Questions about Cell and Worldspace editing

[Blaze69]

As the title says, I've got some questions about working with cells and worldspaces in the CK and whether some things are possible and I'd rather have them answered before wasting time brawling with that broken mess of a so-called program in case it turns out what I want to do isn't feasible.

 

I've been looking into the Japan Home mod, and I think it would make for a great scenario for some character photoshoots I want to make (as well as potentially using its resources in one of my mods sometime in the future). Problem is, the home is placed in the main Tamriel worldspace, a bit downstream from Riverwood, and all of the buildings have "exterior interiors" (i.e. they have no load doors and the interiors are actually placed in the worldspace). Since the exterior placement of the interior means there are a lot of objects in that area, my FPS tank pretty damn hard (from 60 to 20-30) when I'm in the area, sometimes even going so far as to cause CTDs.

 

Since I don't intend to use the home for gameplay for now but rather as a prop location for screenshots, I thought I could replicate the home layout in a separate and much smaller cell and/or worldspace to reduce the amount of stuff to render around the home and hopefully make it playable. But placing all the items again by hand to replicate the original layout would take ages and be tedious as hell.

 

So, my question is: is it possible to copy several objects (statics, items, etc.) from one cell to another while keeping their relative placement intact? Basically, select each building and all the objects inside and paste them on a different cell/worldspace while keeping the interior layout? Or alternatively, is it possible to take specific cells from a worldspace and paste them on a separate (and smaller) worldspace? If I could copy the Tamriel cells that contain the home and paste them in a smaller worldspace with nothing else on it, performance could improve as well.

 

Any other suggestions on how to achieve what I'm after will also be welcome.

 

Thanks in advance.

[MadMansGun]

1 hour ago, Blaze69 said:

So, my question is: is it possible to copy several objects (statics, items, etc.) from one cell to another while keeping their relative placement intact?

yes, i did something like that when i edited tojo's dragons to add paintings to the HearthFires homes, i used TES5Edit to copy the objects and then changed what cells they where in.

 

the 3 HF homes all used the same xyz data (proving that they are all just copies of the same cell) so in my case it worked out well for me.

[Blaze69]

46 minutes ago, MadMansGun said:

yes, i did something like that when i edited tojo's dragons to add paintings to the HearthFires homes, i used TES5Edit to copy the objects and then changed what cells they where in.

 

the 3 HF homes all used the same xyz data (proving that they are all just copies of the same cell) so in my case it worked out well for me.

Manually duplicating each and every single object and changing their parent cell would be almost as tedious as simply recreating the home from scratch, so I think that's a no-go. Maybe I could try using the "Batch Change Referencing Records" tool to change the cell record in all of them at once, but I don't know if it works with cells and objects.

 

Guess I'll have to look into it. Thanks for the info.

[MadMansGun]

12 hours ago, Blaze69 said:

Manually duplicating each and every single object and changing their parent cell would be almost as tedious as simply recreating the home from scratch

i found it more time consuming than tedious, but i guess it depends on personal work flow style.

[Alter Native]

18 hours ago, Blaze69 said:

So, my question is: is it possible to copy several objects (statics, items, etc.) from one cell to another while keeping their relative placement intact? Basically, select each building and all the objects inside and paste them on a different cell/worldspace while keeping the interior layout? Or alternatively, is it possible to take specific cells from a worldspace and paste them on a separate (and smaller) worldspace? If I could copy the Tamriel cells that contain the home and paste them in a smaller worldspace with nothing else on it, performance could improve as well.

Yes that can be done without problems with the Creation Kit. Basically just load the Worldspace in the CK, select all objects in the CK and copy them with strg+c and past them in a newly created interior cell. Their relative placement is also copied, it's doable in a minute or so.

 

What is not copied is the underlying land, meaning the dirt/ground etc. that the objects are placed upon. If you're only interested in the interior parts this isn't a problem. If you're interested in the exterior parts with some landscape than this is a major problem, in this case it'll be better to just take the 20-30 FPS and to the screenshoting in the original location.

The navmesh (a map that tells NPCs where they can walk and where not) is also not copied. So if you want to use followers or any NPCs you need to recreate the navmesh, which is not terribly complicated. 

The mod also has some actual windows with transparent glass. Since there won't be a landscape anymore you either have to place some mountains/trees on the outside to recreate the illusion of a landscape or replace the glass with something non transparent like in most vanilla locations.

 

You also have to change/recreate the lightning as the lightning from the worldspace is gone. This means placing a couple of lights that recreate the exterior lightning (e.g. sun light etc.) and setting the overhaul lightning of the interior cell.

 

If you have some experience and know what you're doing all of this is not a terrible amount of work, but if all you're interested in are a couple of quick screenshots it might be better to just take the 30 fps and call it a day. 

 

I constantly do stuff like this for my skyrim stories/ screenshots as it gives you perfect control over the whole scene and location and I find it really fun to do sth. like this, but it might be a bit messy and annoying if you've never done it before and don't know how everything works. 

 

[Blaze69]

5 hours ago, Alter Native said:

[...]

It's not only the sudden FPS drop that I have a problem with (it also only seems to happen when looking in a specific direction, so I don't know if it just happens to have too many objects rendered when looking that way or there is some specific object/group causing the slowdown), the lighting is also weird. The torches and candles don't seem to actually have a light emitter attached so all the light comes from the ambient lighting and it looks bad. Placing it in an interior cell (or an exterior/worldspace cell with less stuff around) would still mean I would have to manually place said light emitters myself, but at least that could be done.

 

I'm starting to think this would be too much work, so I'll probably forget about it. But the info will certainly come in handy for future reference about CK use and cell editing, so thanks you for that .