Skyrim New Lands Mod Mega Tutorial

76.4 MB·English

by  Jonx0r

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

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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

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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.

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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.

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