THE BASICS
As with all creation engines, the basics is the first thing you have to master. In this case, the basics would be:
- Moving the camera
- Finding locations in the Render Window
- The top bar buttons
- The Object Window
Moving the camera is very simple, compared to the rest of the kit. You hold down the mouse wheel to to move around the render window. Hold shift to change the angle of the camera. Scroll the mouse wheel to zoom in or out.
Finding a location is very simple. Head into your Cell View box below the Render Window and double click the location you wish to visit. After maybe a minute or two (and some error messages of course- be sure to click Yes to all on them!), the location should load fully in the Window.
First thing you'll notice when you load up an interior or an exterior is that there are weird colored markings all over. Don't delete these! That could mess up your game completely. Instead, to block them from your view, hit 'M'!
Protip: When editing a location, do not delete anything in that area. Move it out of view or under the world, but don't delete it. Deleting objects could cause incompatibility with other mods that edit that location or that edit that object.
By now, you're probably wondering what all of the pictures at the top of the Creation Kit do. The first button, which is a picture of a file opening, is to load up Skyrim.esm and Update.esm (if you have Update.esm that is, if not, don't worry. Just load Skyrim.esm by itself.)
The second button is to save your work. This button will quickly become your favorite out of the list, as modding engines tend to crash constantly and delete all of your hard work.
The third is your preferences- or the settings. Not much to say about this one, tweak it as much as you like.
The fourth and fifth are undo and redo. Undo takes back the last action you did in the Kit, while redo does it again if you hit 'undo'.
The sixth button is used mostly when making interiors. You can't just slap them anywhere and expect it to work. This button turns the render window to Snap to Grid, which is pretty self explanatory.
The seventh and eighth buttons, I'm not entirely sure as to what those do. I've actually never used them before.
Again, see above with the ninth, tenth, and eleventh buttons. I haven't used those before.
The twelfth button, FX, shows you the animations of the different objects in your location.
The next three buttons are the last three I'm going to cover in this blog post, as the others are more for intermediate modders or those who have more experience. Toggle Light turns on/off the different light sources in a room. Toggle Sky, I'm guessing, turns off/on the natural light from the sky. Toggle Grass, of course, turns off/on the grass in your landscape.
The Object Window is where you create new objects/npcs/whatever it is you want to make, or you can edit existing ones. You can also drag/drop items from the Object Window into the Render Window to place it into the world.
And that's it for now, if there's anything else I need to quickly cover, please tell me down in the comments.
~Fire.
