Besides the fact, that I - once again - got side tracked for a few month, I kept on working on the set during the year. I did a lot of work on wall and fence crossers and some fixes here and there. I forgot to do a post on them… Sorry! Well, here is one on the Meggins group:
As written in the “Raw findings”-post, this group (and also Trough and the mill) was part of the sources, Bannor was able to find back in 2014. The scene dates back to May/June 2005.
Again, here screens of the original stage:
The scene didn’t have a walkmesh. There were no textures with this scene, but at least it had some texture references, so some could be recovered from the stock DLA-textures of the Solace tileset. But still, some textures are lost: We know, that the walls are supposed to be “old_wood02”, but what it looks like and if the planks are orientated vertically or horizontally is (still) a riddle.
The roof, the porch and the floor boards were one object. So one could assume, that these had a (different = old_wood3) wooden plank texture, too. That object group didn’t have any UVW-coordinates, which made any sense.
I was able to establish contact to Steel_Wind and ThriKreen, but they had no real memories of these groups. So I had to find alternative wood textures. I applied wood textures found within the NWN1-sources to stay true to NWN1. As written: how they were aligned, is unknown to me.
When I started working with this group, the first thing, that irritated me, was the little tree right in the middle of the porch going through the roof. The objects of this scene needed a lot of Reset Xforms and some pieces kept on exploding on me (it was even worse with the Miller-scene, but that will be another post), so I decided, that this placement was not the final position and I moved it to the back of the house.
So, here is a screen of my first IG-test, mainly to check out textures:
The tree is moved to the back. I picked some NWN1 wood textures to see the outcome. Sadly. the fence texture is also lost, so I created a temporary dummy texture for it. I also decided to separate the roof from the porch object and test- wise applied a thatch texture, which I found in a Que-Shu-folder.
As you can see, Meggins was also missing a doorway and windows. So I kept on goofing around: I ported over the windows of the Mill group, since I assumed, that they are from the same source/creator. They had no textures, so I applied the DLA-textures for the frame. I also took the freedom to decide, that a chimney is needed. Since it’s a kind of small hut, I ported over the external chimney of the Smithy group, adjusted shape and size and placed it on the back.
In the following screen, I also replaced the fence and the roof texture (roof is now the standard DLA-roof texture of the tree houses):
If you take a close look, you can see, that the distance between the fence poles differs a lot and thus the fence texture doesn’t’ fit nicely in some places. Well, I could adjust the UVWs, but that would mean, that the fence is stretched or squeezed in some places.
So, I created single fence pickets and placed them in between the poles:
I looked at a lot of real hut pictures and decided for the layout you see above: Walls are horizontally and the gables vertically aligned.
As to the fence pickets: That looks quiet nice IMO, BUT in 1.69 (the set will be made for 1.69), the engine is not capable to create all the shadows of al l those pickets and event tends to crash (it does work in EE…)! So, this is an issue, which needs to be worked on, but I continues with other things on this group.
Here is a screen, where you can see an added lamp and dirt way leading through the gates toward the house:
I also exchanged the smoke emitter. The one of the screens above is from the Smithy group and it was just too thick IMO.
Now back to the little tree, which I moved to the back: I took another closer look at the original scene and now had the impression, that the tree was placed on the porch with purpose: The one side of the porch roof is dropped and the trunk nicely winds around the top beam of top porch roof, which isn’t damaged! I made up this story to justify my thoughts: Meggins being “weird” (https://dragonlance.fandom.com/wiki/Weird_Meggin) and probably also a bit sloppy, lets a tree sprout just grow, when it wormed its way through the porch - not caring too much for the hut/house...
So I decided to move the tree back to its original position! To give this position more sense, I also created a hole for the trunk:
You can also see in this screen, that I added a rope to the upper part of the fallen porch roof. I thought, it doesn’t make sense, if it’s a loose end hanging freely in the air.
Other doings:
Windows: As written, they’re a port from the Mill group. But walking with characters IG, I found, that they were a bit large. In fact, compared to the tree houses, the windows were very large! So I scaled them down a bit and they now look fine (IMO). And since it seems to be, that Meggins was planned to look a bit run down, I also ported the spider webs from the Smithy group onto some of the Windows.
This is the current stage:
I think, I’m going to rework the fence again - due to its shadow issue and the original (lost) fence texture was called “dls01_stk_rail” - stk as maybe in “stick”.
I’m also thinking of trying the wooden plank texture on the roof and porch roof.
ThriKreen wrote, that he thinks, that the walls are a bit to straight. Maybe I find the energy to change that a bit, though I don’t have a real idea as to which direction this should take.
Anyways, that is the current stage and I needed a break from Meggins and started to work on the even more rough Mill group. But that will be shown in a different progress post.