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After some feedback I took another stab at the scaffolding. I cut out about 30% of the beams, and made them substantially thicker. I removed the brackets for each step up towards the garden, and instead made two frames on the underside of the planks; one close to the house, and one for outer support of the porch.
I also slimmed down the four central pillars in each corner of the house. They are now 20% slimmer, which makes the house look less chunky. I also managed to raise the whole house about 1 feet, which exposed more of the roots of the tree, and gives a better sense that it's actually constructed on top of a tree trunk, and not just plopped on a bit of mountain.
The ladders are extended a bit, and are only extended a few inches, outward, while mainting their 35:ish angle, which means that the player can easily traverse them by just pressing forward.
Here are some pictures, that also show 2 alternative plank textures (solitude planks and Windhelm planks02, the latter with corresponding border detailing). The top-most picture gives a wide view of the house when standing in front of it, just at the edge of the water. The farmwood planks used in this picture have also been made about 30& slimmer, so it looks less top-heavy now, with that particular texture.
Stone placement is just placeholder now, as is the ground painting (marking a walked-down path that leads to the house). Grass is also completely missing, because it's just floating in the air when viewed through CK, and doesn't look representative of how the player will experience it.
The new scaffolding left a lot of negative space to the right of the house, so that will be taken care of in some fashion, either by adding clutter or by curving a bit of mountain in downwards slope towards the tree.
Still a lot of work left, but it's moving in the right direction, bit by bit.
5 comments
About your concern regarding the player climbing the stairs, one simple solution is to make a flat collisionl, like a ramp basically, instead of one roughly following each step elevation. It let characters climb smoothly (no up-down bobbling in first person view, which I find anoying), even on relatively step angles.
The slightl loss in animation precision(in third person view) is not really noticeable unless the stairs are much longer, and there's a lot of pedestrian trafic. Which is probably why Bethesda used ramp collision for all the whiterun stairs except for waterstair mesh (marketplace). Companions/NPCs also have an easier time on these "ramp" collison, and the navmeshing is slimpler too.
Ok I stop, I'm sounding like a car seller, now :P
Again, great job. Looking forward to for the mod release.
Thank you for informing me about NPC/companion traversal-ease; it might end up deciding how I ultimately go about it. Basically, my idea with this home was to give it a sense of the Witch's Hut in the snes game "Link to the Past", with a small, compact home resting on an organic structure like a tree. Unfortunately, spaces in Skyrim need to be a lot bigger than what I want them to (or what is aesthetically pleasing), if it's going to be a useful home.
Good news is that I've since learnt some basic Blender-techniques, so I now have a lot more flexibility in terms of bending, straightening, or removing discreet surface-areas of a mesh that I couldn't do before, when I did all my work by trying to find already existing, suitable meshes that I mashed together in Nifskope.
You can still distort/reshape meshes in nifskope along the x,y and z angle (in a single direction, or proportionally), but you can't - for example - delete individual triangles, or give a mesh a twisty, organic shape, or take a straight structure and have it bend around its central point to make a circle, for example.
As a side-project, I am working on an Ewok-inspired tree-house made from organically bended branches that i think is going to look really fantastic. The main house, and all its organic shapes, including the door frame is made by manipulating the wovenfence-mesh from "improved meshes" into a lattice-pattern, and then bend it to a vaguely tear-drop shaped home .
It has a very "human scale bird-nest"-feel to it, and when I publish it, I'm thinking of calling it "The Eyrie". The inside of the house will draw its inspiration from "cob homes", where using clay-material to shape the interior leads to very organic, and individually fitted shapes.
Might publish a few screenshots of it when I return home to my development rig later this week.
Cheers, and thanks again for the technical info. Much appreciated.
And even basic Blender techniques, allow you to avoid having a ton of Nitrishapes and material nodes (bslightingEtc) in your final nif file. It's not just about making the nif more readable, by the way, but avoiding having unnecessary drawcalls ingame, so... better performances.
Love you tree house too, btw, can wait to check it ingame. ;)
I was hoping you understood what I was rambling about the underside of the deck.
Apparently you totally did, lols.