bushlurker

Looks impressive so far! I like the desert mesas, and the volcano & lava! ! B

Hi Rip!! - Good to see you back!! This could be the problem... Background images can be a little picky... Visitor can struggle a little with larger sizes, so I always try to keep my background guide images to around 10240x10240 at most - .bmp format is required - standard 24bit RGB.... One oddity about the procedure is that Visitor doesn't like to load images as backgrounds from your project folder... Try dumping the image somewhere else - on the desktop or in a workfolder somewhere... Add the image to Visitor in the usual way... When you do - the whole view will seem to go all "grid" / "selected" and there's no sign of your image... That's OK! - Just hit "save" then quit and restart Visitor - reload your project and you'll find that not only is your background image in position, but Visitor has copied it to your project folder by itself! You can then dump the desktop or workfolder version of the image - Visitor will use its own copy from now on... B

Hmmm... You're absolutely correct Xendance! I just slapped in links in my previous post - going on my previous recollection of relative prices... The "student" license for CrazyBump in particular, is a new one to me - that's pretty good value if you can swing student status! B

CrazyBump is pretty good - and pretty expensive! A cheaper and pretty impressive alternative is PixPlant (which, despite the name, has nothing to do with plants)... Though you can achieve perfectly good results with the NVIDIA Normal map plugin for Photoshop, or Xnormal, which is pretty powerful, and also free.... *Remember - a "Displacement Map" is NOT simply a "Greyscale of your _CO"... For _MCO's - there's considerably more going on with them than it would first appear... _MCO's, and how to make 'em P.S. - If you don't actually have Photoshop... follow the Adobe link at the bottom of the MCO's page linked to above - register for free for an Adobe account, and then download your 100% free and legit Photoshop CS2... OK, it's a little old nowadays, but it's free, legit, and will easily do any task you're likely to require while terrainmaking... Grab it now, while Adobe are still feeling kind... ;) B

I made a "nice grass" texture set recently after a discussion/request about making golf courses on the terrainmakers skype channel... Grass can be tricky to tile neatly, and even trickier to parallax successfully... This texture uses a "tufts" approach to both the parallax & mco texture components which worked quite well - for a change ;) With appropriate clutter, it should be quite suitable for any "tended grass" areas, such as lawns, parkland, golf course fairways, football pitches or any other general urban "nice grass" context, and - with a cluttercutter in place, it's "nice" enough to stand on it's own - with no clutter at all (see above) - in small areas, such as "golf course greens" which is what it was really for in the first place..... :) bush_nicegrass_01 textureset B

All these "cannot load font" errors are a bit of a giveaway, as are "cannot open object core\whatever" They both indicate a problem with your tools install... It looks very much like either a faulty tools install, or outdated tools.... Please make sure you have the 2.5.1 tools installed - GET THEM HERE You can reinstall with this package directly over your old tools... I'm guessing that will fix things - or at least, sort those errors and clear up your log a little so we can see if theres any other problems... PS - please note - there's a specific thread for Sgt Ace's tutorial - it's stickied at the top of this forum section.... it's really useful if you post Sgt Ace Tut issues in there - that way, if they're resolved, the problem and solution is easy to find for other people searching for "Sgt Aces Tutorial problem blah blah"... Likewise, as and when you make it as far as the rest of my tutorial - there's a thread for that too... it isn't "stickied" currently, but it's usually within the first couple of pages of this section... Much appreciated if any "Bush Tutorial" questions could be asked in the "Bush Tutorial thread".... ;) Try the tools reinstall (back up any personal work you have on P:\ first - just to be safe), then go thru the same procedures you've been following with Sgt Ace's Tut, see if it behaves properly this time... And let us know how it goes...! B

A few more screenshots showing different weathers and times of day... ... and An Album with more & bigger screenshots B

RURA PENTHE This episode of our Ongoing Mission takes us all the way to the Beta Quadrant, to the Klingon penal colony asteroid/planetoid Rura Penthe. Screenshot Album Terrain Details 10.2km x 10.2km - 2.5 meter ground resolution 0.5m/pixel hi-res satellite layer (takes a few moments to load, patience please) Rura Penthe was a penal colony asteroid utilized by the Klingon Empire. Located in the Beta Penthe system, it was widely known as "the alien's graveyard," due to the fact that the life expectancy for a prisoner there was, at most, one year. Prisoners at Rura Penthe were forced to conduct mining operations for the purpose of retrieving the vast deposits of dilithium which existed beneath the surface. The surface temperature of Rura Penthe was extremely low, the landscape dominated by bare rock and thick dirty "cometary" snow. Without proper clothing, warmth or food, no humanoid lifeform was able to survive for an extended period on the surface, so all of the mining and prison facilities were located underground. A magnetic shield encased the mining facility and a vast area surrounding it in order to prevent escape through beaming from the surface. Disclaimer Additional Information Cast & Crew Download Armaholic Download (.bisign & serverkey files included) Gentlemen, once again I invite you to... Boldly Go... B

Do I detect the hint of a new Mondkalb's Buildings Pack???? Where's the damned banana icon when you actually need it!?!!!? :) B

If I remember correctly this pbo is an enormous filesize... Mikeros Arma3p correctly attempts to unpack ALL of your game files to the P:\ drive - while less important for the O2/Model guys, this IS important for us terrain guys - BinPBO in particular, is a mysterious bugger, and could conceivably want a little look at all sorts of not-strictly-terrain-related configs, for example, in unexpected places when it's binarizing... Worse still, it generally doesn't complain if it doesn't find them, just quietly screws up... :( Not what we generally want!, so to avoid any issues whatsoever, Mikes tool takes the "whole game" approach... However - the particular .pbo you mention is a sounds/audio one - it's a pretty safe bet it isn't really required to be unpacked to P:\ I'd suggest you - carefully! - REMOVE that pbo from your Addons folder - do the Arma3P run, then equally carefully, REPLACE it... it'll save Arma3P tripping up over that one and it won't make any difference to your final tools..... B

[quote]class layers { class grass_green { texture="terrain\data\grass_green_co.png";[/quote] This path should point to the appropriate surface "_MCO" file, or an equivalent... texture="terrain\data\grass_green_mco.png or a basic parameters-based one like... texture=#(rgb,1,1,1)color(0.5,0.5,0.5,1,cdt); Regardless of the colours you chose to use on your mask, when you feed it to Visitor, it slices it into individual tiles - then it analyses the colours on each tile individually - if it finds more than four (PER TILE!), it'll get confused... Assuming it doesn't get confused, the very next thing it does is change those colours - on a per-tile basis - to RGBA - literally, red, green, blue and black. So the colours you see on any Data\Layers\masktile are the "Visitor equivalents" of the colours originally on the mask. Visitor may well have chosen "Black" to represent your "Original Mask Green", and since all your mask is solid green, that would make all your mask tiles solid black... BI have "sneaky extra tech" which allow them to push this "per-tile colour limit" to six colours - that involves Extreme Sneakiness, plus Alpha Channels - that means their Data\Layers\masktiles are 20% bigger file-size-wise and also require that telltale "_lca" tag - "a" for "alpha". Don't worry too much about that - later on once you're up and running you can start to realise that it actually IS "4 colours per tile" - NOT "per whole terrain"... in the adjacent "tile" you could have 4 different colours - 4 different surfaces... (Well, there's overlap, so one common colour is required, but generally speaking, you can cram in a lot more colours than four..... but - later) When you "Import Sat & Mask" in Visitor, it cuts the Big .png files up, into smaller .png files... However, when you launch buldozer for the first time after that procedure, a DOS window should open and you should see all your .png tiles being converted to .paa tiles - which buldozer requires before you can view the scene for the first time. If that DOS box isn't appearing then there could be an issue with your tools... Have you done any of the basic tutorials? - did their layers tiles convert to .paa automatically when you ran buldozer? Did a DOS window appear listing what was happening? .rvmat looks OK - no issues there I don't think..... B

2048 x 2048 @ 7.5 meters should work fine - that's roughly the same ballpark figures as eg: Takistan... For the "classic" 1 meter/pixel Sat & Mask layer you'd want to aim for a 15360x15360 size, with a "Base Texture Layer" size of 30m x 30m Pretty much standard sizes - they should perform well in-game if not overdressed and shouldn't present any techie issues at all... B

A new Raunhofer terrain...!?! AND VanhA missions!!!!!?!! A Mighty Combination!.... that's my weekends entertainment secured! - Thanks guys!! And - nice to see you both back producing your usual serious quality content! B

You're using the "2.5.1" version of Arma2P - that's correct, but it sounds like you may be using an older tools version... The current latest version tools suite is 2.5.1 (same as Arma2P) - Get Them Here - these tools should be compatible with all A2 and OA models (but not Arma 3 models) I'd make a backup of all your personal stuff on the P:\ drive - just to be sure - then reinstall all tools using the newest version... You should just be able to reinstall and overwrite your current tools in their current locations with the new version..... B

Hi Abs! Delighted to see you're still Boldly Going in Arma 3!!! Inspired me already, so you have..... more about that.... later! Meantime, I discovered while using one of your Trek units as a "terrain reviewing unit" in the editor that your chaps aren't packing a map by default... This renders the in-game map inaccessible (and caused considerable Dammit Jimming when I naturally assumed I'd busted a terrain config somehow... :D) <hint>Time to go watch "The Gallileo Seven" episode.... ;)</hint> B

Speaking entirely unofficially, I'd say it's perfectly OK to use your VBS2 PE tools to create Arma-based stuff... In fact, I know of several PE owners who, after a bit of fuss, have managed to shoehorn their PE Tools into at least semi-working for Arma content production... The main drawbacks are... The VBS2 tools are, of course, totally aligned towards VBS2 content - there's a fair bit of fuss and even some registry tweaking involved in getting them to work reasonably... And you've already discovered the second drawback... VBS2 PE owners are pretty thin on the ground... VBS2 PE owners trying to use the tools for Arma purposes are practically non-existent, plus, of course, the VBS2 support staff are primarily concerned with answering VBS2 support questions, and TBH generally know bugger all about Arma, much less the specific requirements of Arma terrain modelling... In other words - it's extremely unlikely that anyone will object if you manage to get your tools working for Arma, but it's considered an "unsupported usage", so official support or practical assistance is likely to be virtually zero... Fortunately, I just happen to be a VBS2 Terrain Dev ;), so if you catch me when I'm off-duty, either by PM or on Skype, I'll provide a little "unofficial support" to get you up and running... If you've fooled with the VBS2 tools at all then you'll already know that they're anything but a "magic bullet" for instant terrain making, but one or two aspects might be handy... Shapefile production for roads, for example, might be useful for the new A3 terrains... I still occasionally make Arma terrains... I'm busy making one in my spare time right now, and I'm using standard Visitor 3 PE... that kinda says it all really... However, the single biggest asset in the VBS2 Tools Suite should already be available to you - Global Mapper!!! I use that ALL the time! B

That section of layers.cfg looks OK... What do you mean by this part? B

Try clearing the "P:\bin_temp" folder... BinPBO uses that folder as a workspace and it also tries to be clever and save time on subsequent runs, by "re-using" files from that temp folder if it thinks they "haven't changed" since the last time you binarized... That can occasionally lead to "ghost files" appearing in the final packed addon... Clearing the buffer and a fresh clean pack is always a good idea for a final "production version" of your addon. Well... technically, it IS possible to unrap a .wrp to a .pew and then load that into Visitor - though it's generally discouraged apart from for "rescue purposes"... B

material = "god_ahmshere\datagod_ahmshere_sand.rvmat"; you're missing an "\".... and you need to assign a sand colour here too.... class Colors { sm_grass[]={{255,255,255}}; sand[]={{Pick,A,Colour}}; }; B

Absolute minimum files required for the map to run in-game... "myproject.pbo" - when unpacked, should contain... * "Data" Folder Inside here should be all your groundtexture files - in .paa format - plus a "Layers" folder containing .paa versions only of all your sat & mask tiles + (binarized) rvmats) * config.bin (binarized version of your config.cpp + cfgSurfaces.hpp and all your other .hpp's rolled into one) * $PBO_PREFIX$ file (created by BinPbo - it's just a text file and should read "mytag\myproject" * myproject.wrp (binarized version) * texHeaders.bin (sneaky file generated by BinPbo to assist with texture loading times) ... and that should be pretty much all... The "Source" folder which contains "working stuff" like layers.cfg, the actual one-piece Sat & Mask, original heightmap, etc should be excluded by BinPbo at the packing stage... B

You could take a look at Quantum GIS... It's a free, pretty fully featured GIS program which handles rasters & DEM's and projections, shapefiles and most of the other usual GIS stuff that Global Mapper does... B

Are there any plans to allow for "user / community" terrains modding in the future? This looks like it could be great fun to make a terrain or two for! B

Hi again... Firstly - don't mess with that "Segment Size" parameter... it's a basic engine thing and it "likes" to be 512 if possible. (You'll like it being only 512 too, later on when you've mastered the basics and you're thinking about more advanced stuff like using more than 4 surfaces ;)) Try resetting all your parameters to default... Sat image size to 12288 - all other parameters in the "calculator" section as default, then "Accept Proposed" - then set a suitable Base Texture Layer size... in your case you should be offered "48m x 48m", so choose that... Now - go look in your "P:\YourTag\YourProject\Data" folder - you'll find a "Layers" folder containing your current Sat & Mask tiles - delete that folder! Then - reimport your Sat & Mask in the usual way to regenerate the Layers folder and contents at your new settings size... * Can I also suggest that if you have any further problems you make a thread of your own? This thread is really all about JR Walkers sneaky oversized Sat layers technique - that's a Cool Thing and, in the future, people will be searching this forum section for info on how to make it work. When they find this thread, they'll be hoping subsequent discussion in the thread contains more relevant hints & tips - not a separate discussion about a different topic, interesting though it may be... :) If you have a problem or a question and you can't find anything relevant by searching this Terrains forum section, it's perfectly OK to start a new thread about the topic - give it a nice, clear & relevant title, so it turns up for other people in future searches... "Settings for Satellite Image Size" or something would do nicely... A few months down the line, new beginner guys with the same problem will search and find your thread, read the answers you got and be well pleased they found a solution so easily.... B

This is the main reason for the "blotchy patches of colour" you're seeing on your Sat Layer... It's VERY low-res! Generally accepted "normal resolution" for a Sat & Mask layer is 1 pixel per meter... In your case, with a 12288 x 12288 meter terrain, you'd want to use a 12288x12288 pixel Sat Layer. Currently, with your 5120x5120 pixel Sat image, you're only using about 2.4 meters per pixel resolution... that means each Sat image pixel is being stretched to cover a 2.4x2.4 meter area in-game. That kind of enlargement tends to reduce images to a blotchy, pixellated coverage - just like in your picture... It also looks from the coastline in your picture that your sat image may not be perfectly aligned with your heightmap... it looks a little... off. I'd suggest you take a look at that too, but first thing to think about is a higher-res sat layer... try 12288x12288 to start with, it should immediately look a lot better... Also - this thread is really all about JR's fairly groundbreaking "super high res" satellite layers technique... since your terrain is fairly small, perhaps in the future you could consider such a high-res layer (and you wouldn't need JR's sneaky tricks to do it), but for now it's probably best to aim for a "standard res 1px=1m" until you've got the hang of things... B

In the icon selection at the top of the main Visitor window you'll see on open and a closed padlock - side-by-side... Once all your pier elements are correct, carefully select them all (Ctrl & Shift while clicking will add to or subtract from the selection)... Once you have them all selected, though I don't think you can "group" them as such, you CAN "lock" them in position with the closed padlock icon, or unlock with the open one... Slightly confusingly, you'll find a third padlock icon up there - that's a "view locked items" button, which will show all locked objects as shaded mid-grey... (which is why it's a good idea NOT to use "mid grey" as a colour in your Artificial objects lists ;)) Be warned - although you'll find that these locked objects can no longer be accidentally dragged out of position, they're still vulnerable to being knocked out of vertical alignment if you were to start tweaking the heightmap around the area... B