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[Oblivion] Dwip's Tutorials


Dwip

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In which I'm going to make a thread as a repository for all of my various Oblivion, Blender, and GIMP tutorials to have one more good spot for all of them. They're all hosted off-site, and will remain so due to the element of pain in porting them over.

General Game/Mod Design Articles

1. On Valve Level Design @ Ravings of Demented Rabbits - A discussion of the theories behind level design talked about in the commentaries for Half-Life 2 Episodes 1-2, and the application of those theories to Oblivion using AFK_Weye as a model.

2. Neverwinter Nights 2 Gameplay @ Ravings of Demented Rabbits - A discussion of various gameplay and design elements in Neverwinter Nights 2, with a good deal of talk on better dungeon and quest design.

3. Neverwinter Nights 2 Storytelling @ Ravings of Demented Rabbits - A discussion of the story elements of Neverwinter Nights 2, focusing on structure and pacing.

4. Dungeon Design Examples, Part 1: Ithal's Tor @ Ravings of Demented Rabbits - A presentation of dungeon design theories, illustrated by a fairly non-linear dungeon constructed for a Dungeons and Dragons game, along with how to construct it in Oblivion.

5. Dungeon Design Examples, Part 2: Temple of Elhonna @ Ravings of Demented Rabbits - Part 2 of my dungeon design series, focusing on puzzles, traps, and interweaving story elements.

General Tutorials

1. Guide to Oblivion Installation @ Ravings of Demented Rabbits - A basic guide to installing the game and various utilities, plus some mod suggestions.

Construction Set Tutorials

1. Dwip's Guide To Scripting @ Bethsoft Forums - Various topics related to scripting, including basic terminology, layout, and a dissection of the quest SQ09 Go Fish.

2. On the Care and Feeding of Leveled Lists, Part 1 @ Ravings of Demented Rabbits - A discussion of the ins and outs of leveled lists.

3. On the Care and Feeding of Leveled Lists, Part 2 @ Ravings of Demented Rabbits - Complex topics relating to leveled lists, such as multi-leveled lists.

4. Oblivion Clothing Reference @ Ravings of Demented Rabbits - A reference for all vanilla/SI clothing.

Modeling and Texturing

1. I Saw the Sign @ Ravings of Demented Rabbits - A guide to making road sign textures in GIMP. General techniques should work for most signs.

2. Fine-Tuning Nif Texture Editing With Blender @ Ravings of Demented Rabbits - A guide to dealing with textures, materials, and the like in Blender. Probably mostly outdated by more recent tutorials, but may help deal with some obstinate vanilla .nif files.

3. Creating Dice In Blender @ Ravings of Demented Rabbits - A basic tutorial on creating a simple dice model in Blender. Also covers some basic texturing concepts like UV layouts.

4. Using UV Face Layouts To Texture With Blender And GIMP @ Ravings of Demented Rabbits - A continuation of the dice tutorial discussing the creation of custom textures based on Blender's UV export features.

5. Flipping Normals In Blender @ Ravings of Demented Rabbits - A brief discussion of normals and their manipulation in Blender.

6. Subdividing Meshes In Blender @ Ravings of Demented Rabbits - How to use various tools to chop up/subdivide meshes and their parts in Blender.

7. Normal Mapping For Oblivion @ Ravings of Demented Rabbits - A discussion of how to do decent and non-glaring normal maps. Be sure to read the comment thread here, as my conclusions are sometimes suspect.

8. Creating Icons For Oblivion Using GIMP @ Ravings of Demented Rabbits - A discussion of creating both item and quest icons.

9. Creating Oblivion Weaponry In Blender, Part 1 @ Ravings of Demented Rabbits - A complex tutorial discussing all aspects of weapon creation in Blender. Advanced level.

10. Creating Oblivion Weaponry In Blender, Part 2 @ Ravings of Demented Rabbits - Part 2 of the above.

11. Creating Editor Markers For Oblivion In Blender/Nifskope @ Ravings of Demented Rabbits - How to create geometry that's only visible in the CS.

Edited by Dwip
All those br tags, lost in time, like tears in rain.
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  • 4 weeks later...
  • 3 months later...

"Man, why isn't anyone visiting my tutorials anymore? Oh yeah."- Updated all Ravings of Demented Rabbits links to point at its new home at dementedrabbits.net.- Rearranged slightly, added the new General Game/Mod Design Articles category, with several new articles therein.

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You get a lot of traffic to them from here? I wouldn't have thought we had that high an exposure front here.Changing URLs is a beast though. I've been through it enough with my stuff that I'll fight like hell to keep ahold of the iguanadons.net domain if nothing else.

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Here and Google are my single biggest referral sources, interestingly. Or were, until the site move. My Analytics data took a nosedive when I moved - I don't think Google's caught up with the death of the old site yet, so none of the tutorials are getting linked, and they're my biggest traffic source.

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Ah. Well hopefully that's all getting sorted out. I bet the domain change here didn't help much either since my blog was about the only thing pointing this way. I really hate site moves and I hate domain changes even more, but in the end it seems to have worked out.

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Speaking of tutorials, it'd be great if someone pulled together a quick overview of how to create new worldspaces. That along with the dungeon design would be awesome.

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This is the worldspace tutorial I used for mine. AFK_Weye's worldspaces are actually injected into oblivion.esm through some process and for some reason I don't altogether remember at this point in time, possibly to fix an old bug of some sort.I do need to do that second dungeon design tutorial, don't I.
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Injecting the worldspace is Gecko's "move worldspaces" function. Only necessary if you need working LOD in a new worldspace. Which you did on the island.Also I guess I need to do the followup tutorial to my patch making tutorial that explains how to deal with persistent refs at some point.

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That's weird. I swear I replied to this already. I wonder if I forgot to actually hit the Reply button, heh.@Dwip; That's what I'm using, but it's pretty sparse on explanation in places, especially the heightmap editing. I suppose I should just jump into the CS and try it. Also yes, you should continue writing the dungeon tutorial.

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And did for the tomb worldspace, originally, for what it's worth.Depending on the size of your worldspace, I found the heightmap thing to be more trouble than it was really worth. There are heightmap tutorials out there, but unless you're creating a ton of land, it's easier to just do it by hand.For values of easier, anyway. Landscape editing sucks the good suck.

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The heightmap also has some nasty bugs that can cause chunks of your landscape to vanish. Anything less than one quad in size is probably best raised through the landscape editor with a huge edit radius and the flattening tool.

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What about the next step about "painting" the land mass in the actual heightmap editor? What's that about? It made my land disappear!

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That would be the aforementioned heightmap editor that's full of bugs and shouldn't be used.You should be using the landscape editor, with your area visible in the render window instead.

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This, yes.The technique for that, by the by, or at least the one I use, runs like this:- make sure you have a good-sized edit radius, and raise some land just above water.- Change to flatten mode, click down on the stuff you raised, and create your landmass.- Use a smaller edit radius brush, and go through and make contours, sort of like a topographical map. Do one level, flatten fill the whole thing, do the next level, repeat until all your mountains and hills are done. Tedious but works well enough. Smaller elevation changes work better than larger ones. About human height is pretty good.- Change to soften mode, make sure you've got a small edit radius, and go through and smooth out the contours. Be gentle here, because it's easy to fuck it up really bad.- Go through and texture.I seem to recall from the tomb worldspace debacle that there's the possibility of having all your worldspace heightmap data wiped on load. If I remember rightly, this is what the Gecko worldspaces thing is all about preventing, but I did the work for that particular thing three years ago and don't really remember. Were it me, I'd raise some land, save, then reload and make sure it worked before putting three hours into it.Samson's done worldspaces more recently than I have, and may know more.

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Samson's done worldspaces more recently than I have, and may know more.
Except the one in Faregyl was hackishly copied from existing landform data using tes4edit :PFor that matter, so was the one in the Oblivion realm in Feldscar. Yep, I cheated the system.The principles are the same though - the smoothing tool is your friend, but can easily turn on you if you're not careful.
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Yeah, landscaping I don't have a problem with. Right now my issue is the render window not co-operating as I pan around and jumping all over the place.

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