Generating and fixing grass for Project Tamriel

All tutorials and guides related to TES III: Morrowind modding
Post Reply
User avatar
chef
P:C Head of Exteriors
Posts: 1018
Joined: Sat Jul 07, 2018 3:48 pm
Location: Canada

Generating and fixing grass for Project Tamriel

Post by chef »

Useful links
Morrowind Mesh Generator: https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mod ... ?tab=files
Scamp’s In depth mesh generator tutorial: viewtopic.php?f=141&t=29
ESP QuickEditor: http://www.project-tamriel.com/viewtopi ... 419#p14419
Splitting grass from your file: http://www.project-tamriel.com/viewtopi ... 100&t=1451
TESAME: https://www.tamriel-rebuilt.org/content ... e-tutorial
GIMP dds plugin: https://code.google.com/archive/p/gimp-dds/
Photoshop dds plugin: https://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-tex ... -photoshop (cs6 and below) or https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/76482/ (cc)

After a claim is finished and reviewed, it should be merged into a section file before grass is generated, as grass is just an optional plugin and shouldn't block interiors from being opened. Second thing to do before generating is to check which claims are border matched. If there are any non border matched claims, then it’s best to avoid generating grass on those borders. Next either copy the section file esp and use an ESP QuickEditor cutting script for the area you want to generate in, or just edit your copy of the pre merged claim if no significant changes have been made to it in the section.

Now to edit the file’s landscape textures. Use shift-c to check under structures, rocks, cliffs etc. for any grass texture that is hidden and paint over it with default. Check with any border matched claims to see if there are any statics covering some grass tiles on your side of the border, paint over any you see. If there are any claims not border matched, paint default along the entire border 3 tiles wide. Any cells with no grass tiles, such as ocean cells, can be deleted from your file, because the mesh generator can struggle with larger files.

Once you edited the landscape and you are ready to generate, you need to get a grass ini. I attached a 7z with the Gilded HIlls ini, or you can follow Scamp’s tutorial linked at the top of this page to create/edit one. If an ini for a regions exists you should use that instead of making your own to keep region consistency. Open Grass.exe, point the settings towards your ini, and change the name of the output file if you wish. Remove Morrowind.esm from the generation list and add the file you edited, then make sure to remove GRS_ from the ID Append, and leave it blank. Hit generate. If Grass.exe crashes during generation, split the esp you are generating with into multiple files and generate multiple grass.esps to merge.

Open the grass esp to make sure you didn’t miss anything, if not, you can now merge the grass esp into the section file. Remember to clean out the wilderness, Bitter Coast, and West Gash cells that get dirtied on merging.

I've found the easiest way to fix grass errors is to edit the rock texture to be very dark, and the textures of the grass objects to be something highly saturated, bright and vibrant so it stands out from the grass and rock ground textures. Save your grass with DXT5 and rock with DXT1. The easiest way to find errors is to pan around and look at all the objects in each cell, but you could also cycle through each grass object by searching with ctrl-f and f3, though I don't recommend that as it's tedious, takes forever and is very easy to miss errors.
Attachments
GH_Grass.7z
(460 Bytes) Downloaded 178 times

Post Reply

Return to “Tutorials and Guides”