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THE ELDER SCROLLS V: SKYRIM NEW LANDS MOD TUTORIAL The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim New Lands Mod Tutorial 0 REVISION HISTORY Version: Date: Description: 1.0 19/01/2022 Initial release. SUPPORT If you found this document useful, you can follow me on Reddit and YouTube for updates. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim New Lands Mod Tutorial 1 PREFACE Initially I wrote up this guide for personal use because I’m an idiot and kept forgetting how to do specific things. Lately I’ve been adding to it to cover as many topics as possible relevant to making a typical new lands mod for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. I’m Jonx0r and I made the Wyrmstooth mod which is available for download on Nexusmods, Steam, and Bethesda.net. As of this writing I’d estimate that I’ve spent roughly 2000 hours working on the mod since May 2012. This tutorial outlines the way I approached making a new lands mod, which, as a disclaimer, may not necessarily be the best way to do it anymore. When I started modding in 2012 there wasn’t much out there to follow in terms of guides and tutorials, so a lot of this was learned through trial and error. Mostly error. I’m far from being some sort of mod expert and this document is a work-in-progress so if you spot any mistakes, know a better way to do something, or would like me to cover additional topics please let me know. I’ve tried to make the instructions as easy and as straightforward to follow as I could, but let me know if I need to reword or clarify anything. Maybe at some later stage I’ll consider recording this tutorial as a series of YouTube videos but right now I’d just like to make sure I have as many relevant topics written down first. Anyway, with that said, I hope someone finds this at least remotely useful. - Jonx0r The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim New Lands Mod Tutorial 2 CONTENTS Preface .......................................................................................................................................................... 2 Introduction ................................................................................................................................................. 8 Before we begin ........................................................................................................................................... 9 Chapter 1: World space ......................................................................................................................... 13 Creating a new world space ..................................................................................................................... 14 Creating a height-map using World Machine ....................................................................................... 19 Importing a height-map with TESAnnwyn .......................................................................................... 45 Sculpting a landscape with the landscape edit tool .............................................................................. 51 Adding landscape textures ....................................................................................................................... 63 Creating tileable landscape textures ........................................................................................................ 74 Adding lakes and rivers .......................................................................................................................... 101 Setting up water flow and currents ....................................................................................................... 112 Adding regions ........................................................................................................................................ 128 Region generated textures and objects ................................................................................................ 142 Setting up locations ................................................................................................................................. 183 Setting up encounter zones ................................................................................................................... 192 Adding navmesh ..................................................................................................................................... 196 Adding occlusion geometry ................................................................................................................... 218 Cluttering a world space ......................................................................................................................... 225 Chapter 2: Markers .............................................................................................................................. 244 Adding idle markers ................................................................................................................................ 245 Creating a custom idle marker .............................................................................................................. 262 Adding map markers .............................................................................................................................. 266 Adding common radiant markers ......................................................................................................... 272 Chapter 3: Sounds and music ........................................................................................................... 289 Adding sounds ......................................................................................................................................... 290 Adding acoustic spaces .......................................................................................................................... 315 Adding music ........................................................................................................................................... 322 The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim New Lands Mod Tutorial 3 Chapter 4: NPCs ................................................................................................................................... 347 Creating an NPC ..................................................................................................................................... 348 Adding and creating AI packages ......................................................................................................... 376 Making a merchant ................................................................................................................................. 392 Making an innkeeper .............................................................................................................................. 406 Making a bard .......................................................................................................................................... 414 Making a follower ................................................................................................................................... 429 Setting up a home owner ....................................................................................................................... 441 Setting up a boss and making a location clearable ............................................................................. 465 Adding ambient creatures ...................................................................................................................... 473 Chapter 5: Random encounters ....................................................................................................... 480 Adding random encounter triggers ...................................................................................................... 481 Creating our own list of random encounters in the story manager ................................................. 489 Creating new random encounters ......................................................................................................... 511 Chapter 6: Quests, dialogue and voice acting ............................................................................. 535 The basics of setting up quests ............................................................................................................. 536 Adding dialogue to a quest .................................................................................................................... 563 Chaining dialogue topics together ........................................................................................................ 588 Blocking branches ................................................................................................................................... 606 Generating an .SEQ file ......................................................................................................................... 615 Adding voice acting and lip synching .................................................................................................. 619 Adding hello, combat, crime and other incidental dialogue ............................................................. 635 Adding scenes .......................................................................................................................................... 677 Using talking activators .......................................................................................................................... 724 Creating an MCM ................................................................................................................................... 736 Chapter 7: Building LOD and generating files ........................................................................... 764 Building land LOD using Oscape ........................................................................................................ 765 Building object LOD using xEdit......................................................................................................... 777 Building tree LOD using xEdit ............................................................................................................. 783 Final adjustments to world space settings ........................................................................................... 790 Generating max height data .................................................................................................................. 817 Generating TVDT occlusion ................................................................................................................ 820 Generating grass .gid files ...................................................................................................................... 825 The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim New Lands Mod Tutorial 4 Chapter 8: Asset pipeline ................................................................................................................... 827 Importing assets from Skyrim in 3ds Max .......................................................................................... 828 Exporting assets from SpeedTree to 3ds Max .................................................................................... 832 Fixing transparency in NifSkope .......................................................................................................... 844 Exporting assets from Zbrush to Substance Painter to 3ds Max .................................................... 852 Exporting assets from 3ds Max to Skyrim .......................................................................................... 911 Chapter 9: Motion-capture animation ........................................................................................... 928 Setting up the character skeleton in 3ds Max ..................................................................................... 929 Constraining the skeleton to a biped and importing mocap data .................................................... 941 Exporting animation from 3ds Max with Havok Content Tools .................................................... 967 Chapter 10: Speech synthesis ............................................................................................................ 992 Introduction to speech synthesis .......................................................................................................... 993 Preparing a dataset using voice acting from The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim ..................................... 996 Mounting your Google Drive storage in Google Colab ................................................................. 1021 Training a Tacotron model in Google Colab ................................................................................... 1028 Training a WaveGlow model in Google Colab ................................................................................ 1033 Checking progress in Tensorboard .................................................................................................... 1040 Synthesizing audio from the models we’ve trained .......................................................................... 1044 Improving audio quality in Audacity .................................................................................................. 1050 A couple tips and tricks ........................................................................................................................ 1056 Chapter 11: Other tasks ..................................................................................................................... 1058 Unpacking the BSA archives ............................................................................................................... 1059 Adding additional master files ............................................................................................................. 1062 Removing accidental edits ................................................................................................................... 1065 Adding texture paths to 3ds Max ....................................................................................................... 1069 Adding texture paths to NifSkope ..................................................................................................... 1074 Optimizing interior cells with roombounds ...................................................................................... 1082 Version control and merging changes ............................................................................................... 1095 Cleaning your mod in xEdit ................................................................................................................ 1129 Checking for errors in xEdit ............................................................................................................... 1131 ESM-ifying your mod in xEdit ........................................................................................................... 1134 Generating papyrus debugging trace .................................................................................................. 1137 Creating a .bik video file ...................................................................................................................... 1140 The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim New Lands Mod Tutorial 5 Chapter 12: Packaging the mod for release ................................................................................ 1146 Porting your mod to Skyrim Special Edition .................................................................................... 1147 Packaging your mod for Legendary Edition ..................................................................................... 1153 Packaging your mod for Special Edition ........................................................................................... 1160 Packaging your mod for Nintendo Switch ........................................................................................ 1170 Index ....................................................................................................................................................... 1174 The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim New Lands Mod Tutorial 6 The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim New Lands Mod Tutorial 7 Introduction INTRODUCTION In this tutorial I’ll be covering the general process of creating a new lands mod using the Creation Kit and various other tools. I’ll be using the Creation Kit for the Legendary Edition of Skyrim which is available from Steam, but you can follow along with the Creation Kit for Special Edition as well. You might also find some of the information or workflows useful for other Creation Engine games such as Fallout 4. Figure 1 - A custom world space loaded in the Creation Kit. While there are a lot of topics to cover in this guide, it’s far from being an exhaustive look at all facets of modding. For the sake of brevity I’m only going to be covering the topics relevant to the development of a new lands mod and environment art. I’ll be referring to Wyrmstooth in numerous examples to show practical implementations of what I’m talking about. This tutorial assumes you have the Creation Kit already installed and are somewhat familiar with using it. There are also certain actions that may cause the Creation Kit to crash and I’ve tried my best to highlight the cases where that might occur. Alright, let’s get started. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim New Lands Mod Tutorial 8 Before we begin BEFORE WE BEGIN Firstly, if you plan on working with a group of developers, see the section Version Control and Merging Changes for steps on setting up version control. This might seem a bit obvious but I figure I should mention it anyway. Before making a start on your mod, I’d recommend setting up a project folder. This should include a copy of your mod’s assets from your Skyrim\Data or Skyrim Special Edition\Data folder and only the assets related to your mod. As you work on your mod and generate new files, be sure to copy them to your project folder. This will come in handy later on when you’re ready to package your mod for release. Figure 2 - Project files. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim New Lands Mod Tutorial 9