JohnLoftyWiseman 1 Posted February 16, 2013 (edited) Recently I've been wanting to get into map editing in ArmA II. I've read many a tutorial on terrain editing using Visitor 3, but so far I've only used templates from other people. Ultimately, I would like to make my own map from scratch, but even after some fairly extensive searching on various forums, I haven't been able to find any tutorials for creating the map from absolute scratch (by that I mean creating all of the files to go into the data and source folders; terrain maps, the masks, the CPP files, etc, which can then be imported into Visitor 3 and binarised into a complete map for use in the game itself), so I was wondering if there are any tutorials anyone knows of that explain how to do this, or even if anyone would be able to explain how to do it. I know it's a lot of work and steps, and therefore probably not something that any one tutorial or answer can explain, but I figured it'd most likely be better to ask this question directly since I don't see much out there already for this particular topic. As some additional info, I've already gone through the terrain creation tutorial over on the Bi Studio Wiki, meaning I've already created a new dedicated partition, and extracted several .PBOs into my CA folder, as well as registered a tag to use for the projects. TL;DR version: Is it all done from within Visitor 3? How do you go from a blank canvas to starting to form mountains and roads and whole cities? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Edited February 16, 2013 by JohnLoftyWiseman Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
m1lkm8n 410 Posted February 16, 2013 (edited) Bushlurker.com The mans a genius. I went about it the hard way by taking arial photos then importing a grayscale image into l3dt then created my own heightmap. Then exported it as and xyz then imported into visitor3 The best way prob would be a program like global mapper which can give you real life xyz files Edited February 16, 2013 by M1lkm8n Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
bushlurker 45 Posted February 16, 2013 (edited) I've already gone through the terrain creation tutorial over on the Bi Studio Wiki, meaning I've already created a new dedicated partition, and extracted several .PBOs into my CA folder, as well as registered a tag to use for the projects. Sounds like you've made a good start! Watch out for "older" tutorials... for example, there's no need nowadays to mess around unpacking one or two game .pbo's manually into your P:\CA folder anymore - there's a Mikero Tool which will unpack the whole game with a few clicks... I'd suggest you take a look at This Beginners Guide... In particular, the Absolute Beginners Setup Section at the start... Follow thru that and you should have your tools and P:\ drive fully configured pretty quickly with all the game data unpacked properly and available. After you have the tools set up - you could either follow the rest of that guide (it's another "templates provided" tutorial basically), or you could then flip to Mondkalb's Terrain Tutorial which is relatively... brief, but which DOES cover pretty much everything else you need to know to go about making all the different files you need and what to do with them... Between these two properly up-to-date guides you should be able to tackle pretty much all of the basic tasks involved... Good luck! B Edited February 16, 2013 by Bushlurker Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
JohnLoftyWiseman 1 Posted February 17, 2013 Thanks for the replies - the guides that were linked have both been extremely helpful, and I've made a lot of progress. I'm now up to the stage of making the satellite map and mask for the terrain, and I have questions about that, which I think I'll start a new thread for since it's a different issue. The replies are greatly appreciated. Thanks again. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
