bit tricky, just because it is hard to see exactly where it is sitting. Try baking the area and viewing it with baked and surface mesh enabled and you should see a seamless yellow path onto the roof. I had pretty good results with house 1, but house 3 would only work if I created an additional plan on the roof.
ScreminMemes and Miserere posted some great advice in the Toolset Q&A thread on the official forums on making seamless exterior areas:
Quote: Posted 10/13/06 02:03 (GMT) by ScreminMemes
The off limits area is there to create the illusion of seamlessness. All you need to to to make your areas seamless is copy one then move it to the side until the last two in-bounds rows from the original area are the first two out of bounds in the next area.
Quote: Posted 10/16/06 17:28 (GMT) by Terror2001
I've been looking for a way to copy sections of a map to create this seamless effect but have yet been unable to. I understand the copying of the map to a new map, but how do you select and move a group of tiles?
Don't try to copy sections of a map. Instead:
(1) Make a copy of the entire area (i.e. copy the area itself, not the terrain and stuff in it). Just select the area in the area list, right-click, and select copy.
(2) Identify the edge you want to carry over (let's say it's the North edge of the original area, so you want to preserve the *North* edge of the new area as well).
(3) Select and delete all objects that do not fall within the 4 tiles along the edge you are preserving (otherwise all those objects will collapse to the new edge when you do the next steps, which will screw up the areas you want to preserve). So in our example we delete all objects that are not within 4 tiles of the *North* edge of the new area.
(4) Use the Resize option (I think it's in the Edit menu, but I don't have the toolset in front of me right now) and reduce the size of the edge *opposite* the one you are preserving until you have only 6 tiles in width, total (4 of which will be off limit areas). The 2 off-limit areas from the other area will now be the walkable areas of the new area. In our example, we would remove most of the tiles on the *South* edge of the new area.
(5) Use the Resize option again to increase the size of the area back to what you want it to be, this time on the other edge. Now you have extended out the walkable area in the other direction and can build it up however you want. So, in our example we would add several tiles to the *North* edge. Et voila.
Think of the process as kind of inch-worming your way from area to area. You move to a new area (by making a copy), contract the area to eliminate the parts you are leaving behind, and then extending again in the direction you are moving. Does that make sense, or do I sound like I'm on crack?
Anyway, hope that helps. I've tried this and it works like a champ. Where this method falls apart is if you try to create four areas arranged in a square pattern, since the fourth area you make will only be able to "inherit" the edge of one of its two adjoining areas, not both. That's where you'd have to do some fudging.
_________________
Miserere
Project Lead (Retired)
Tales of the Pendragon (Defunct)
You can find the conversaion here:
http://nwn2forums.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=502381&forum=1...