Toolset Tips

[indio]

Object Height Adjustment 1 - Shift + Mouse Wheel Up/Down
Object Height Adjustment 2 - Page Up/Down
Object Size Manipulation - Resizer Plugin (by Bool)
Improved Area Browsing - Sin Plugin
Improved Script/Object Browsing - PowerBar Plugin
GUI Management - 'Minimise' palette tabs
Palette Management - Learn the Classification tool
Water Management - Define some nice generic water, export it, then import on new megatiles
Walkmesh - Make all placeables but for the ones needed to be used environmental objects, and employ the walkmesh cuttter

There's more, but I need to be doing it to remember them. Will add as I go.

[indio]

Now it's been 8 months since I started toolsetting, and this one has remained a mystery to me. In truth, I'd barely noticed them, but then examining a screenshot I got curious about how an interior tile suddenly had a rounded curve.

So, I read the freakin manual.

Select a tile and hover it in place, then with Up/Down keys, cycle through variations of that tile.

[Grand Fromage]

Tired of laying down transition waypoints manually? I sure am, that's a pain in the ass.

But what I just discovered is that you don't need to. Connect your two ground transitions using the door type, and set the transitions themselves as the targets. It works just fine, and you don't have to futz around with waypoints at all.

[indio]

Some city baking tips for areas with lots of doors:

- Lay out all placeables
- Bake your area
- Duplicate your area
- Make invisible placeables in the original area and use your walkmesh cutter to get good outlines of all placeables
- Convert all your placeables to environmental objects
- As this will delete all your doors, open up the duplicate area, and (depending on the number of doors) select all doors
- Open their collective properties and lock Height and Position
- Copy and go back to your original area
- Paste
- Rebake

[Thangorn]

tips for getting neat walkmesh cuts -:

1. Hide your placeables while cutting walkmesh around enviro-objects
2. Show C3 collision data and make your walkmesh cutter trigger cuts following the bottommost plane of the C3 data. C3 even shows you where your doors are in buildings so you dont need to worry about taking a shot in the dark to cut around the base of a door in the side of a building properly.

[Thangorn]

further to my above tip..

For city walkmeshes -:
1. Place everything you want where you want it
2. Change your buildings to enviro-objects
3. Show c3 collision data
4. Hide enviro-objects. This will now give you an un-interrupted outline to follow to lay nice neat walkmesh. If you have curbs, you'll have to hide placeables aswell.
5. Cut with the walkmesh cutter along the bottom of each enviro-object model following the c3 data.

Sure beats messing around trying to judge the walkmesh from a placeable model.

Please note: a few placeable models like one of the inns and a couple of the temple models have no c3 or c2 data to work with, this is largely why you get odd geometry fade effects on these models. With these models, you still need to judge it or bake it as per indio's instructions above.

Surely some code ninja can script a plugin that will do the same thing automatically one of these days, the data is there for the plotting.

This may save you a bit of time Indy..

[indio]

Brilliant.

[indio]

This thread could move tot he new forum for sure.

[Grand Fromage]

Need a bottomless pit, or just a deep one? MotB added new flat textures: black, grey, and white, and when combined with fog you can make one that's nearly seamless.

Observe, an ice canyon:




Normally you would be able to just make out the bottom, and see a seam where the ground ends and the foggy netherworld off the area begins. But not after using the pure white to wash out the entire bottom.

[Demson]

To create the illusion of distance in an exterior area, there is an old theatre trick.

Scale (under object propertes) trees and distant objects to miniature sizes and put them far away towards the edge of the area.

Example

Placing decreasingly smaller identical at regular intervals will help allot.

You can also do this with texture patches, besides placeables.

Be careful with giving players different vantage points, since that can give away the illusion.

And of course, raise/lower terrain at the edges to create hills (not done very well in the example).

[Curmudgeon]

Toolset FAQs

Includes how to restore your Toolset to it's default condition - handy when you lose a tab, a menu gets scrambled, etc.

[Curmudgeon]

NWN2 File Formats:

NWN2 File Format Listing

Want to know what that file does? Here's a list.

[ElCadaver]

Everyone is probably aware of this, but I just discovered it, so I'll share for those who don't know.

Ever been caught wanting to add a texture to a tile, and the pallete is all full up ( 6 textures)?

Well, if you click on the small icon of a texture you don't mind losing in the pallete, and the scroll through the large texture icons to find a another texture that already exists in the list of 6 textures and double click it, it over writes the small texture icon you selected. Now deselect and reselect the tile, and you have a free texture slot! I hope that makes sense.

Great when you have made an oversight an not left a texture slot free for something important, which would neccessitate a redo of the texturing, and a lot more work.