Display forest on satellite map

[Alucard_Voss 1]

Anyone kind enough to explain how can i display forest areas on my map ? I tried everything so far, export shapes to imagery, painting by hand in Photoshop and they just look so bad on satellite map, can someone help me out ?

Forgot to mention my island is made by L3DT

[anthariel 165]

Hello !

Well, for aerial view, your forest is generaly covered by a lot of trees, so this should not be a problem.

For the map view, this is covered by a green area, this green area is defined on your config.cpp :

example :

class Tilos: Stratis
{
    minTreesInForestSquare = 10;
    minRocksInRockSquare = 25;
};

The minTreesInForestSquare parameter will create a green area on your map according of the value defined (in this case 10).

Same thing for the follow parameter but for rocks. (gray area).

But of course, if you need you can also paint your area in photoshop, create a layer, use the lasso tool, use the paint pot with a green color and then set the opacity to 25, it's should be fine.

Quick example : http://i.imgur.com/sbRhVJ2.jpg

But in the best case, use the two parameters cited above.

Sorry if I was not clear

Edited April 27, 2015 by Anthariel

[Alucard_Voss 1]

Thank you for clarifying a bit on this kinda issue, but when painting with Photoshop it looks bad, and seems that config.cpp does nothing, tried different values and got nowhere.

[anthariel 165]

Can you put your config here please?

[1para{god-father} 105]

I think I know what he is trying to ask - on your Sat Mask How do you paint / make the forests and get them to look nice - as when using L3DT the sat mask it exports is not the best and does not show any Forest's textures so you need to PS forest onto it - this I believe is what he is asking how do you do that bit - the config does show the Green blocks but not nice forest from above.

Anyway that is what i think the Q is :)

[Alucard_Voss 1]

Yes 1Para that is my question, how can i display forest on a Sat Mask / paint them on

[memphisbelle 99]

Yes 1Para that is my question, how can i display forest on a Sat Mask / paint them on

Well, that pretty much depends on how much creative you are. There are no rules or how to´s that provide the one and only way how to get the Sat Map look awesome.

Things I have done so far reaches from painting some places on the map that have been representing the Forestareas later on or secondly grap a Satellite Image that already has Forest Areas on it. My Suggestion is to Play around with your ideas and try painting with Photoshop or stitching images together until you are self confident that everything is fine and satisfies you.

In order to patching Images together I recommend to make screenshots from Google earth / Google maps satellite views and put those ones on your map. The Satellite map is a sort of Art and requires ideas and a certain degree of creativity

[wantafanta 13]

we need a good single thread for all these satmap painting questions.... ive found a great deal of help from searching the forums but all this help is scattered in different threads.... and IMO the sat map is the most challenging part of terrain editing for arma since i havent been able to create a satmap that looks nice when it starts to blend with the close detail textures.... if someone who has been terrain making for awhile and is super confident with their sat map painting skills would care to share the process he goes through from start to finish im sure it would be a good resource for the community.

oh and for satelite imagery, there is much easier ways to obtain high res sat imagery aside from taking screenshots of Google earth (slow and boring method) i suggest using ersi's world imagery (one of the online data sources for global mapper, you can access it through any GIS program though and it has up to .15m per pixel resolution. it might take awhile to download the whole area but there are other ways of downloading sat imagery from different sources. allmapsoft has a decent program for this but it costs money so i assume some people will choose to avoid it. a free solution is possible but im not sure if i should mention it due to the google TOS, but just do a bit of google-ing and you will find python scripts or .net library's that can download from the google/bing (or a few other sources) web map tile servers

Edited May 13, 2015 by wantafanta