Grebbeberg - WIP terrain

[DeadParrot 0]

I tried this one on OFP. With 50 meter cells. Your seems much more detailled. How did you get the data?

Got drawings of the railway bridge. The artillery, before retreating, fired the last shells at the explosive charges and they hit.

Good luck Dualjoe.

[DualJoe 10]

I tried this one on OFP. With 50 meter cells. Your seems much more detailed. How did you get the data?

I didn't get all the data, that' s why it's taking me so long, most of it is done by hand. Btw I'm using the river as sealevel and as you know most of the land is below the riversurface, which means height data becomes pretty much useless, except maybe as reference material.

Got drawings of the railway bridge. The artillery, before retreating, fired the last shells at the explosive charges and they hit.

Could use as much reference material as possible, can't seem to find much apart from the Grebbeberg website.

Still contemplating how far I'll go with the 1939 version of the terrain. The marsh area to the east of the hill used to be farmland at the time, but I kind of like the way it is now. I'm now reaching the detail level of ditches and such and I'm contemplating how much of the defensive positions from the time, I'll build into the ground-mesh, or to just leave it all for mission-makers (so they can experiment). I think I'll only do the primary positions along the vertical waterway and on the hill itself.

I've also started researching materials and textures in Arma2 and trying to figure out a nice workflow including image editors. I'm trying to decide between Blender, Vector-based (inkscape/Xara etc) or raster-editors (Gimp). The last one seems to be the preferred option, however the first two offer some unique possibilities (like arbitrarily changing texture resolution without loss of quality, or reusing assets without added cost of memory/storage). If I take the time relearning Blenders powerful node-system, I could paint colored masks directly onto the model and with some procedurals mixed in for good measure generate all the needed textures for Arma2 in the correct format.

Edited October 31, 2011 by DualJoe

[DualJoe 10]

Getting to the last stage of detailing the heightmap. Here's an impression of some of the more finished bits. Keep in mind I'm still using the place holder low res google-satelite image as texture (I did tinker with it a bit though).

Morning flight towards the rising sun:

Started the tedious and mammoth task of cutting out all the ditches in the farmlands and probably the main reason I won't be showing any progress for a long while.

Getting the sea and groundlevels just right was a long and arduous process. If you look closely in the screenshots above there are a couple of areas where the water shines through the land, but I think I've almost got it now.

I've tried changing the ocean color, following some posts I found on the net, but with no effect whatsoever. I've seen people do it which suggests it should be possible. I also noticed the talk about a surfwash-shader and wet shader in addition to the main watershader. Which brings me to my usual round of questions.

How do I change the seawater color just for my island? Is it possible to disable the wash shader, so I won't get the white lines anymore?

[mr.g-c 6]

Wow... good luck with it...

Is it going to be real 1:1 scale? If so, then you're the first one i know of who made this 1:1

[DualJoe 10]

Yeah it's 1:1, wouldn't know if I am the first one though. If you're not recreating a real life area, 1:1 scale is whatever you want it to be.

[DualJoe 10]

I've begun adjusting the present-day landscape to may 1940 and I'm almost to the level of detail where I should decide whether to dig the trenches into the ground or use objects to place the trenches on top of the landscape.

Here are some photographs from the time of the area I'm recreating.

http://storage.kennispuntmei1940.nl/images/greb/foto/normal/mb/mb_012.jpg

http://storage.kennispuntmei1940.nl/images/greb/foto/normal/sm/sm_2.jpg

The first one is one of the pointy defensive works at the base of the hill where all roads bottleneck.

The problem with trench objects is that I plan to recreate the defensive positions in depth. Which means multiple lines of defense spanning almost the entire map from north to south. Which would mean a mindnumbing amount of sandwall-objects. Personally I prefer to just cut all those defensive positions into the land. Not only is it a lot less work for me, but imho it just looks better, with the defensive positions blending/camouflaged into the terrain.

I can see one little niggle with this plan however and that's because I plan to release this map for public consumption. This also kind of suggests, that I should cater for the needs/desires of the mission-making public(/individuals). My terrain prepared for war will look a hell of lot different than a peacetime version of the same area. I welcome thoughts and suggestions from the community on this matter, before making a final decision.

To put it simply: Would mission-makers rather have a clean map, they can dress up themselves in it's entirety and if so, would it be infuriating if there are a number of already prepared positions all over the map on key positions?

[Rovka 14]

Hello Dual,

First things first: Great work on the map so far, and since I'm dutchie myself I look forward to it's release. As for your placement-question regarding those defence-works:

I say why not have both options available? Half or two times a quarter of carved-out defence-works, and another half or two times a quarter excisting out of normal non-carved terrain, having those latter locations up to the mission-makers taste to fill the gaps if they wish to do so as they see fit.

Now with those halves one can have a rather wide spanning section of forward-line and a second line if one wishes for. But with a quarter of that width here and there, you can place more such resistance-strongpoint locations around the map if you wish to do so.

And to my personal opinion, doing such that way it also will be easier on many people's rig I presume. But in the end, it's your call ofcourse, as you are the mapmaker on this one. :) Anyways yet again; Splendid project, I like it very much so far! Good luck!

Edited November 7, 2011 by Thani '82

[_William 0]

To put it simply: Would mission-makers rather have a clean map, they can dress up themselves in it's entirety and if so, would it be infuriating if there are a number of already prepared positions all over the map on key positions?

For your first map, I recommend doing one thing very well and have the map stand-out because of it's 1:1 mapping and historic context. Use the time you save by carving out trenches to iterate improvements.

Nothing is stopping you from redoing the map afterwards with objects.

IIRC, Old Bear also went back to [ADO] Brik to redo it as [ADO] Brik 2.

Wrt mission making: provided the map is "AI friendly", I'll cover it with automatic (single) player mission generation at PlannedAssault.

Looking forward to your further updates and results.

[DualJoe 10]

@_William: :eek:Woah! I just looked at the youtube video on your plannedassault-site with my mouth open in astonishment the entire time. Wish we had this when I was at the Royal Dutch Military Academy, maybe then we could actually try some of the practice plans we made. Hell maybe even experiment with different approaches and try new ideas. It makes the "simulation"-software we used look like even more of a joke.

Back on topic: I've tested the trenches and I think I'll dig them in the map. They are not as intrusive as I feared and still leave room for dressing up (if anything they offer more options). Graphic performance seems to be unaffected and it just gives the map that little bit extra. I'm already having a blast against the AI in the area.

Having AI function somewhat properly may very well be my number 1 priority on this map and is where I've spent most of the time till now.

Exporting and testing how the map works in game and then going back make changes and exporting again for testing. I waste even more time, because I can't work on this in Windows(eats up too much resources). I really, really wish arma2 and tools would work on Linux, wouldn't care if it was native, Wine or inside a virtualmachine, anything would be better than this.

Update:

Progress is very slow because of the minute detail and required precision and concentration (read Lots of human error). As I said before each time I scale up the level of detail the workload increases exponentially.

Apart from that, I'm actually pretty happy with the result sofar. I'm still pleasantly surprised when I see very familiar and realistic looking Dutch scenery ingame every time I test the map. No performance problems to speak of yet, locked at 60 fps with some AI-units fighting on the map with the same graphic-settings that'll drop below 40 fps on the first Chernarus benchmark. A buddy of mine tested it and reported the same thing.

EDIT:

From the trenches. Don't mind the grass, haven't started on the different materials and masks yet, because I need a 3d world first. As a test I placed some camouflage-nets and took a couple of screenshots from the hill looking down and then from the trenches looking back.

Edited November 8, 2011 by DualJoe

[DualJoe 10]

No new screenshots, but I have not abandoned it. I've been busy in real life and I'm really struggling with the config-files.

No matter what I try I can't figure out how to get arma2 to use my mountainless replacement horizon. I also have been unable to remove the seafoam. Since both are textures which should be replaceable with the ones I've made, I suspect the same mistake is affecting both. Oddly enough I have been able to override the seacolor, but my custom foam-texture in the same section is ignored.

[_William 0]

Just make sure to raise that issue in the editing part of this forum, and perhaps also at ofpec.com. You're probably not the first to try this, and not everybody with map building know-how is visiting this part of the forum.

[DualJoe 10]

After my fruitless efforts, Bushlurker was kind enough to solve my config.cpp issues with the horizon and the blindingly white foam.

The improvement is so striking that I just couldn't resist grabbing some screenshots.

For comparison a link to a real photo of the area with similar angle and time of day: http://www.panoramio.com/photo/3263665

I was concentrating on the water with these pictures, but someone with keen eyes should be able to tell that the landscape is slowly morphing away from the present day google satellite footage into the 1940 situation. In case of doubt, the last picture at the northernmost edge of the map shows the last part of the inundated area at that point in time.

Edited November 20, 2011 by DualJoe

[bushlurker 46]

Glad to have been of some small help... :)

It's an intriguing and offbeat approach to heightmap modelling - which seems to be working pretty well so far from the screenshots!

Despite the limitations, I think using modified "sea" is definitely the way to go - all that low-lying land and water would have been a total bitch to implement with "pond objects"... With "sea" at least the AI should respect it as "water" and creep around looking for crossing points... It might all just work out very well with a bit of luck! Taking shape nicely so far anyway!

B

[DualJoe 10]

The AI does indeed react to this type of water, but I can't say it's very predictable. I was pretty sure to have dug the small south-north stream deep enough so that tanks couldn't cross and infantry had to swim, but a couple of times now I've been surprised by armed enemy units (including tanks) on my supposedly safe side. The AI will not always cross however, most of the time they do indeed creep (or get stuck) along the edges of the deeper parts. I suspect this will need much play-testing and tweaking. Not an easy task I've noticed, because even on this barren landscape I'm having great difficulty keeping track of them, especially from the air.

I maybe doing something unorthodox using a 3d program for this, but I honestly wouldn't know where to begin with the "standard" terrain editors if I'd wanted to do similar things. To name a few examples, things like multiresolution, where I can drop down a few levels of detail, make fairly large adjustments (like inundating a large area) and still retain the smaller details from the higher levels. Adjusting and projecting old photographs in realtime on the 3d terrain so I can switch between them while changing the geometry. Rendering out an ambient occlusion map. Or even just placing camera's at certain positions and rendering that image to see what it looks like at eye-level. Just to name a few.

The one does not exclude the other. Now that I've figured out the workflow between the programs I now know you can easily switch back and forth between blender and terrain editors. The retopology tools let you shrinkwrap an existing terrain (or part of terrain) onto another one, or you could just use the heightmap from the terrain-editor directly. I'll admit though that getting the heightscaling correct between all programs takes a lot of time, experimentation and creativity.

Back into logbook mode:

I've made a start investigating how to use textures, materials and clutter, in the hope to make a start in dressing up the island. I was hoping to do that as a distraction from sculpting. I've looked at the available ground-textures, clutter, plants and such from the main Islands in Arma2 and OA and I'm starting to fear that I might have a bit of a setback here.

The terrain I'm making obviously has nothing in common with the desert of Takistan, but I'm also having a hard time finding usable springtime stuff in the autumn-themed Chernarus world. Unless there is some large community plant/clutter project, I might also have to start making my own. Not really looking forward to this, because I'm not familiar with plants at all, nor what's required to make them look alright and function ingame.

[_William 0]

Great shots. Good progress!

The AI does indeed react to this type of water, but I can't say it's very predictable. I was pretty sure to have dug the small south-north stream deep enough so that tanks couldn't cross and infantry had to swim, but a couple of times now I've been surprised by armed enemy units (including tanks) on my supposedly safe side. The AI will not always cross however, most of the time they do indeed creep (or get stuck) along the edges of the deeper parts. I suspect this will need much play-testing and tweaking. Not an easy task I've noticed, because even on this barren landscape I'm having great difficulty keeping track of them, especially from the air.

I recommend getting Troopmon to easily track what the AI is doing. I'm using it to switch views between units, and keep an overview of all units on the map. I use it for most of my screen shots.

Wrt AI and water:

- (non-amphibious) vehicle AI isn't very good at recognizing where it can cross and where it cannot cross water. They fail crossing the river south of Zargabad (Arrowhead map). They fail crossing the N/S river at the Sangin (community made map).

My guess is that offering a nearby (100m?) crossing at every point of in the inundated parts of the map will work. You might have to 'advertise' these by turning it into a road. I recommend testing with a platoon of (BLUFOR) tanks and with a group of trucks. Getting this right may involve trading realism for game-play.

- AI in large formations used to have troubles walking around water. In a large line formation, the group leader would skirt the water, causing several of this men to walk through water and drop their equipment. Unsure if this bug is still present.

- Occasionally, amphibious vehicles attempt to exit a river at bank that is too steep for them, and will get stuck.

Another weakness of the Arma2 vehicle AI is to attempt to climb steep hills and get stuck doing so. In your case, that would be the south-side of the Grebbeberg. You probably can get around this by populating the hill heavily with trees, so the AI doesn't see the hill as a viable path.

Regards, William

[DualJoe 10]

Thanks for the feedback and also the troopmon tip was really helpful.

I already discovered some issues with the AI and one of them is indeed the I'll keep formation even if I drown AI bug. I'll look for the bug-ticket later so I can vote on it. I also noticed a tank squad getting stuck on the shore, while infantry crossed at that location, I just missed if they swam or not. Could be a very delicate wade-through-depth issue, where infantry is able to cross deeper parts of water than tanks. If the latter is true that would open up a lot of interesting possibilities, some of which I was secretly hoping for.

Realistically this whole area should be almost impassable for most vehicles, apart from the dykes and roads, but for the sake of gameplay I'll try making most of the smaller canals crossable for vehicles. I was planning some key crossing-points like the lock at the base of the hill, the large rail-road-bridge across the Rhine and the roadbridge over the railroad on the hill. I was hoping that non-amphibious vehicles would only be able to cross at those points, which would make defending them or blowing them up as effective as it should be. Ideally infantry should still be able to cross and try to conquer a beachhead and by the looks of it apart from the missing roads and bridges for the tanks, it already works like this.

I doubt however that I'll be able to work around all the limitations of the AI, some of which might become painfully obvious on this map. Like AI getting stuck and remain frozen even under fire. Or their kamikaze single-mindedness, no use of smoke for attack or retreat. Another fairly odd one I hadn't really noticed before is that tanks seem to have a high tendency to show their ass to the enemy. To me this is a major bug, it goes against the whole principle and design of tanks and how they operate. I think I remember reading that some of these issues were addressed in a few AI-addons/scripts. I might try some of them again, but the ones I tried a while back resulted in major performance drops, or added a lot of irritating extra features.

Regarding trees, plants and objects, I'm trying to come up with a list of things I need to make for this map in order of importance. After the heightmap I think the most important things would be everything that has to do with the 4-surface-material limitation of the Arma-engine. As I understand it you can add variation to each of these 4 via sattelite-texture colors and different clutter-definitions. Which boils down to:

1. Grass - for the dykes, most farmfields, actually for the major part of the map.

2. Forestfloor - for the hill and maybe the orchards just east of the hill.

3. Sand/mud/earth-material/texture - For the underwater surfaces, trenches, excavation-sites, (ploughed)farmfields.

4. ? - though one, because I need a few more but I can't decide which one is the most important.

I still need the basaltblocks lining most of the waterline of the Rhine and all of the little dams. Generic surfacematerial for the towns and factory plants. More types of farmfields other than just dirt and grass. Ideally more than one sand and grass texture, because I expect I'll have to use both a lot.

Next in the list would be one or more custom roads, at the very least a brickroad-type for the main road and the towns.

Last would be a number of typical objects for that area, like the waterlock, large railroadbridge across the Rhine, roadbridge over the railroad and other historic landmark structures, a few little bunkers (kazematten) and of course a collection of typical Dutch vegetation and clutter like the "knotwilg"(It's twigs are the basis of allmost all Dutch dykes).

Edited November 21, 2011 by DualJoe

[DualJoe 10]

Well, looking at these videos I might just try my hand at making a couple of trees after all. I wonder if I'm able to figure out how to render to texture to a bunch of billboard-planes for the leaves. Mind you, both scripts are for blender, maybe ngplants could be an alternative for non blenderheads.

Old script, but still looks useful enough, video tutorial looks especially impressive

Video of an interesting looking versatile new script

[EDIT]

While collecting information on plants and terrain for groundtextures and clutter I noticed something which I may have to consider. It looks like even the plants play a part in the defensive function on the steep slope of the hill. The steep part has a lot of very nasty thorny-bushes, which you really wouldn't want to walk through. I'd even go as far as comparing them to barbed-wire obstacles. Suddenly I realized that there is quite a a lot of vegetation in Holland you would not be able to crawl or walk through like it was nothing. Certainly not with exposed skin or unprotected eyes. Could be interesting to make these plants harmful to infantry, or to say it in another way, there are bushes one shouldn't be able to lurk in.

Edited November 23, 2011 by DualJoe

[lecholas 2]

Thanks for links to the tutorials. I wasn't aware of the funcionality in blender 2.59 and I must say it looks very promising. I've recently experimented with ngPlant combined with other tools (intended workflow: sculptris for trunk, ngPlants for branches and blender for uv mapping and p3d export) and the results were quite encouraging (don't mind the unfinished textures and the lack of leafs). I was wondering though how polygons-intesive should be a tree for ArmAII as AFAIK BIS haven't released any sample tree for us to learn from.

I was also thinking about using Autodesk's free beta of 123D Catch (formerly Project Photofly) and as a matter of fact even today I tested on a trunk of a tree: 1, 2 (the great advantage of this program, not to say it doesn't have any disadvantages, is that it generates models and mapped textures at once; wheather they can be easily used for model cration for Arma is a topic for a different discussion).

[bushlurker 46]

There's a sample "LINDA" birch tree here

B

[sander 14]

The terrain looks promising, the inundations and flat terrain should present greatly differing tactical situations.

Regards,

Sander

[DualJoe 10]

@Lecholas: Indeed some very impressive images, now all we need to do is figure out how to get it ingame.

@Bushlurker: Thanks for the link.

I looked at the example tree which unfortunately only comes in 3DMax-formats. Using the official fbx-converter does not seem to export correct UV-maps and textures, or Bistudio does some tricky stuff with their textures and UV-mapping. While I can figure out some things from the texturemaps, I very much doubt this is how trees are imported ingame. The texture for the leaves seem to consist of the same twigs and leaves projected from 6 different angles. They also seem to use worldspace normalmapping for the leaves (lighting?) and tangent normalmapping for bark-detail. There were a lot more bark-textures than needed, but maybe so you can have different variations of the same tree.

Guess I'll look for an existing tree-model from the game to unpack to figure out how the Arma2 engine handles trees, in particular uv-mapping, textures and materials and LOD-models.

Not much progress while I'm trying to get Windows7 in working condition again. Ran out of space on my c:-drive because a couple of applications were filling it up. After cleaning an defragmenting windows is now refusing to boot.

I think I'm far enough along now with the heightmap to start working on textures and materials and such. Especially now that I'm digressing so much from the present day Google Satelite image that it's starting to interfere and distract while I work on the map. This will probably mean I'll be busy gathering resources and doing tests. Bear with me, this is the first time I'm doing something like this so most of it is new to me. I want to try a few ideas for creating the big 1px/m satimage.

EDIT

@sander: Yeah the terrain already works very differently compared to the default world and I'm not only referring to different tactical options and requirements of the terrain. For example somehow the same distance on this map feels a lot further away than it does on the Takistan map, which is the opposite of what I was expecting. I don't really understand, but somehow eventhough it is tiny compared to most other maps, it doesn't feel that tiny to me at all. Could be my imagination, but my buddy said the same thing when he tested it for me.

Edited November 24, 2011 by DualJoe

[lecholas 2]

@sander: Yeah the terrain already works very differently compared to the default world and I'm not only referring to different tactical options and requirements of the terrain. For example somehow the same distance on this map feels a lot further away than it does on the Takistan map, which is the opposite of what I was expecting. I don't really understand, but somehow eventhough it is tiny compared to most other maps, it doesn't feel that tiny to me at all. Could be my imagination, but my buddy said the same thing when he tested it for me.

Interesting remark. I had the same feeling when trying my own experimental high-heightmap-resolution maps (2 meter resolution 2x2km map felt like a huge terrain). But I always wondered if it is not for the fact that I, as a maker of the heightmap (it was not downloaded from the Internet, it was made from vectorising scanned map's contour lines) know every little land feature of it and even when I don't see all of the landforms I know that they are there; my consciousness holds all the data in the background (let's call it a phenomenological horizontality of perception) and I have a feeling that the terrain is 'reach' and every 100 meters contains big ammount of landforms and 'affordances' for using them (contrasted to big flat surfaces of a lower-heightmap-resolution - there's nothing there). On the other hand when I play other modern games which have smaller but more dense terrain (of which I'am not a creator) than ArmA series I have a similar feeling.

edit

There's a sample "LINDA" birch tree here

Thanks Bushlurker. So should I take it that first LOD of a tree for ArmAII should have about 8000 faces?

Edited November 24, 2011 by lecholas

[Claude_Viole 10]

Hi all, DualJoe's 'buddy' here...

Once every few days I do some testing on DualJoe's Grebbeberg 'island'... Starting with a raw heightmap with a sat image projected, it's slowly getting to a really promising project. As said, the 1:1 scale feels a little odd at first glance, but I think it is the only way to go when modelling for a real world area.

Almost every evening I speak to DualJoe about his project to inform him about bugs, performance, etc. I'm a little surprised by the overall positive feedback here in this topic. I'm looking forward to the public release... Here are some screens (not the best ones, I know...) of the current w.i.p.

[DualJoe 10]

I've been busy, unfortunately not so much with this project. I've been experimenting with different methods to texture this map and I've come up with a few workable methods. One of which allows me to paint directly onto the 3d-heightmap without lag (Not that easy with such a highpoly model AND 16kx16k texture). At least I can now start creating a library of textures, references and brushes for the satellite-image.

While working on the latter I did manage to produce something which I thought was interesting to share.

I think I found a proper workflow to create tileable ground-textures (sand in this case), which look detailed up close, but don't show the usual repetitive patterns in the distance as demonstrated in this screenshot from Blender.

Hope it's not too dark, I was trying out some extreme sunlight angles which make repetitive patterns more obvious.

Can't show how it looks in Arma2 because I don't understand how the Arma2 normal/heightmap textures work, let alone how to convert my own bump-/normalmaps. Looking at some of the other textures from the official maps, the engine seems to be using a curious mix between grayscale and normalmap-colors. I'll work on when I've got some more time to spare.

[DualJoe 10]

Continuing my log

I may have been a little over enthusiastic about having found an easy one size fits all method. My trick was to have a highly detailed normalmap and a toned down diffusemap with the help of High-pass filters. Unfortunately a highly detailed normalmap is so sensitive that you can't really use the same technique for every image/surface type. Which means it just takes a bit of extra work for each ground-texture you might want to use. Also finding usable images to generate textures is proving difficult. So much so that I'm thinking of just going on a hunting trip myself with a digital camera, or get very creative and produce my own photo realistic 3d texture-surfaces.

Seeing that this was my very first attempt at sculpting I'm not too confident about my abilities with the latter.

I remember seeing a trick a while back for photographing textures. You take successive pictures, but each time with light from a different angle. Top, down, left and right. Apparently with some photoshopping-magic you'll then be able to generate very high quality textures including height- and normalmaps. Since it get dark early this time of year in my area, this might be an option.