The land of Amblu Kai is loosely based off of Northern California. The heightmap itself is created from real-world terrain. If there is enough interest, I’ll put up a tutorial on how I imported a real-world landscape into Skyrim.
The new landscape is both similar to and different from vanilla Skyrim and will use a mix of vanilla and custom assets. First and foremost, I wanted a lighter pine needle texture to use as a base for much of the landscape. In Photoshop, I first opened the vanilla PineForest01 texture after unpacking the .bsa archive with BSAopt. I added a new layer, filled that with a pale tan color, and set that layer to Overlay, which gave me a nice, lighter pine needle texture. I then saved the new texture as a .dds file (requires the nVIDIA .dds plugin) saved with interpolated alpha into the Skyrim directory data/textures/landscape. Going into the Creation Kit, I added the new texture as a paintable ground texture by first creating a texture set, then a new landscape texture, called PineForest04. I added two grass objects to PineForest04, called RocksGrass and FieldGrass01. In the above screenshot, you can see the new texture with both the rocks and the green grass. I also created a second new texture, PineForest04NoGrass, without the rocks and grass assets for use in areas where I didn’t want grass and rocks. At this point, I’m pretty happy with the new texture.
The trees of Amblu Kai will reflect the tree species of the mountains of northeastern California. The main tree species will be: Ponderosa Pine (a long-needled pine found in lower elevations), incense cedar, white fir, red fir, white pine, whitebark pine, and mountain hemlock.
Creating these new tree species will involve both retexturing vanilla tree assets, retexturing custom trees from fellow modders on the Nexus, and altering existing models in Blender to create brand new trees.
Vanilla Skyrim is a bit limited in tree variety. From a bioloigcal standpoint, all vanilla “pine trees” appear to actually be the same species of fir. I want Forsaken to reflect the natural biodiversity of a real landscape and custom trees will help achieve that goal. First up is the red fir, the dominant tree species above 6,500 ft elevation:
Not bad, but not perfect. I took a custom tree model from GBK Green Trees mod and added a darker, slightly reddish bark texture and darker, bluish-tinged needle texture. I’ll need to redo the bark texture, but so far its looking good.
Ponderosa pines, being a long-needled pine, will require a brand new texture. GBk Green Trees mod contains a few excellent giant redwood/sequoia models which will stand in perfectly for my BOP (big ol’ Ponderosas). Mountain hemlocks, which often sport double crowns, missing branches and other unique characteristics, will require new models, as will whitebark pines. Whitebark pines will be found only at the highest elevations.
Forsaken: The Mountain of Fire 