Screenshots of Vvardenfell, scaled and texture converted to TES4: Oblivion.


This page contains some screenshots of the Vvardenfell Landmass and some earlier stages of development, which I scaled to double it's original size, and texture converted from TES3 to TES4 using TESAnnwyn for the TES4: Vvardenfell project. A download link to the heightmap is given further below.



A romantic sunset on the north side of Red Mountain region (older heightmap shot using a blanket grass texture)









A slightly closer view of Red Mountain. Far from home, a wandering Legionaire.









With placed content, scaled using my TES4Scale, the meshes were converted using Galadrielle's NIF convertor.
























A 1x scale landscape, converted to TES4 with full LOD.







































The Dark circular markings are the Daedric ruin that existed in Cell (0,0) in the original game.














The main run up to Dagoth Ur: The black patch is where Ghostgate should be.







































A Telvanni SharpShooter guards the mountain. His buddy has fallen to his death in down the slope (presumably he was standing on a Telvanni platform in the original game).

















































The City cantons of Vivec would be here.














Caldera: The dark markings hint at the layout of the old town.










































































Not nearly so romantic now it's been Vvardenfell textured ...




Ancient Lava flows, north of Red Mountain.




The Cavern of the Incarnate.














From the south-western tip of Vvardenfell




Dagoth Ur at the centre of Red Mountain.




Looking up-river in the direction of Balmora




The CS generates a buggy mesh (non-existent islands in the river in Balmora), but you can get the idea.



















Yummy water in TES4.









Old Reddy, in mist ...




Hey, looks magnificant in pink!









A typical path in the Ascadian Isles.




We'll fix Bethesda's buggy LOD mesh generator with time.




Red Mountain: A monster looms over all Vvardenfell. Full Size Prints for just £29.99, no just kidding. ;)




Red Mountain, from the north of Vvardenfell.




Errr ... Red Mountain. ;)








2 methods were used (the second much better):

  • Method 1 involved writing a program to qudaruple the height gradient data in the original morrowind.esm, spreading it over 4 cell, doubling the height offset of each cell and X,Y,Z co-ordinates all objects, producing a fully playable 2x scale mod, but with unpleasant terracing effects along the North-South slopes that needed brushing.
  • Method 2 involved writing a heightmap importer/exporter (TESAnnwyn) which exported the Morrowind heightmap to a 16-bit RAW, doubling the height data in the process, then doubling the 2D image size (in both dimensions) in Adobe Photoshop and re-importing the landmass using TESAnnwyn.

    TESAnnwyn was also used to export the vertex colour map and texture placement maps from the original landmass. Both have been scaled and the same texture conversion process that TESPort uses has been added to TESAnnwyn to convert the scaled placement map on to the new TES4 landscape, so it now comes ready textured with Oblivion's textures and the scaled vertex colour map. This landmass ESP can be downloaded for you to test for yourself in Oblivion: Vvardenfellx2-LW5.7z and the first version LOD files: Vvardenfellx2-LOD-Package.7z, though with a slightly buggy LOD mesh.


    Vvardenfell expanded by 2x2, as seen in the TES3 (MW) CS Region Editor.


    Topological size comparison. Bottom left is from the eastern portion of Bethesda's official Tamriel map. Bethesda's Cyrodiil (the playable landscape from Oblivion) is above it and Vvardenfell (the landscape from Morrowind) a bit north-east. Bethesda have broken the scale when they released Oblivion. To the bottom-right is the entire landscape from Oblivion (including the unplayable parts of Tamriel). The top right is the 2x Vvardenfell which is the subject of the Silgrad Tower project.


    Balmora (2x2) MW Method 1 (ribbed): Looking North-west. Enough space for a small town now.


    The heightmap scaling method removed the ribbed effect almost completely. On the right: Yup, Bethesda put a croc in the middle of Balmora's river!


    A Dwemer Ruin in TES3 (Method 1): This showed the scaling band effect on north-south slopes. Still the detail on that Dwemer building looks great for Morrowind - purely down to the DirectX9 rendering by Timeslip's MGE mod.


    Dagoth Ur (2x2) MW Method 1: Compare the Ninja Monkey on the right to scale. Shame about the zig-zags.


    Seyda Neen (2x) MW Method 1: You can see the auomtatically expanded out blue invisible barrier blocks around the ship illustrate what the original ship scale would have been to the enlarged landmass.


    Dagoth Ur (2x) OB: The enlarged Red Mountain is big enough to swallow an Imperial palace tower at its centre. This was from the first TESAnnwyn output, non textured (and no LOD generated).


    On the left: Dagoth Ur (centre of Red Mountain) with Method 1: The first method would have needed a lot of quick soft-brushing everywhere to solve the terraced zig-zags and fairly regular cell joins problems. My horse (top right) just died in mid stride (it didn't even make a sound), yet it's still standing!
    On the right: Original scale Dagoth Ur (directly converted to TES IV with TESPor). 8 times less volume, still pretty big, but not really awe inspiring.




    My old mod automatically scaled up using my (unreleased) TES3 scaler program: These are the lower slopes of Ynys Mon Iron Age Hillfort, looking really imposing in 2x2. The top right is actually to the first major plateau, the hill (now mountain) goes even higher to the core of the settlement. The slope faces east so doesn't show the ribbed effect of north-south slopes (data that needs interpolating to solve this problem).