Welcome back! Yesterday we toured the modded area and identified a number of items that we need to address in order to properly integrate the mod. Today's we're going to focus on the two "big rocks" - the conflicted buildings used by Books of Skyrim and Imperial Physician. In today's blog we'll look at the physician first, relocating the entry to his interior so it's not conflicted anymore. We'll also start working on the bookstore, though that will spill over into tomorrow because of time constraints.

 

Now, let's revisit Solitude and take a look at the problems that each of these buildings pose for us. 

 

 

One thing we need to acknowledge first is that a potential solution is to just move the door slightly to the right. We shouldn't dismiss this out of hand, though doing so will require additional adjustments to the Frostbite Clan stall and to the wine stall. I didn't notice it yesterday, maybe due to bad lighting, but you can see here that the wine merchant's stall has become interposed with the Frostbite Clan stall. We will need to reposition one or both to address this. 

 

For now, though, let's look at our options for this door. To start, we need to understand the extent of the geometry, so let's disable all these stalls so we can see an unobstructed view of the door.

 

 

So what we're looking at in terms of modded geometry are:

 

• The projecting wooden roof, which is approximately twice as wide as the door. The supporting pillars are all the way at the front, but the roof covers the full length. The height of the roof rises up to roughly window height on the second storey. 
• There are some farming related objects on a freestanding table off to the side. These can be pretty easily relocated.
• There is a significant amount of decorative foliage that may need to be adjusted or reconfigured. 
• There's a window that we can probably just disable, depending on where we put this door.

 

Now let's look at our options for relocating this. My inclination is to put this in the market district or the gate district, though conceivably something like this could fit in with the residential district as well. Groot's mod adds a number of unconnected doors, any of which we could use - as long as the decorative pieces fit. For technical reasons, my preference would be to move this somewhere inside SolitudeWorld rather than using the external area. 

 

 

This door is an option. While it isn't as wide as the roof segment, it has a minimum of projecting geometry at the sides, allowing us to mount the roof without overlap. It also keeps it somewhat close to its original location.

 

 

Ones like this are unsuitable for what we want to do, since we need a flat second storey wall for the roof to lie flush against. The sloping roof will cause geometry gaps. 

 

 

Doors like this one aren't ideal either because they're likely to add a lot of extra workload in terms of extending the porch surface so the roof lines up right. However, otherwise the building's design is a pretty good match. Two of the other doors in the courtyard area looked more promising, but they kind of take us back to the logistical issues with moving geometry like this willy-nilly across worldspaces. It's certainly doable, but not as cleanly as I'd like.

 

So our "first line" of viable options are to either keep this one where it is now with minor adjustments and then move both of the south side market stalls, or to move this to the empty building just inside the newly-added street. I think we'll try moving it to the empty building and seeing how that works.

 

So to do this, the first thing we want to do is copy all the SolitudeWorld records from Imperial Physician over to a working file. We'll also add Groot's mod as a master file.

 

 

With that done, let's load up our working file in the CK.

 

 

Unfortunately, as you can see here, a single-width wall like this is too narrow, because it allows roof geometry to poke out the sides. So we'll need to fall back to "plan B" and keep the physican's entrance in place while relocating the market stalls. Let's reload our working file and try that approach instead (we'll save the market stalls for later though). The first step is going to be to hide all the geometry opposite the door so that if we go to a low camera angle we won't have lots of interposed statics and scenery.

 

 

Next, we'll do the 'gross edit' and just rotate and shift the entrance so it's centered on the building.

 

 

With that done, we'll zoom in and look for any misaligned, floating, or otherwise bad looking items. I shrunk the thistle plant and fine tuned the position of the bee hive shelf.

 

 

Finally, I adjusted the hanging vines to align with the new building face. Now let's see how it looks in-game.

 

 

 

It was hard to get an ideal camera angle on the door but it's looking a lot better than before. I'll probably want to go back and fine tune some aspects after I move the market stalls, but this takes care of the main issue with the door. 

 

Now let's look at the other real estate conflict: the bookstore. Here you can see how the bookstore and Groot's magic laboratory try to occupy the same space:

 

 

And this is the bookstore when it's not interposed with the lab:

 

 

Here's the far side of the bookstore, and the footprint of the lab by comparison:

 

 

I'd wondered if it was feasible to spin the bookstore and put it in the corner here, but as you can see in the CK, that spot gets used for civil war stuff:

 

 

There are a number of ways we can handle this, but I'm kind of leaning towards actually downsizing or moving the laboratory. This is something I need to do a little research in, so we'll continue this segment tomorrow after I can really analyze our options.