JohnLoftyWiseman

I'm just starting off with modelling in O2, and I've followed through the Piper Cheyenne tutorial, or at least the four parts that are there, so from that I have a knowledge of how to model at least the outside of a plane. Unfortunately, it seems very difficult to find any tutorials online for O2, especially things like how to build the interiors of planes or how to get started with making the different LODs. Anyway, at this time I've started to model the one plane I've wanted in ArmA for a long time now; a C17. (I know someone did try to make this a while ago, and showed images and videos of it, but they never released it as far as I'm aware.) My question right now is how do I measure the model properly and make sure it's true to the real life dimensions? I know what the real dimensions are, and I know that I can create planes of those dimensions in O2. However, in the Piper Cheyenne tutorial images of the plane are used to trace the shape of the different parts of the plane, and I'm presuming that this is advisable with every vehicle model, but those images aren't the same size as the planes that are created. So: How do you make sure that the aircraft is the same size as the real-life version, whilst making sure that the shape of it is accurate too? Resizing the images just takes the aircraft image out of proportion, so how should this properly be done? If my question sounds a little unclear, I apologize, but I think that should give people the general idea of what I would like to know. Thanks in advance.

The map I'm making is quite hilly, but the locations I've chosen for the runways are the flatter areas I can find. Aircraft can take off and land fine at them, but the only problem is how on earth to place hangars and other objects on slopes. Could a concrete slab or some other material be placed under it? Is there a way in Visitor to edit the terrain or to slant the object? Editing the height of a hangar simply won't work since I need to be able to get aircraft inside, and lowering only fills it with hill, so I doubt aircraft would be able to go inside then. Is there any way to solve this?

So now I've finally got up to the stage of creating a satellite map and mask for my terrain. I have my height map (as a .xyz). I've imported it into Visitor 3 and added a few buildings, roads, and plants. I've then exported the different layers (building layer, plants layer, terrain layer, and roads layer) as EMFs, and converted them to PNGs, before importing them into Paint.net (I don't have Photoshop but I'm thinking of using Gimp), and edited the layers so that they all lie on top of the terrain layer (the background at this point is not visible), the result of which can be seen here. (You'll notice that the few objects I've placed are located in the lower left hand corner of the image; I'll add more in future, but this is just to begin with.) The biome is temperate forest, just for reference. So now I need to add the textures to make the complete satellite map, but unfortunately I have little to no experience using image editing programs to this level. Is it a case of actually adding images over and over and blending them, or is there a way to change a particular colour from the SurfaceMapLegend to a specific texture (which would be way more preferable)? Do images have to be smudged or blended in some way? From the tutorial I'm currently going through, the end result should look something like this, but with my terrain. As of now I have no idea how to get anywhere near that stage, let alone creating the mask, which according to that same tutorial should look a little like this, again with my terrain though. If anyone could give some advice about how to undertake these tasks, I would be very grateful. Thanks again for all advice. The help I've received so far has been extremely helpful indeed.

Thanks for the replies - the guides that were linked have both been extremely helpful, and I've made a lot of progress. I'm now up to the stage of making the satellite map and mask for the terrain, and I have questions about that, which I think I'll start a new thread for since it's a different issue. The replies are greatly appreciated. Thanks again.

Recently I've been wanting to get into map editing in ArmA II. I've read many a tutorial on terrain editing using Visitor 3, but so far I've only used templates from other people. Ultimately, I would like to make my own map from scratch, but even after some fairly extensive searching on various forums, I haven't been able to find any tutorials for creating the map from absolute scratch (by that I mean creating all of the files to go into the data and source folders; terrain maps, the masks, the CPP files, etc, which can then be imported into Visitor 3 and binarised into a complete map for use in the game itself), so I was wondering if there are any tutorials anyone knows of that explain how to do this, or even if anyone would be able to explain how to do it. I know it's a lot of work and steps, and therefore probably not something that any one tutorial or answer can explain, but I figured it'd most likely be better to ask this question directly since I don't see much out there already for this particular topic. As some additional info, I've already gone through the terrain creation tutorial over on the Bi Studio Wiki, meaning I've already created a new dedicated partition, and extracted several .PBOs into my CA folder, as well as registered a tag to use for the projects. TL;DR version: Is it all done from within Visitor 3? How do you go from a blank canvas to starting to form mountains and roads and whole cities? Any help would be greatly appreciated.