Worldbuilding: Lesson #1

[DarkRider]

 

 

Worldbuilding Lesson #1: The Tamriel Exterior

 

 

 

Intro:

Hello Student! Welcome to your first class. Before beginning be sure you read the syllabus for the class and make sure you have yourself added to the student progress report so you can watch your points tally as you go! Let's start with a bit of general worldbuilding info.

 

Part I: The What's What

 

What is Worldbuilding?

One of the most common aspects of modding is worldbuilding, which involves the creation and development of new worldspaces that are separate from the world of Tamriel which Elder Scrolls IV is set in. In Worldbuilding 101, we will be exploring how to worldbuild a parented worldspace. Landscaping is not the same thing as worldbuilding, but it is an important part of it

 

What is a Parented Worldspace?

A Parented worldspace is a new world that is dependant on another worldspace for its data, such as landscape. The exteriors of cities such as Bruma in the vanilla game are set in the Tamriel worldspace, but the interiors are set in their own worldspaces which are children to Tamriel. Aside from Tamriel, most of the other worldspaces listed in the cell view window are parented or 'child' worldspaces

 

Can We Copy a Parented Worldspace?

In short, not easily. A child worldspace relies on its parent for its cell location and landscape data. If you changed the child worldspace to be unparented, all of this data supplied by the parent is lost causing all statics like city walls and houses to float where their landscape used to be.

 

Smarty Says: While it's not easy, it is possible to unparent a child worldspace and make it stand on its own by duplicating its parent and deleting anything in that duplicate world you don't need. However, if the parent is Tamriel odds are good your pc won't be up to the task of duplicating it. Do not count on having to unparent a worldspace, plan ahead and either build it as a child worldspace or as a stand alone world.

 

 

Part II: Building the Exterior

 

Now that we have some of the basic concepts defined, let's get started! In this section of the Worldbuilding Course, we're going to build a Mini City focusing our efforts on making a parented worldspace! Cue up the Construction Set and load the Oblivion.esm only. If you are already confused, you should head to the CS Basics class.

 

First thing we need to do is save to create a new .esp. Click SAVE and name your mod ChildworldTutorial.

Once that is done, it is safe to claim the cells in the parent worldspace where we plan to build our city worldspace. Some cells in Tamriel can be unstable for building in, most notably is cell 3,3 which can cause the player’s compass marker to stop functioning properly when a mod alters that cell. That's one to avoid. In the Cell View window, set the worldspace to Tamriel, and in the view pane, click on the Location tab to order the cells by their cell grid numbers. This will make finding your cells much easier. We are looking for cell -2, -2.

 

 

Once you found it in the list rename it to claim that as your first cell: aaDRWorldTutorialExt01

 

Now you need to claim 3 more adjoining cells so we have a 4 cell grid.

 

• -2, -1 becomes aaDRWorldTutorialExt02
• -1, -2 becomes aaDRWorldTutorialExt03
• -1, -1 becomes aaDRWorldTutorialExt04

 

Within these four cells we are going to build a small city worldspace. On average, Bethesda Developers used around 12-16 cells for each city sometimes more; this will only be 1/3 of that. So, when planning for future projects, plan on many more cells, and much more time allotted to flesh out the space.

 

SAVE!

 

Once you have your cells claimed, it's time to tidy up a couple marks, go through and find any leveled creature lists in your four cells and delete them by highlighting them and clicking the delete key. You want to make sure you don't have creature spawns inside your city walls.

 

 

Next we're going to use castle wall statics to make a perimeter wall for our city. Save often! Be sure to build your perimeter inside the boundaries of the 4 claimed cells, otherwise when you clean your mod you may accidentally delete walls when you clean dirty land refs out of the neighboring cells. As you place your perimeter walls and towers you may find trees or rocks in the way, just take a moment to scoot those things to either side of the wall for now.

 

The best place to start is with the main gate since it uses a bit more space than a regular wall and you need to choose a good place for the player to enter the city. Make sure you don't rest your gate right up against a hill, choose an open side of your territory so you can give your city a proper entrance. Remember you don't want your entrance in the center of your cell, keep it to the edge. With the main gate in place, you can start plotting out your tower positions.

 

 

Sink the towers in up to the lower ridge on the bottom of the model. You will have to go back through and tweak the tower positions once you start adding walls, you will also need to adjust the landscape. At this point, just get a general idea of where your perimeter will be so you don't build off in the wrong direction on accident.

 

Smarty Says: Use shorter towers on higher planes of land and taller towers in lower planes so the wall stays close to the same height all the way around. It's not always possible to keep the wall level, especially on steep hills, but do your best, improvise when you must.

 

With the towers in place it's time to use castle wall statics to form the perimeter. There are lots of wall types, bends curves, etc, but it's possible to build your entire perimeter using various chains of CastleWall01 (use snap to grid to snap a few pieces together for longer chains and then rotate them together) and angling the chains to reach the towers.

 

 

When placing castle walls you will want to check certain points:

 

• Make sure your walls face the right direction, the higher perimeter edge should face out
• Make sure wall edges are sunk into the tower inside and out so no open faces are showing
• Make sure the bottom of the wall is sunk into the ground. If the ground is too low, landscape it up, or position large rocks under the wall.
• Use snap to grid to link walls together so they line up properly; once you make a chain of walls you can select all the pieces and rotate them into place as a unit.

 

Once the perimeter is formed, it's time to go back through with the landscaping tool and raise the land under the walls where needed and make sure there are no gaps anywhere. When you are sure your wall is solid, open the landscape editor and paint shadows under the entire perimeter. This will help in Lesson #2 when we move to the child worldspace. The shadows will guide your castle walls in the new space.

 

Open the landscape editor and choose a size 3 brush radius. Check the Edit Colors flag and set the vertex color to a nice gray R 78, G 78, B 78

 

 

Then use the Right mouse button to gently paint shadows under your perimeter walls. If you position your brush radius well you should be able to shadow both sides of the walls nicely with one pass. When you are finished you should have a complete perimeter that looks something like this:

 

 

Do not obsess too much about matching the example perimeter exactly; just do the best you can to make a 4 cell perimeter for your mini city in whatever shape you think fits to the land shape.

 

 

Part III: Faking the Interior

 

With a solid outline for our city, it's time to fluff up the interior of our city as it appears in Tamriel. What you see over a city's walls in Tamriel is a facade of the actual city worldspace. In this section we're going to plot out this facade, though we may need to make some adjustments later.

 

First step is to examine the land, look for where the most natural raises (possible house locations) and dips (road locations) are in the land within your city walls. Use a cobblestone or road stone texture to paint your roads through the city. Make sure to leave space for houses on all sides of the road! After painting the road, go through and adjust the landscape so your road is not sloped or unnaturally jagged and move any rocks and shrubs off the cobblestone.

 

Let's take a closer look at landscaping roads.

 

Roads in the vanilla game are slightly depressed in the ground; this is the natural effect of a road that is often traversed, just like a common path will wear a rut in the ground. So when you are landscaping your road you want to use a Size 2 brush radius and gently depress the center of the road (remember one click movements are easier to undo if you make a mistake!).

 

So the road we started with may look a bit like this:

 

 

And we want to gently sculpt the center to a slight depression (not a great valley):

 

 

Make your way around the entire length of your road, until the entire things is smoothed out. Be sure to paint your road with 100% Opacity so that grass doesn't punch through your cobblestone.

 

Smarty Says: Since we're talking about roads, let's talk about exterior road textures. The game provides a number of cobblestone textures for city interiors. Exterior roads use a special texturing combo: Roadstone01 at 100% opacity in the center of the road a Roadstonesmall01 at 60% opacity to outline the roads and blend them into the grass! Try it later in the lesson when we build a road to our city!

 

Now that our road is finished, it's time to plan the structural layout of the city. Most cityscapes in Oblivion have LOD versions of their houses. These LOD houses are only vaguely reminiscent of the actual models, they are easier on FPS because they have less detail to render. These LOD buildings make up the city as it appears in Tamriel.

 

For this section look for CheydihalHouseLOD in the Under WorldObjects>Statics.

 

Place several of these in your city interior where houses will most likely go. You'll notice in the next example there is a priory chapel. There is no LOD version of chapels and churches so for the priory, go ahead and add a PrioryChapel01 to your city.

 

 

SAVE!

 

The last step to faking our interior is to remove path grids from inside the interior of the city walls. No character should ever walk through this facade, so we want to remove pathing to prevent any NPCs passing through the country side from trying to walk through our city.

 

Toggle on pathgrids. One by one, highlight and delete the nodes that are inside or under city walls. Do this carefully. If you accidentally click on the landscape, all the nodes rendered will become active and when you click delete you will effectively delete many cells worth of nodes; that's a mistake you don't want to make. Delete only what you must. When finished you should have a clear grid inside your city, like this:

 

 

Smarty Says: Don't want to delete nodes one by one? With pathing activate you can draw a selection rectangle around groups of nodes to highlight more than one, then press delete to delete all of those selected. Choose small groups, deleting large groups can crash the CS and cost you work since your last save. Save often!

 

In Lesson #2 we will head into worldspace creation and create our child world to furnish the city interior. Before moving on, be sure to complete the homework below as it is not optional if you want to pass the class!

[DarkRider]

 

 

Homework: The City Stables

 

 

 

This assignment is worth 15pts for Part I and 15pts for Part II. You need 100pts to earn a medal for this section and 200pts overall to graduate the Worldbuilding course. So do your assignments and post screenshots when you are done!

 

For this assignment you will need to complete the city interior facade we started in class and you need to build the city stables which are an integral part of any city. If you have taken the CS Basics class as recommended you will already have the skills you need to complete the homework.

 

Part I: Finishing the Classwork

 

The city needs just a couple finishing touches, but don't waste time adding statics beyond things like a statue or a well. You don't want to waste FPS on stuff no one will ever see. Make your way through this checklist to finish.

 

 

Quote

Assignment

 

• Finish the Mini City
• Add a Portcullis to your Main Gate
• Add an Upper Class Cheydinhal House (non LOD version)
• Add a Town Statue
• Add a Cheydinhal city well
• Add a curved wall somewhere in your perimeter

 

 

 

Part II: Building the City Stables

 

This part is worth a total of 20pts. We're going to create a stable for the city. Stables are an important part of city life as players interact with them. To begin, you need to claim an adjoining cell that is directly in front of your Main Gate and name it:

 

 

 

aaDRWorldTutorialExt05

 

 

This area is pretty hill laden so you may need to smooth out a space, Make sure that you don't flatten the area, the world has very few natural flat spaces. Instead, lower hills and use the smoothing brush to smooth any rough edges. When you lower hills you can create so sharp edges, this can appear very natural if you texture those edges with a rock texture.

 

 

Once the area is prepared, add a HouseLower03 to be your stable house, and then use farm fences to build a horse enclosure. The vanilla farm fences are rather disproportionate to the actors and player characters, so if you want a more natural size, scale your fence pieces down to .900 or .800.

 

 

Add some static clutter to your stable yard like crates and hay bails.

 

 

Only a couple things left to do. Use the landscaping tool to draw a road from your main gate past your stable and stop before leaving your cell. Than add a MapMarker to your road in front of the main gate. And a Horse Marker to the stable yard.

 

What is a Horse Marker For?

 

A horse marker looks just like a northmarker that we use in interior cells. But a horse marker serves a special purpose when used in a city stable. The horse marker marks the nearest stable to the city. When the player fast travels to the interior of a city and they receive that message about their horses being stabled, the horse marker is what tells the game where to park the player's horse. If you don't use a horse marker the game will send the horse to the nearest horse marker to the city's location; which can be far away if you're not careful! So whenever you make a city, make a stable and add that horse marker so your players can reunite with their favorite equine companions quickly.

 

Back to map markers. Your MapMarker here should be located by your stable and should be set up as the stable marker. The marker for your city will be in the city interior. This marker should have the Stable name, and be marked as a settlement, Visible, and Can Travel To just like all the other stables in the game.

 

 

And once again the final step in this area is to adjust pathing. Click on pathgrids and remove any autogen (orange) nodes that are floating or under the stable or under the stable fence. Then repath with red nodes.

 

 

When your homework is done, post a screenshot and wait for approval to move on. Once you have the green light, you are ready to move on to Lesson #2: Creating the Interior Worldspace.

[DarkRider]

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