posted 01-01- 10:48 AM               

Thanks Guys

~Nat~

Terrain Building using 3DS Max
Basic Level (adavanced to be written up at a later date)

Given that you have a basic map of your terrain to scale (40x40 miles), better in greyscale, only needs be 512x512 for now. (this will be a displacement map.. black for low, white for high)
set your units in Max to 1FL = 1 mile
Make a patch Grid (using Quad) to the size of 40.01x40.01FL set the segs to 10x10
Convert it to an Editable Mesh
use the Displace modifier, and select the texture for your terrain for Map and Bitmap
set the strength to about 0.33 (play with this setting till your happy)Remember, you're terrain may look pretty flat in Max, but once in the game small bumps become rather large mountains.
OK, you're happy with the way it looks now, collapse everything you did.
You now have a single tile thats 40x40 miles in the shape of the terrain you want, now comes the fun part..
go into face select
select the bottom left corner square of 3x3 segments and detach them, (name it object00 for ease of use later when you’re importing these into OPS), then select the next set of 3x3 along, this will become object01 and so on working left to right, bottom to top.
after about an hour you have 0-399 (400) tiles. These now have to be centred on the X,Y axis NOT the Z axis (I had to use Max4 to do this, although I believe it can be done in Max3.1, Tailslide will hopefully modify a max script for me that will do this in Max3.1 and I’ll post it). OK, after that you now have a stack of 400 tiles in the center, these need to be mapped.
Select all the objects then go into Mesh select, select faces, and select them all from the top view, now map them as you would normaly using any 256x256 texture, and every tile in the stack will take on the texture co-ords for a 256x256 texture
Export them all as an Object, but DONT use Materials
Now in ops, open up a base terrain, I used Midway, and import each of your tiles into the corresponding tile in the terrain (remember they have mirror tiles around the edge, don't work on these)
You'll see now that the tile you import displays the texture of the tile you've replaced
Now all you need to do is create your full sized texture (5120x5120) dice it up, and set up the terrain as a stand alone instead of a replacement (small changes in the SM file, texture names, missioneditor.ppf etc)

That’s about it, you now have your terrain, there maybe some small adjustments needed to the position of some of the tiles so that you don’t have a gap around them, but this is a fairly simple matter of using the shift/cursor keys for accurate positioning of the tile.

Don't expect it to look perfect first time around, the tiles can be fidly in OPS.

For further information/tips contact me at Naturiich@aol.com

posted 01-01- 05:06 PM               

Thanks for posting this Nat, it sounds good to me, the only thing to add would be screen shots of the work in stages of progress- that would be sweeeeet!

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-Sv =FC=

WWI in SDOE!

posted 01-01- 07:32 PM               

The tiles line up in almost every case perfectly, one or 2 I've found have needed slight adjustment, but what I've also found is that if you make the terrain far to "extreme" in the differences between low points and high points then it's less likely that the tile will fit properly and will need more manual adjustment, this is because the tiles central point can be pushed to one side by a steep downward angle at the edge of the tile, that being said.. Stalingrad needs some alteration, because as I said in the tutorial, the terain looks pretty flat in Max, but in the game the hills and river banks are extremly steep and too high, this part is pretty much trial and error until you get used to it, which I'm still not.. lol, it's just to easy to misjudge elevations till you look at it in the game.

So, to summerise, yes you can make just as detailed terrain and even more detailed by this method, also you don't have to spend $10,000 on Multigen. To be honest SV, I don't see the difference between how Multigen models terrain and using displacemant maps, I really don't know how they were done to start with, but this way is sound and the more people that build them now, the more we'll learn, I already have ideas on a different way of adding water and land that will work very well with a bit of luck and alot of testing lol

Oh, I guess I should also say that you can ofcourse optimise the tiles, say use 20x20 segs, and once you have them chopped up, optimise them before stacking, but I don't like that approach, wasn't happy enough with the results.

Last thing.. yes, I was thinking of step by step pics to go with the tutorial, and headings describing whats going on, if you think that tutorial is sufficient to get a terrain built from it, then thats good enough for me SV. I really hope you can get this into AC3D format, I didn't know you could use dispersion maps in AC3D, but if you can sort it out SV, thats wicked

Please feel free to ask any Q's at all, it's easier for me to answer Q's then write everything up in one go.

~Nat~

posted 01-01- 09:38 PM               

If you redo it please add more detail. Like EXACTLY how you made stalingrad.

Maybe some pictures too.

Looks like I'll be reinstalling max.

posted 01-01- 10:57 PM               

Polytrans is pretty good in this way for converting .dem files but it's commercial software

TS

posted 01-02- 09:12 AM               

You can model the terrain like an aircraft, full 3D - no tiles. So you can have larger polys where you need less detail and more polys where you need the detail. Also, with non-square polys, you can get much higher detail with less polys. Then Creator dices this up only where needed, at the seams. The end result is a higher detail terrain with less polys.

The downside is that the modeling task will take longer and more creative energy. Also you need a mesh dicer. I think 3Dsmax has a "slice" command. Use this in a script 80 times to get the same effect (if that is possible, I know nothing about max scripts).

posted 01-02- 09:40 AM               

TS

posted 01-02- 09:56 AM               

The hardest part of this method is getting the elevations right, it's far to easy to have very steep slopes on river banks and hills, but that part is always going to be trial and error until it looks right, I think I'd have to say that if you get the shading right on your displacement map, it will save you alot of trouble in Max, I'm currently on the 11th complete rebuild of Stalingrad, that being said, it's been a learning curve that others after me wont need to go through to such an extent, because I'm always here for adivce and tips, but not only that, this is now making it much easier and quicker to build a new terrain, infact, a basic terrain is now much quicker to build that an aircraft, and if Tailgunner can get the placing of towns and airfields straightend out and a tutorial posted then whole thing can be done in probably half the time of an aircraft if not quicker.

posted 01-02- 11:34 AM               

Bryan was working on an app that converted DEM data into OpenPlane terrain, but he did not finish this project.

posted 01-02- 12:59 PM               

OK, I just sat down and made a base terrain tile set, this is a 40x40 mile terrain tile, split up and named into the 400 parts and the pivot points set to the center of the tiles. You can download this to work with and it'll save you sitting there breaking a tile up.

To use a displacement map on these 400 tiles, you need to select all the tiles, go into the modifiers, and selcet Displace just like in the tutorial above, you can then go through selecting the map to use etc and have a tinker with displacement mapping without all the hassle of making the tileset yourself. Once you have finished with the displacement you'll still have to center all the tiles on the X,Y axis, I don't know how to do this in Max3.1, or AC3D, so if anyone knows how then let me know, I had to use Max4 to center the tiles.

The Base Terrain is in 3DS format, so I believe you should be able to use it in AC3D aswell as Max.

Here's the link
http://members.nbci.com/naturlich/BaseTerrain.3DS

Have fun guys, and please let me know if you know how to centre the tiles on the X,Y axis with Max3.1

~Nat~

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7./JG3 "Naturlich"


"SDOE... What and where would you like to fly today?"
http://members.nbci.com/naturlich/index.htm </B>

posted 01-02- 08:49 PM               

I only have access to 3dsmax 3.1, should I bother trying this yet? I will use terraserver in a test to complete a full photo-real terrain using your process - but I need to know if this "centering" that you speak of can be done in 3dsmax 3.1--- anyone?

posted 01-03- 02:08 PM               

Remember.. flatter is better.. LOL, you'll see

posted 01-04- 04:27 PM               

I'll still be here when you have time to try it out, so soon as you're ready just let me know I'm just glad that others are interested in building terrains and that I can help to make things that much easier, really now the only tedious part is importing them into OPS. Thing is though, even without TG writing up a Tutorila for towns/airfields, you can still build a terrain to fly around in and add towns/airfields at a later date

Good luck SV

~Nat~