Terrain

Thanks to narc for the work put into this tutorial.

(creating the heightmap)

#1 create an image that is 512x512 pixels in greyscale mode. save as: windows bitmap image (.bmp extension), 8 bit. comment: this will be used as input to gensurf. for this example i will assume you saved it as tut_heightmap.bmp and it resides in C:\

when your done the picture will look something like this:

(creating the alphamap)

#1 using your same picture, resize it to 32x32 pixels, change it to color a format, now you will paint over it with the PENCIL TOOL.

paint the hill areas: yellow

paint the valley areas: blue

paint the rest: red

note: you may o­nLY use the same amount of colors as you have layers in your metashader. in this example we use 3 layers, therefore we will paint with 3 colors. also dont forget having three colors touching will result in a bad texture blend, dont allow that to happen.

(see picture: the red, yellow, and blue intersect and that is bad. adding more red fixes it!)

#2 we painted it in color with the pencil to make sure we had used o­nly 3 colors in the picture, now we will again paint it with the PENCIL to the correct values. note: if you use anything other than the pencil tool such as paintbrush or paintbucket you may be painting with unpure colors.

paint the yellow: white (RGB value 255)

paint the blue: black (RGB value 0)

paint the red: grey (RGB value 128)

when your done the picture will look something like this:

#3 save the picture in greyscale mode as a .PNG

note: for this example i will assume you saved it as tut_alphamap.png -- you MUST place this file in C:\SoF2SDK\base\textures\heightmaps and another copy of it in C:\Program Files\Soldier of Fortune II - Double Helix\base\textures\heightmaps

#4 open it in irfanview and press the "I" key to verify the picture is in the correct format. download irfanview free at http://www.irfanview.com/ you should see that there is o­nly 3 unique colors.

(creating the terrain entity)

#1 create a brush 8192x8192 units square, and 1024 units tall. (press "Q" to verify the dimensions) tip: 8192 is evenly divisible by 1024, always make terrain size divisible by 1024

#2 turn o­n View>Show>Show Blocks -- this shows the cutting planes, you want to align the brush edges along those lines. tip: since our brush is divisible by 1024 it fits perfectly within the cutting planes. this will prevent it from being split needlessly and will lower r_speed.

#3 choose Plugins>Gensurf>Ground Surface -- now set all of these in the popup window and hit OK

(general tab)

game: quake 3 arena

waveform: from bitmap

orientation: ground surface

roughness: 0

random seed: 1

(extents tab)

divisions X: 8

divisions Y: 8

decimate: 0

use bezier patches?: NO

(bitmap tab)

filename: C:\tut_heightmap.bmp (select your file with the browse button)

map color 0 to: 0

map color 255 to: 255

note: remapping the color values will affect terrain size but may cause errors, leave them at 0 and 255 there is a better way to do it.

(texture tab)

surface: tools/_terrain

other: tools/_caulk

steep: (leave it blank)

steep angle: 60

offset h: 0

offset v: 0

scale h: 1

use pk3 file?: NO

in the gensurf plugin click OK

#4 gensurf should have made the terrain a func_group for you, that is what we want. now add these keys/values to it:

terrain: 1

alphamap: textures/heightmaps/tut_alphamap

shader: metashader/kam4

layers: 3

#5 select the terrain, choose Selection>Scale... -- in the popup box choose these values and click OK

X: 1

Y: 1

Z: 4

#6 you will now need to position the bottom of the terrain so that it lies perfectly along a cutting plane of the grid. now build a floor textured in tools/caulk to put under it. fully enclose your terrain by building walls and cieling from any sky shader texture you like -- make sure the sky texture you choose has a white border indicating that it is a SHADER. put a clip brush over the areas that you want no o­ne to go, such as the map edge hilltops. add an info_player_start or info_player_deathmatch.

#6.5 you can add these keys to the worldspawn to optimise the compile time for testing!!! terrain maps take a long time.

_sun_light: 600 (a method of lighting the map, usually the sky shader controls the lighting. i believe this method compiles quicker at a slight reduced quality?)

_sun_angle: 75 -30 (the angle of the light)

grid: 256 256 256 (this will increase the lightgrid making compile time faster at a reduced image quality, you can also increase the values if you recieve a light grid array size error, it may happen if you make a really big map, normally you want to not ever use this for a final version unless entirely necessary)

distancecull: 2048 (this will reduce r_speed o­n larger maps by removing the polygons beyond the number of units you specify, it may sometimes cause flickering grey artifacts however)

fog: ar_fog_snowy_day (this will apply a fog effect to mask the distance culling. valid values are ar_fog_city, ar_fog_desert_day, ar_fog_desert_night, ar_fog_jungle_morning, ar_fog_jungle_day, ar_fog_jungle_night, ar_fog_grassyhills_day, ar_fog_grassyhills_night, ar_fog_snowy_day, ar_fog_snowy_night. you may also create your own fog shader -- these are defined in C:\SoF2SDK\base\shaders\arioche.shader for your refrence.)

the error "WARNING: Couldn't find image for shader textures/metashader/filename_0" is OK. there you go, a small terrain map :) you can make larger o­nes by using a larger brush than 8192x8192. also you can make them less blocky by increasing the X&Y divisions under the extents tab in the gensurf plugin.

for more info, and info o­n creating metashaders please refer to:

section 2.3 of sof2_terrain.doc

the Q3A terrain manual http://qeradiant.com/manual/

the file C:\SoF2SDK\base\shaders\metashader.shader