Revamping exterior buildings, A feasable endaveour?

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Ninelan
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Revamping exterior buildings, A feasable endaveour?

Post by Ninelan »

Beautiful clutter models, lovely textures, wonderful mods all around that make this game feel modern...aaaaand those, papercraft houses to boot.
I've been looking around if there have been any attempts at revamping the buildings, and so far I've found naught. And probably deservingly so, the amount of assets that would need change is heart-sinking!

But I am a 3D modeller, I mean, I could do it myself, but the question is, just how out of scope can this project get?
I've been thinking about doing this for quite a while, and I guess it's time to bite the bullet.
I still need to familiarize myself with mod making for Daggerfall first, but I want to first survey the scope of this project.

What I know so far from surveying the models in Daggerfall modeller:
There's what seems like interior building blocks for houses including flat faces, roofs, rooms, stairs. And there are complete exterior houses. The focus will be the exterior building look only.

So how much modelling will this just take? My first guess would be:
-Most assets on a building are reused (tiling window textures, wooden beams, bushes, house trims...)
--Meaning that once a single window of a type is done and textured, it can just be placed in the appropriate spot.
---Most of the work thus would be 'busy' work, that is... once the models are done, what remains is the tedium of placing those objects for each house type.
-add some misc detail like beveling edges and making thatch roofs thick and rounded-ish.
-Not make the houses overly complex, they should still look simple but cute.

So the issues...The issue I had from the start when I even conceptualized this project.
A single model has multiple texture variants. Meaning a more detailed house model with holes for windows will not be compatible with a building that has windows with shutters. -This is probably my biggest pitfall for the project.
How to then have the right model for the right texture set?

If this will work, I have a somewhat reasonable Idea of where to start.
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Daniel87
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Re: Revamping exterior buildings, A feasable endaveour?

Post by Daniel87 »

Thumbs up for the endeavour! We need people like you. 3D modelers are rare here.
Ever thought about joining the 3D People of Daggerfall? It might be less work to begin with but still having a huge impact.
Or modelling the nature billboards in 3D would be awesome, I would try to implement it in my Wilderness Overhaul for some realistic nature.
In Julianos we Trust.

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Re: Revamping exterior buildings, A feasable endaveour?

Post by King of Worms »

3d trees are still huge performance hog.

I remember there were threads on 3d buildings but cant find it. The search is not exactly great here...

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Ninelan
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Re: Revamping exterior buildings, A feasable endaveour?

Post by Ninelan »

If I were to team up with other lovely devs here, I would personally enjoy turning the animals (static and enemy) into 3D.
It seems like a fun challenge to both fix the broken anatomy of some critters, like bears, rats and sabers and still make them look like they fit into Daggerfall.
Here's an example of my 3D animals, realistic and cartoony.
Spoiler!
Image
But for now, I'll just be messing around with the houses! It looks like the mesh exporter regularly exports broken UVs, which is a bit of a pain.
How to gently and elegantly slope thatch roofs can be done within a few seconds, which is nice! So for now I'm mostly just fiddling around in Blender to figure out the best way to do the process, that is, what looks best for each texture set! I should perhaps at some point share results when I'm happy with them.
Daniel87 wrote: Thu Jul 01, 2021 9:07 am Or modelling the nature billboards in 3D would be awesome, I would try to implement it in my Wilderness Overhaul for some realistic nature.
King of Worms wrote: Thu Jul 01, 2021 10:31 am 3d trees are still huge performance hog.
That's usually the issue with 3D trees, more so if they're unoptimised models! I went ahead and checked out the project.
With how many Daggerfall renders at a time, it's easy to see why there would be issues, even Oblivion had to rely on billboards to render its foliage, but it looked pretty beautiful still!
To make such a project more optimised I'd guess would be to fetch an artist to draw an upscaled version of the leaves, heavily strip down the trunks to reduce the verticles to be more manageable, perhaps add some leaf planes for meshes, then do the rest via billboards.

In comparison, your typical Daggerfall house has roughly 228 vertices. You can get an 'ok' looking cartoony tree with 612. An unoptimised tree generated in a tree generator without leaves can be something like 15000!!! Now duplicate that for each tree instance and you have pain! :lol:
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Jay_H
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Re: Revamping exterior buildings, A feasable endaveour?

Post by Jay_H »

I remember there were threads on 3d buildings but cant find it. The search is not exactly great here...
Well, the buildings are already in 3D so the search probably won't help :lol: I'm just kidding, KOW.

Here in the middle of a topic you'll find some talk of re-structuring building exteriors: viewtopic.php?t=476&start=280

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Hazelnut
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Re: Revamping exterior buildings, A feasable endaveour?

Post by Hazelnut »

Replacing building models is pretty well defined and there's one mod (handpainted models) which replaces city walls, and they get retextured in desert regions.

This is probably the best place to start: https://www.dfworkshop.net/projects/dag ... els-flats/

If you do want to work on trees or enemy mobs, that would be great as well. The 3D trees mod only has non-winter northern natures replaced with models so far. The author has stopped work and provided all the source for others to pick up the baton. In game, only the nearest map pixels are models, everything more distant uses std DFU billboard sprites. For this reason the existing tree models generally match the original sprites, but it's possible to replace the sprite to match a model if desired. Not sure of the LOD that VMBlast put in the tree models, as I am not up to speed with modelling at all.
See my mod code for examples of how to change various aspects of DFU: https://github.com/ajrb/dfunity-mods

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Re: Revamping exterior buildings, A feasable endaveour?

Post by l3lessed »

This is sorely needed to make towns feel more up to modern game standards and looks.

If you want see through windows, you could use a render texture pipeline where the outside windows are and a predefined camera placed on the inside block windows streaming to the window texture.

You could flip this also, and you would have the appearance of see through windows when inside the building. One person put an example of this up on the forum, but I can't find it now.

If interested, and you need assistance, let me know. I had to figure out how render textures and camera work to get my minimap compass mod working. It might be to resource intensive to do this and require a good amount of setup, but just a thought.

The last thing, once buildings are redone to get cities truly unique and updated, is to see if you can use the separate sub-blocks to place the parts of the town at different terrain heights, so towns aren't always uniformly flat every where.
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Ninelan
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Re: Revamping exterior buildings, A feasable endaveour?

Post by Ninelan »

Ho boy, VMblast's work is absolutely stunning!
And thank you guys for links~

Hazelnut wrote: Thu Jul 01, 2021 5:38 pm If you do want to work on trees or enemy mobs, that would be great as well.
Once I have some working assets and a few replacements to 'show off', I'll probably branch out to keep myself engaged.
l3lessed wrote: Thu Jul 01, 2021 6:14 pm You could flip this also, and you would have the appearance of see through windows when inside the building. One person put an example of this up on the forum, but I can't find it now.

If interested, and you need assistance, let me know. I had to figure out how render textures and camera work to get my minimap compass mod working. It might be to resource intensive to do this and require a good amount of setup, but just a thought.

The last thing, once buildings are redone to get cities truly unique and updated, is to see if you can use the separate sub-blocks to place the parts of the town at different terrain heights, so towns aren't always uniformly flat everywhere.
That sounds like a good next step as an upgrade! But for now, I'm still skittish about the single house models and their texture variants. It's gonna crop up once I have some meshes in.

Here is one template I am satisfied with. I added more detail than what I think is necessary for a basic lift of the architecture (like the floor trims could just be a flat plane, the window shutters having depth). I'll likely trim it down a bit, for I just wanted to see how it'd end up looking like.
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Re: Revamping exterior buildings, A feasable endaveour?

Post by King of Worms »

Lovely model! Welcome to the forums :)

If I might add my opinion/suggestion:
- Id personally made the new 3d parts stand out a bit more, giving it a slight more depth. Especially the horizontal attics, corner stones and door frames. Ofc only once you see the model ingame you can really tell how the depth part feels/looks like, but as it is now I think this might be too conservative and most ppl would miss these details.

- Corner stones - every 2nd one is missing

Question... will these models change its textures when other mod provides them? In a same way the vanilla models behave. Or are the textures hard baked and only way to change them is to provide new models with different textures? I ask because Id be glad if my Dream mod was compatible with this once its done.

PS: the horse model is quite nice as well

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Ninelan
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Re: Revamping exterior buildings, A feasable endaveour?

Post by Ninelan »

King of Worms wrote: Mon Jul 05, 2021 2:04 pm Lovely model! Welcome to the forums :)

If I might add my opinion/suggestion:
- Id personally made the new 3d parts stand out a bit more, giving it a slight more depth. Especially the horizontal attics, corner stones and door frames. Ofc only once you see the model ingame you can really tell how the depth part feels/looks like, but as it is now I think this might be too conservative and most ppl would miss these details.

- Corner stones - every 2nd one is missing

Question... will these models change its textures when other mod provides them? In a same way the vanilla models behave. Or are the textures hard baked and only way to change them is to provide new models with different textures? I ask because Id be glad if my Dream mod was compatible with this once its done.

PS: the horse model is quite nice as well
Thank you and thank you :) !

Also yeah, the doorframes are a must! For this one I just slightly inset the doors, and the tudor like houses offer nice textures to allow building up doorframes! I'll need to muster up some designs per texture set so they look natural.

Maybe there could also be other details like fencing? This particular house model has a separate pillar in the corner.
Or in hammerfell some of the flat houses could have different trims, crenellated, flat, oval even?
-I did the cornerstones that way intentionally, for now, to see how it looks like in case I needed to cut down on detail~
Having both will likely be a must~.


Any mod that changes textures, will change these textures too, and they'll hopefully look as good with higher resolutions if I set them up properly and the textures do not deviate too much from the original ones.

But another point, while I saw some houses have 1 texture per model, a lot of house models change textures between regions! Basically, the texture won't match the house shape lol, so that's something that will need to be resolved when making the mod. I don't have programming knowledge so I'm stumped in that aspect!
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