Water LOD issues Troubleshooting

[Yossarian]

Hi all,

I am trying to find a solution for one issue, that bugs me since Fallout 3 release. Maybe some of you guys could give an heads up.

It's about the issue creating LOD for islands or worldspaces with large open waters. What happen in most cases if you do this, are messed up LOD meshes of the water area. A LOD nif with messed water looks like this:

As you see, the shape I pointed in the screenshot should not be there. It's water space.

Now, what I did is: I loaded the nif into Max and removed the faulty water mesh.

Then I loaded the original nif file and made paste over for the NiTriShapeData.

I got this file:

I thought this would be a very neat idea. However, it did not work. If I load the worldspace ingame,

my game crashes with this lod nif.

However, LOD nif files have NiAdditionalGeometryData for whatever reason and I think, that the issue

is related to this. Because of course the block info and num vertices is much less with the new mesh.

However, I have no clue, what info is stored in the NiAdditionalGeometryData and how to update it, to make it fit with the new mesh verticles count. There are also some more information, that are unique to LOD files, such as BSSegmentedTriShape. Not sure what they do. However, just paste over the NiTriShape is not enough.

Does anyone have an idea how to solve this?

Regards

Yoss

 

[Yossarian]

It seems I got it working. Actually it seems like I only did a small mistake by using Copy Branch instead of just copy in Nifscope. Have to make some additional tests now, but it looks like this method is suitable to create worldspaces with large water surfaces.

[RoyBatty]

Cool Yossarian, thanks for the helpful info! :)

Maybe you could add it to our new wiki?

[Yossarian]

Sure, but I still need to make more tests on this. Paste Over seem to work but the new mesh will be placed not in the exact same spot as the original mesh, so this results in the mesh being offset. This can be corrected with Nifscope, but is really tedious. Need to investigate, if there are possibilities to get the new mesh into the right spot.

[pintocat]

You'll need to make an account for the wiki before we can assign edit permissions, so just leave a note in the geck wiki forum thread on this forum to tell us if you have a username created

[RoyBatty]

Sounds like export settings, don't change/reset transforms.

[Yossarian]

Since you delete major parts of the mesh, I am not sure if this can be fixed. Could also be an import setting. Not sure if it's possible to import -> export a mesh with the exact same position in space. Anyway, I found kind of workaround to fit the mesh into the right spot. I think it can be done. However, I've plans for an Island mod, that's why I actually looked into it again, but I need to finish something else first.

[RoyBatty]

could be import settings too, should be able to import it without changing the transforms.