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[E2TB] Export To Terrain Builder

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[E2TB] Export To Terrain Builder

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I'm pleased to announce the release of E2TB, a small module for Arma 3 that allows you to export data to Terrain Builder. Writing this announcement here because it only concerns Terrain Makers.

 

Why?

If you have tried to import from EDEN or from any other custom tools that generate objects while in mission to Terrain Builder (such as XCam, Surface Painter, Map Builder), you may have seen the hassle of objects' rotations being often incorrect once imported.

This has been very painful for many terrain makers, given the fact that rotations needed to be corrected back into Terrain Builder.

 

This mod fixes most of those issues. You can check out results in this comparison image:

 

eOdeb2Gtga.jpg

 

This came out of a painful session of 4 days (for 40 lines of code or less), where after all experiments I was able to import using .lbt format, the format that Terrain Processor exports with. The last 2 of those days have been heavily spent on Discord's Arma3 #terrain_makers channel. A big thank you for help / discussions to @lappihuan @zgmrvn @mikero @W4lly63 @ianbanks @Ice @cring0 @Adanteh @HorribleGoat @t_d ...and all the other folks involved in those discussions in those memorable days of October 18th and 19th 2017. After this, a new fix from @ianbanks came in. This is what is now being used.

 

How does it work

  • Copy the objects to the clipboard:
    • From EDEN: click on the menu Export > Export to Terrain Builder (E2TB) or the absolute position alternative
    • From within a mission (SP): run the action Copy the map objects to the clipboard or the absolute position alternative. To do this you'll first need to drop the SCAR_E2TB_Module in your mission.
  • Copy the contents of the clipboard in a file and save it with the extension .txt
  • From within your map in Terrain Builder: File > Import > Objects. If you exported with absolute position, ensure that you import the objects in Terrain Builder by checking advanced options > absolute in the import dialog.

 

According to our experience, absolute position works better with large objects such as Big Rocks. Your mileage may vary.

A huge thank you to @ianbanks for the absolute code positioning / TB matrices computations, and for allowing me to include his work in E2TB.

 

Scale

E2TB will use the size as reported by the following tools:

  • XCam
  • Surface Painter
  • Map Builder

 

Download

Find E2TB on:

 

Note

There are certain objects that behave very differently in EDEN and Terrain Builder. These are the objects that have the named property `placement=slopelandcontact` into the geometry LOD.

 

The intended behaviour for these objects is to stay flat on the ground and adapt to the terrain. Though, in EDEN you are able to easily position them horizontally, but once imported in Terrain Builder they will follow the ground. As an example, if you were to put a barbed wire on top of a bunker that is on a slope, once imported in Terrain Builder the barbed wire will follow the underneath terrain slope and hence be in an incorrect position.

 

As a compromise, E2TB assumes that all of those objects are used as normally intended to be: on the ground, following the terrain. This should cover 95% of usage. If you use those objects differently, you will have to manually fix them in Terrain Builder.

We are working on alternative options to see if we can come up with some other solutions, as in the end it boils down to the fact that EDEN and Terrain Builder do not treat these objects in the same way.

 

A sane development cycle for those objects: set them on the ground using SLOPE mode (to follow terrain) so that you can preview them as close as possible to what you'll see once imported in TB.

 

 

Comments and feedback welcome.

 

_SCAR

 

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The tool now also exports objects at the scale specified by XCam, SP or MB. 

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Is it possible to save directly to file? I tend to have 50,000+ objects at once and clipboard usually crashes the game ;)

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4 hours ago, icebreakr said:

Is it possible to save directly to file? I tend to have 50,000+ objects at once and clipboard usually crashes the game ;)

 

Any DLL that writes to file you'd recommend (also considering license)? make_file.dll and its 64-bit version?

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Hello, I have a problem with the mod during the terrain builder export

 

In Eden Editor : 

 

screenshot_79.png

 

 

In Terrain builder

 

screenshot_80.png

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That's the land contact points. Scar and ianbanks have been trying to work it out on Discord, its a bug with arma more than anything. You can use x-cam to place paths first, and they import ok(ish) then build the rest with E2TB

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As per what RoF says.

 

I've nailed it down to the p3d objects with the placement=SlopeLandContact property set. For those, Terrain Builder positions them differently than EDEN, which causes all sorts of mess.

 

For some objects there will be nothing that we can do (barbed wire for instance, as its poles are placed vertically to the terrain and hence if you try to rotate the objects you'll end up having the barbed wire in the correct position but its poles not vertical anymore).

 

Anyway, we are working on it. If you know anything of vector computations contact me and you can help. :)

 

 

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As you can see it has the placement=SlopeLandContact property set. Not sure why you are posting this here? Maybe I'm missing your point.

BTW it is not legal to unbinarize a p3d file.

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Permettez-moi de vous montrer que l'élément est correctement configuré et que je ne vois pas pourquoi il changerait d'état entre l'éditeur eden et le constructeur de terrain

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That the trouble through, its SET. it won't import correct.

 

And scar's correct you shouldn't be posting you are opening A3 objects lol

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On 12/3/2017 at 6:39 PM, Sezon.dev said:

This is an arma 3 object that I opened. Let me show you that the element is correctly configured and that I do not see why it would change state between eden editor and terrain builder

 

As per my previous explanation, objects with the placement=SlopeLandContact set will behave differently in TB and in EDEN. There's no "seeing" or understanding it, that's down to the way BI has implemented different behaviours for the same object in different tools.

Anyways, we are working on it and it will fix most objects, but not those that skew.

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As already discussed, there are certain objects that behave very differently in EDEN and Terrain Builder. I found out that these are the objects that have the named property `placement=slopelandcontact` into the geometry LOD.

 

The intended behaviour for these objects is to stay flat on the ground and adapt to the terrain. Though, in EDEN you are able to easily position them horizontally, but once imported in Terrain Builder they will follow the ground. As an example, if you were to put a barbed wire on top of a bunker that is on a slope, once imported in Terrain Builder the barbed wire will follow the underneath terrain slope and hence be in an incorrect position.

 

As a compromise, E2TB will now assume that all of those objects are used as normally intended to be: on the ground, following the terrain. This should cover 95% of usage. If you use those objects differently, you will have to manually fix them in Terrain Builder.

 

We are working on alternative options to see if we can come up with some other solutions, as in the end it boils down to the fact that EDEN and Terrain Builder do not treat these objects in the same way.

 

New version 0.10.0 released on Steam.

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On 10/26/2017 at 12:51 PM, icebreakr said:

Is it possible to save directly to file? I tend to have 50,000+ objects at once and clipboard usually crashes the game ;)

 

I've looked into this option, but unfortunately saving to file wouldn't make a difference. It's not the text output that fills the memory (that is at most 3MB with 50,000 objects): it's the fact that all of the objects need to be loaded in memory from script to process them, and this eats a lot of memory.

I will though try to reproduce and see if there's anything that I can do to address this.

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Hello, create in my field with eden editor, which would be nice to be able to import the format terain builder in eden editor. Because thanks to eden editor we can place all our objects, and thanks to surface painter we can generate drill or other but we can not reimplant them in eden editor, we must directly put them in terain builder. If E2TB and Surface Painter could associate to import and export as desired it would be perfect!

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