posted 05-22- 08:31 AM
OK, some ppl have expressed a wish to know more about this most tedious of things, so I posted it up in General, and thought I'd copy it to here.. these are the basic "first steps" that will get even my kid sister going lolOK First off, you obviously need OPS and a 3D prog, I use Max r2, then you need Max2Obj and also a good idea to get the Jonny Ow plugin aswell. Also, you will need Parfile tools, you will need to extract the par files so that you have all the terrain textures in a folder. When you have done this, use Ifranview to batch convert the Rhineland tifs to a different tif format.
OK, most ppl think that a terrain is so big it's too hard to work on, not quiet true, lets take something simple.... say.. possible my next project "on the side", a fantasy terrain derived from Rhinland, we want large mountains and canyons for some good fun.
Well, to startwiht, load up OPS, and open the Rhineland.sm file. We don't want al those towns in there and other stuff now, cause the terrain is going to be changed so much, so just delete them out of the sm, this leaves ou with only the airfields, which we'll keep.
Right, not for the shaping of the terrain.. you already know that terrain tiles run from 0 to 399 (although there cna be alot of tiles with the same name.. you 'll see this in OPS), so we need to export each tile that we wnat to alter as an object, if there are 4 tiles called terrain0 you only need one of them, same goes for the rest.
now you've exported them all, open up Max or whatever, and import it. Point 1 DO NOT move its postion at all!! If you do, it will not go back exactly in the same position on the terrain, and you'll get blue lines that you can fall through all over the place.
All we do is select sub-object Vertices, select the points you want to move, and from the side or front view, pull them up to where you want them, using the perspective view to see how it's looking. When you have the shape you want, colapse the stack, and map the tile with the corresponding tif that you extracted using parfile tools, then export it.
Cool, thats all yuo need to know to get to about where I am! LOL once you have done all the tiles this way, you open the terrain in OPS, and import each tile that you just worked on to replace the one in the SM file, save it and try the terrain out to see how it looks..
Problems you might have is matching tile edges be very very careful with theseusing the grid lines in Max, make sure you know exactly how high you have altered a tile edge and on which side you did it, so that when you work on the tile that will be on that edge, you will be able to match it up properly. All Tile alignment must be done in Max/AC3D because fine adjustment in OPS will be almost impossible.
These are the basics to editing terrain models, there's other little tips and things but this will get you going, and you'll learn more from this once you start working on it.
I would be more than glad to help someone working on terrain.
|Points that I wuold need help on... How the hell do you get the angles smoothly curved!!??
How do I place an airstrip where I want it!!??
Why is it so damn hard to alter material values!!??
I'd like to have a team working on terrain, but I doubt many ppl find this ""exciting" enough to be a part of, so I guess me and Diego will cary on trying to work through this as best we can, He's a great artist, and I have an idea of what I'm doing.. but to be very honest, thats all I have, and yet we have a new terrain... So.. anyone can do it. And I need help!.. LOL (I do!)
Hope this has helped some anyway, I posted in General so that everyone gets a look at it, maybe we'll get a team together after all huh?
~Nat~
If there's any interest in setting up a team to get serious terrains done in shorter time, mail me or find someway to let me know.
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JV44 "Naturlich"
If you can't out run em.. <B>OUT GUN EM!</B>
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posted 05-22- 08:31 AM
