Mapping Your Hood in ArmA

[JDShots 0]

Has anyone mapped and modeled their neighborhood or other familiar real-life site in OFP or AmrA?

What are the basic steps needed to accomplish such an effort? I imagine this could be quick and dirty, or very time consuming depending on the density of your locale.

I remember reading that OFP used some original locations to model some of the islands and towns.

[fasad 1]

It is easier to make a fictitious or roughly "inspired by reality" island/terrain than trying to represent any real location accurately. I know of no way to import any real world data other than heightmaps. Also there are no ArmA island/terrain creation tools available yet. Any island editing is extremely time consuming.

The original OFP islands used scaled down heightmaps of real world islands, nothing more.

[tj72 0]

You need to plan out all the dimensions and layouts of how your real neighborhood is and then figure out how to "project" digital camera pictures of the neighborhood onto a 3d model. The 3d model will try to match the dimensions and aspects of your real place as best it can.

You need to get pretty deep into 3d modeling and image edit. With UV mapping, a digital camera and then you just need to get your objects into ARMA's editing tools. There is a cheap and dirty technique I used on a vehicle. If you take a digital camera and walk around taking pictures of all sides you get all your texture maps you will need for that object very quick. Of course lighting and shadows come into play. So an overcast day is best so theres no sunlight baked into your textures. Ive just started to do buildings. I took a front on of a town hall building (no homeland security spooks showed up btw)

and I got a nice facade for a 3d building. I still have to do the sides and back. And I dont have those pictures so I can either go back or try to create the rest by hand by cloning the bricks and windows. You will have to do alot of photoshop cloning/rubberstamp to take out things like street signs and things that will look wierd. So I know thats not any specific info but thats the basic grounding and if you get good at it you can get quick photoreal 3d objects.

  For the neighborhood you could walk down the street and just keep taking pictures of the houses as you go, cross the street and do the same. You will want as many angles as you can get but you wont be able to get them all. If your camera is high res enough you could do it in movie mode and just pull your frames out of the .avi by making them a sequence with an app like After Effects.

 Take lots of tile shots of the ground, street asphalt and grass and whatever to create a library for your custom textures. Big shots of the ground from up high will work great if you can get them.

Forget about the woods for now because in 3d the forests are a monster to tackle. Try to get some lonely trees in wraparound as shown above. Then you can clone them ingame to make the woods.  You will get them into 3d and see where the textures are good and where you need to generate custom textures to get rid of stretching. UV mapping knowledge is key it is the best way to texture in 3d Im convinced. Alot of planning on pencil/paper of the angles and the 3d models versus real life objects will help. Do a small test of this concept first.

Im familiar with Lightwave 3d btw if your looking for an app. Good interface but professional priced. If you can use Blender or another app that is cheaper it will do the same stuff. I only know how to do this in LW.

P.S. about 3d trees you will also have to use Alpha maps and some basic tutorials on how to model low poly trees in a variety of apps are available online/search/google/3d tutorials/trees or something like that.