Bornholm, Denmark [Terrain WIP]

[Horner 13]

Definitely the best terrain project I've seen for ArmA 3 so far! Keep up the outstanding work!

[FatFukinLenny 3]

Very impressed with your work, nice and lush!

[_omme_ 10]

Yeah, absolutely well done so far!

Just one (hopefully constructive) thing: I have some Problems with the LODs of that broad-leafed trees. The lowest detailed Version seems to be translucent somehow. When the next detailed Model is swapped, they are mostly opaque. I saw this in your chopper-video. Also the Silhoutte of the LOD models of the trees seem to be very different (in your latest Video from June 18th at the beginning in that alley). I guess those trees are assets, which where not made by you. So I don´t know if you could do anything here, since there are tons of trees already placed.

But altogether outstanding Work man! I´m really looking forward to the release!

[spitfirefrench 10]

Im seriously looking forward to making an alive mission on this

---------- Post added at 10:56 AM ---------- Previous post was at 10:52 AM ----------

what size is the map? Sorry if its already mentioned somewhere

[EO 11275]

Im seriously looking forward to making an alive mission on this

---------- Post added at 10:56 AM ---------- Previous post was at 10:52 AM ----------

what size is the map? Sorry if its already mentioned somewhere

Always best to read the first page of any thread on the forums!!:)

Bornholm, Denmark is an island for Arma 3 and is supposed to be almost stand-alone and not require much other than @A3MP; more on that later.

The real deal Bornholm is located as the most Eastern island in Denmark. See the Google Map for location: http://goo.gl/R8vWgj

Bornholm covers about 588 square kilometres and the Arma 3 variant will be designed in a 2/3 scale making the island area cover about 400km2. Altis in comparison is 270km2. The island will have a span of about 20km x 14km. The population of Bornholm is 40.000 people, it's one of few rocky islands in Denmark, height is between 0 to 164m with a lot of variation. The resolution of the heightmap used for the Arma version is 5.5 meters. This is enough to make ditches, smaller canyons, detailed hills etc.. Altis in comparison is 7.5 meters. The vegetation ranges from dry pine plantations to lush beech and birch forests depending on the area of operation. In the center of the island, Almindingen is the largest forest with mostly pine trees.

When I'm done I'm going to count, but I expect the number of compounds/farms to reach at least 1000.

My lowest goal is to have the ground, heightmap, elevation changes and so on to be 90% real, while it's just not possible to be 100% correct on the details because of engine limitations in Arma and because of time constraints. Placing wise I'm aiming for 1 building placed for every 5 real buildings. But as of now I'm rather at 4/5 because it's so exciting to run around in! Anyhow, my goal is still to make a crowded island. In fact to give you a better idea, these are the keywords I'm working from: Crowded, tight, claustrophobic, lost, pretty and not destroyed environment, bright, relaxing. Some of the keywords might give you ideas, other maybe won't. But that's okay.

Time frame for completion: "Soon-ish". My internal goal is to finish it within 6 months from May, however this is a giant project with many unknown factors along the way, so don't expect it anytime time soon-soon. Instead you can expect continous updates on the progress with photos and video.

Again, if you like my work do not hesitate to throw a donation my way. See how under "Support me in my work".

As you guys in this community rocks, I would appreciate constructive criticism and ideas for making the final experince of Bornholm even better. You can do it by commenting on my YouTube videos (Subscribe! https://www.youtube.com/user/Sandfeld) or posting in this thread. Thanks for reading through this and I really hope you look forward to it as much as I do.

[CaptainAzimuth 714]

Amazing. Will this map include some of the many Lakes/Ponds that Bornholm has? If so, i'd be extra EXTRA looking forward to this map. It looks stunning already, and it's not even finished. This is the highest quality un-official map for Arma 3, and that's something to brag about.

[egilsandfeld 7]

@MikeTim: Yep that's the International Hotel or "HouseB_Tenements" as it's called by it's model name. Would you guys know if the ladders work on the hotel in A2?

I'm not using anything from MBG Buildings, but I could swap some standard models for those later on.

@_oMMe_: Exactly! I do have problems with some foliage like those trees, but also all my maize/corn is appearing in front of you at about 100m out. Further away and they are transparent. Currently I haven't looked into this, as the worse thing that can happen is to swap the model for another working one. If you have any insight on how to change the LODs on a model, please let me know :)

About the size of Bornholm, I'll get my ruler out at some points and calculate it properly. But official figures is 589km^2 and my version is 2/3 = 392km^2 :) Quite a playground, won't you say?

Thanks for your kind words. It's progressing really fine. Working on bringing nicer looks to cities, towns and farms currently by adding fine short grass instead of tall and clumsy grass or rough dirt.

[miketim 20]

I am pretty sure there are working ladders on that building in A2, but I think its only the one of the bottom, their may have been a ladder all the way, but I am not sure.

If there was a ladder that went all the way up the building, I dont think it works in arma 3 if I remember correctly.

Alot of "if"s lol

If you want me to check I will.

Edit:

Do you know that "tall" (for a one story) house from MGB (or mbg:confused:) that is brown and has the pointy roof? I will see if I can get a steam pic of it.

I think that specific one would fit denmark excenllently, and its enterable, with a pretty good texture, better than most ArmA 2 buildings.

Edit 2: Pic http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=275670544

Not the best pic, (lol I spawned it on N'ziwisogo with zeus by accident, trying to build a Laotian drug village)

But I hope it allows you to identify it, I am pretty sure it is from mgb/mbg (whatever) buildings, since I think its from the same pack that celle 2 uses, which is that mbg one, and celle 2 has those ofp houses with better textures/interiors, and this was in a category with what I think were ofp houses reduxed or somthing.

This is a pretty long post mostly for that one building, damn.

I think it looks pretty danish to me. ;) Might be weird right near the Altis buildings though, I know you used some.

Then again on your earlier vids I saw chernarus buildings near them too, you kinda sepearted them by hedges so it didnt look that weird.

I do wonder, is it possible to rexture the vanilla buildings? If someone can tell me how, I would be more than willing to do so.

Anyway, lol

Hope I helped.

Ps:

Just realized you wrote Nexoe as well as Nexø, I thought ø was equiavlent to ö in swedish or german or somthing, and I thought that made more of a u sound

Edited June 25, 2014 by MikeTim

[egilsandfeld 7]

Mike, you ask a lot of questions which are not always relevant to this thread :) Could you please ask them the right places? I will look into the MBG Buildings when I have time for it :)

---------- Post added at 16:06 ---------- Previous post was at 16:04 ----------

Amazing. Will this map include some of the many Lakes/Ponds that Bornholm has? If so, i'd be extra EXTRA looking forward to this map. It looks stunning already, and it's not even finished. This is the highest quality un-official map for Arma 3, and that's something to brag about.

Arma 3 does NOT support lakes / Ponds at the moment. You will have to beg BISim for that feature to return. Us terrain makers do cheat and lower the terrain to below sea level to get a pond. Downside is that we need to get to sea level and the pond will sound like a ocean. Not ideal but it works sort of :)

[miketim 20]

Haha, sorry for that EgilSanfeld.

I assume the reason in one of your videos you said the "pond" (which was just ocean water right?) was carved out was because the real ones from ArmA 2 do not work anymore?

I was under the impression that they worked, but only if you used one pond object, since when multiple were in the same "viewframe" (visible to the player) it made a big texture bug

But singular (small) only 1 item ponds seem to work on Takistan in ArmA 3, at least visually.

Feedback Ticket of the pond texture glitch:http://feedback.arma3.com/view.php?id=15579

I don't know if this information helps, but I will tell you anyway.

Your probably like, oh god not more of Mikes posts

[CaptainAzimuth 714]

Haha, sorry for that EgilSanfeld.

I assume the reason in one of your videos you said the "pond" (which was just ocean water right?) was carved out was because the real ones from ArmA 2 do not work anymore?

I was under the impression that they worked, but only if you used one pond object, since when multiple were in the same "viewframe" (visible to the player) it made a big texture bug

But singular (small) only 1 item ponds seem to work on Takistan in ArmA 3, at least visually.

Feedback Ticket of the pond texture glitch:http://feedback.arma3.com/view.php?id=15579

I don't know if this information helps, but I will tell you anyway.

Your probably like, oh god not more of Mikes posts

In that case, ill make a ticket for a new way to makes ponds within Arma 3. It's ridiculous to me that you can make a terrain, and you can't even make one of lifes basic features, a pond, due to some kind of limitation. Still looking forward to the map though. Thanks. =D

Edit: VOTE

http://feedback.arma3.com/view.php?id=19372

Edited June 25, 2014 by DarkSideSixOfficial

[Bibou42 10]

I'm really looking forward to play your map! Looks promising!

To me, the community really lacks summer european maps!! Wants to have the good old ofp atmosphere again! Geat job so far!

[egilsandfeld 7]

Thanks Bibou :) That is what I'm trying to do.

Update July 7 - Nexoe, proper grass and asphalt

Also a short written update.

After a bit of vacation I'm back in the saddle. Finishing the current tile of 5 x 5km covering Nexoe. Nexoe took quite a while to finish up as it's a large city with plenty of houses, harbour stuff etc.. Also I have sort of tweaked the sat, normal and mask layers now so they look quite natural. Lighting does a lot to the sat layer both when on the ground and in the sky looking at it, so we'll see how it ends up with some proper lighting soon hopefully.

I've really started to play some short missions myself on the terrain to take the focus away from the island it self. Main purpose is to reveal if anything stands out negatively on the island which can conflict when really playing on Bornholm. It's getting better and better definitely, and it's so much fun popping up and down behind small woods in the AH6 to shoot terrorists in technicals ;)

Overall, progressing really fine at the moment. Going to start on the big tile this week, but the largest amount of work is done as most cities and towns have been finished already :) Left is Rønne, Aakirkeby, Dueodde, Vestermarie and Nylars which will take time, but only Rønne is really large. Besides that there should be a lot of great compounds/farms in the South as well as a closed military area of Raghammer Shootingfacility (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9959158/Arma/Raghammer-grundkort.pdf).

Back to work! Keep the donations coming please, I REALLY appriciate it

and it gives me so much joy to continue working on Bornholm :)

[_omme_ 10]

Awesome!

I did some research in the last days because of the LOD switching problem. I couldn´t find out how to fix that, sorry. It seems to be hardcoded in the ArmA III engine and the LOD switching distance is not touchable. Someone wrote that it works nice with ArmA III installed on SSD, so that the engine can load the objects faster. But i don´t think, that the LOD draw distance is affected by that. It works better on Altis since there are better foliage models with better LODs. So the problem is the foliage itself.

IMHO the smoothing of the normal texture is a bit to intense: now the ground looks to flat for my share. Do you know the NVIDIA photoshop plugin?

https://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-texture-tools-adobe-photoshop

With that tool you can adjust the normal map in different ways. It should be possible to reduce the height in the normal map insted of smoothing it. So the whole details in the map are kept, and the black shadowish looking locations should be gone. Just play around with the settings. For me it worked fine a few years ago. The best would be if you had a greyscale bump map and convert that via the plugin into a normal map.

Cheers man! Incredible Work so far!

[CSLALUKI 30]

AWESOME, thank you for this update ! I like this map. ;)

[fennecus 10]

Looks great but don't forget to allocate some hard cover like rocks. Especially outside of towns.

[egilsandfeld 7]

@_oMMe_: Thanks for looking into it. Yeah it seems like it's the LODs in the models itself. Maybe I can switch some of the LODs with some better looking ones. Also yeah I'm actually using that plugin, and I've raised it now from 1 x scale to x1.7. Going to see now how that went. I actually use this one, which should be a greyscale bump map, I believe:

http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9959158/Arma/BornholmNormalMap.png (4.7Mb)

I put in a solid grey behind the layer after applying the nVidia filter, because that layer becomes halfway transparent. The color of that is grey (128,128,128). Could I do this in another way?

@Fennecus: You're so right. Actually put in lots of rocks when I started, but forgot it along the coast North. Going to pick it up again for sure. Good that Bornholm is a rocky island ;)

Thanks for your kind words

[zooloo75 834]

Impressive work!

---------- Post added at 09:05 PM ---------- Previous post was at 08:58 PM ----------

Sent you a donation - Keep up the awesome work Egil! I love European maps :)

[_omme_ 10]

@_oMMe_: Thanks for looking into it. Yeah it seems like it's the LODs in the models itself. Maybe I can switch some of the LODs with some better looking ones. Also yeah I'm actually using that plugin, and I've raised it now from 1 x scale to x1.7. Going to see now how that went. I actually use this one, which should be a greyscale bump map, I believe:

http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9959158/Arma/BornholmNormalMap.png (4.7Mb)

I put in a solid grey behind the layer after applying the nVidia filter, because that layer becomes halfway transparent. The color of that is grey (128,128,128). Could I do this in another way?

The problem here is your source texture. Sadly it is not a real greyscale bump texture. In a true bumpmap there are the lower areas black and the higher ones white. And the smooth grey values inbetween of course. Your source map is more like a lighted diffuse rendering of some sattelite data or something like that with a lightsource in the North-East. In a bump map all the valleys in the northern part of the island would be darkest at their lowest height. In your source map, the bottoms of those valleys are brighter than the slopes leading into them. When you now convert that into a normal map and import it into the engine, the valleys are shaded as they were higher than the surrounding slopes. That is the reason for the strange looking shadows you detected, because the shading does not fit the geometry. You need a true bump map with dark valleys and bright heights and without illumination to fix that. It should look more like this example image: http://www.photoshoproadmap.com/imagenes/blog/relief-shading/relief-shading2.jpg

I hope that there is one map out there for bornholm.

Cheers!

[UGLY58 10]

Nice Work,

Huge project hopefully you have help ? Certainly looks real promising keep up the good work !

[egilsandfeld 7]

@_oMMe_: Perfect! Yes got a greyscale bump now that I can process instead. Will return with how it works. Do know what I should do after processing the plugin? It makes most of the layer transparent. Should I just throw a grey solid underneath it or?

[_omme_ 10]

Its been a while since i used that tool. I can imagine, that the reason for that transparency is that there are multiple layers in photoshop, which should be combined before processing the NormalMap. If that wont work, you can try saving the image as jpg, and re-open the jpg in PS again. But there can be other reasons for that transparency.. If you are sure, that there is no information loss in the generated NM, you can simply fill a new layer with [R:128 G:128 B:255] (neutral normalmap color) and move that layer in the background.

But I assume that the processing failed, and there will be information loss. In most of the cases, the generated normal map has no transparency. You could also check the alpha-(transparency-) Channel and fill that with pure white. Maybe there is some info written into it (maybe specmap or something). Play around a bit with the tool´s params, especially in the height generation section (9x9?) If you later have the feeling, that the light is shaded the opposite way than it should be, you can try the invert-thing (usually x and/or y). Try setting the "alpha filed"- checkbox to 'unchganged' or better 'Set to 1.0' (white)

Cheers!

Edited July 14, 2014 by _oMMe_

[_omme_ 10]

Hey Egil.

Just saw your recent video. Thx! Its getting even more awesome! Yeah, the normal mapping could be more intense. But be careful: When the sun is low in the Morning / Evening, the effect is a lot more visible. In rainy weather at 12 o´clock it should be less visible due to the not rendered lighting shadows and the flat appearing normal mapping because of the angle of the sun.

Cheers!

[egilsandfeld 7]

Ahh this is more like it :)

Greyscale Bump map of Bornholm 2048 x 2048 px:

http://i.imgur.com/WQCg3LU.png

I am aware of the low sun affecting the shadows. With current setting of 2 in scale it could use just a bit more actually, so I'm trying with 3 now.

Some random and non-related images:

http://i.imgur.com/kKn6aKx.jpg (Almindingen East about 2 clicks from Nexoe)

http://i.imgur.com/mCU2ewC.jpg (Nexoe city from the seaside)

http://i.imgur.com/MsYwc8m.jpg (A farm I can't remember where is!)

Imported objects for the entire South of Bornholm as well now. I'll call this area Dueodde. It has a large white sand beach, lots of vegetation planted/grown in the sand as well. Took a drive yesterday in that area, and the sand bottom is quite cool. Just like I hoped it would be :)

Btw. Thanks so much for the donations, guys! REALLY appreciated. It's going so well now with the beautiful island!

Edited July 18, 2014 by EgilSandfeld

[nomisum 129]

really looking forward to a big north european setting. looks fantastic so far. donation well earned :P

how is it performance wise developing, say in comparison to altis?