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[WIP] Bat Country


TheVampire

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So I'm working on a map I decided to name Bat Country. It's an island based on the Island of Santorini, Greece. It will be terrained similarly to Altis/Stratis. Here is a picture of the real island.

 

xkRaLBo.png

 

The Island has some history. The island used to be a volcano until it erupted and collapsed into itself forming a Caldera in the middle. The remaining islands are the remains of this volcanic island and caldera. The eruption from the island is thought to possibly be the cause of the extinction of the Minoan civilization (68mi South via Tsunami), and may be the source of the lore behind the city of Atlantis. The center island in the caldera is still volcanically active spewing lava flows occasionally. The inside edge of the caldera sports sheer cliffs to the water's edge.

 

I went with the name Bat Country in reference to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and because I do not want people to view this as an accurate representation in any way of the real island.

 

The map size will be roughly 20km x 20km, so about half the size of Altis, but the actual land surface area will be much less.

 

The reason for this thread is discussion about the terrain, and as a place for me to ask for help in creation of the terrain. This is not yet an "announcement" thread for the terrain to be released anytime soon.

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Current issue is that I need to photoshop the sat map from the real world version, and then make a mask (or should I make the mask after the configs?)

I shouldn't need to worry about creating textures since I plan to use the same ones as stratis.

Currently all I have is a XYZ heightmap and a 4K photo from google earth.

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Current issue is that I need to photoshop the sat map from the real world version, and then make a mask (or should I make the mask after the configs?)

I shouldn't need to worry about creating textures since I plan to use the same ones as stratis.

Currently all I have is a XYZ heightmap and a 4K photo from google earth.

Both at the same time.

there's a way to cheat with masks to at least create nice base to work off of, It's called indexed colors.

Load your satmap into photoshop.

Image > Mode > indexed color...

Now you can restrict your satmap to 5 or 6 colors only, photoshop will automatically find nearest neighbor to a color you choose.

use 5 indexed colors if planning to use normal map (futura), or use 6 if not.

Check your satmap for color ranges you should use.

Convert back to RGB and save as tga.

 

Normally you'd want to stick to solid colors (255.0.0 - 0.0.0 - 0.128.255 - etc). Dont worry while indexing, you can always index more colors, like 256 and then use Selec > Color range to change to a solid color. When established few base colors, do indexing to limit your map to 5 or 6 colors. This is if you intend to use solid colors like pink on sand or grass for some reason.

 

For satmaps, normals and masks you should stick with 1m = 1px if possible. So a 1024px heightmap with 10cell size = 10240px satmap/mask/normal (2048x5 or 4096x2.5 also). Anything less will look blurred or washed out, or just create broken satmaps where they overlap.

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Impressive :) but not at £250

true, but still.. it patches all satmaps together for you with a click of a button and slider for a quality. That already saves you hours of work.

 

Not sure about whole licensing part, but lets think outside of the box - Buy a licence and offer services to others, they gives you coordinates and size they want and chip you like 10 or 20 bucks for an exported height and sat maps. That could work and plugin pay itself in a long run, right?

You give them a low rez preview and if they are happy, you provide them with full rez satmap, normal map and and 4k heightmap.

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true, but still.. it patches all satmaps together for you with a click of a button and slider for a quality. That already saves you hours of work.

 

Not sure about whole licensing part, but lets think outside of the box - Buy a licence and offer services to others, they gives you coordinates and size they want and chip you like 10 or 20 bucks for an exported height and sat maps. That could work and plugin pay itself in a long run, right?

You give them a low rez preview and if they are happy, you provide them with full rez satmap, normal map and and 4k heightmap.

 

That could work, at £10 a pop ? after 25 maps you're in profit :)

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I was planning to do a 4096x5m heightmap for 20,480m and I was going to try to build a 1 - 1m satmap for it.

Thanks for the mask tips though Raymix.

My first large map was 4096 x 8.132, because I started with 32000m world by mistake and had to scrap it. It produced broken satmaps and whichever way you look at it, I could not fix it.

I keep mentioning broken satmaps, but never shown an example, so here it is.

On top of that, it required 32k satmap to work with. 

At first while testing and rendering I started with 40960px satmaps, nothing fancy, but boy it was slow to work with. Every step you do takes 10sec for photoshop to respond... literary every smallest thing including zooming. And I am on [email protected] and 16GB RAM.. still crawling.

 

So I backed down at 20480px and it was easier to manage it... but still not fast enough for practicing, so finally I decided to scrap the terrain and start a new one.

Current one is 4096 x 2.5 @ 10240px and I am very happy with results. Rendering changes in world machine only takes 1 night now ^__^...glad that part's over, heh. Working in photoshop at this resolution is a peace of cake ofc, so that's another good thing.

 

Alright, good luck with the project, ask anything, I'll gladly share everything I found out so far (haven't got into configs much yet, but unrap altis or stratis, there's plenty of resources there, don't bother with online sample configs, they are outdated). Oh and sorry I can't share my WIP on forums, since it's not epoch based, so it would be irrelevant, but feel free to type in my nickname in youtube to see how it looks like :)

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Would you suggest going with a 10240 sat making it 1px - 2m then?

I didn't think about the hardware limitations.

nah 20480 should be ok since you are working with downloaded satmaps, problems at this rez starts when adding more and more layers or modifying whole file at the same time.

I believe working with PSB instead of PSD format should force photoshop to work at optimized speeds.

Give it a go before drawing any conclusions. While zoomed in and working on small details its fine even at twice the resolution. But working with whole image at the same time and playing around with multiple layers or alphas slows down even 10240, which is natural, but at least it does not crash and fits my work speed. I keep everything on SSD, think it helps a tad... especially if saving often when file sizes starts growing.

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I need to get an SSD. My read/write speed is atrocious. I'm surprised my computer can even play games sometimes.

I didn't grab a good satmap when global mapper would let me export, so I'm having to stitch images together from google earth pro. I'll probably have to put the whole island together out of 2k map shots and then resize it over terrain render from L3DT.

How did you do your sat map for your WIP Raymix?

If I could get a fairly correct sat map generated I would just mask over the building locations and roads rather than work with a large sat map.

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How did you do your sat map for your WIP Raymix?

I generated mine from scratch using world machine and grome, it's not based on any real location. There were quite  a lot of tests and scrapped terrains till I got what I want, it's best I can do to make it look as natural as possible without spending few weeks/months studying geology, lol.... here's some public pics from current and previous attempts (sry for hijacking and offtopic): http://imgur.com/a/rEM9c

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I generated mine from scratch using world machine and grome, it's not based on any real location. There were quite  a lot of tests and scrapped terrains till I got what I want, it's best I can do to make it look as natural as possible without spending few weeks/months studying geology, lol.... here's some public pics from current and previous attempts (sry for hijacking and offtopic): http://imgur.com/a/rEM9c

 

Common problem with heightmaps in video games is that people use them in wrong scale. Be careful with your scale!

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Common problem with heightmaps in video games is that people use them in wrong scale. Be careful with your scale!

I agree. Trees should never be as far up a mountain as snow, and the snow should be a ways up the mountain :)

And @Richie I do have it but it means manually saving shots and then manually stitching it all together in Photoshop. If I could use a program like L3DT to generate a terrain that looks close enough I'd just do the rest by hand. L3DT makes a sat map, but the water has a uniform depth and it thinks it's all supposed to be forest instead of the sandyness of the Mediterranean islands. I could maybe spend some time repainting it, but that would probably take just as long as using google earth.

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I agree. Trees should never be as far up a mountain as snow, and the snow should be a ways up the mountain :)

 

That really depends on the real-world geographical location of your map, even if fictional, it still needs a geographic position, if anything for the star maps et al to function correctly ;)

 

Maps like Taviana I think had almost the right mix of different terrain types, and it could have been a great map if it was officially released as a standalone map.  Alas - some thing's just aren't meant to be :rolleyes:

 

 

Good luck with your map Vampire, I'll be sure to try it out when it gets released.

 

My current map project is a behemoth 41x41km, so it will be some more months before I'm ready for any public sneak-peek / reveals.

 

If you need help with any issues drop me a PM :)

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  • 2 weeks later...

Current issue is that I need to photoshop the sat map from the real world version, and then make a mask (or should I make the mask after the configs?)

I shouldn't need to worry about creating textures since I plan to use the same ones as stratis.

Currently all I have is a XYZ heightmap and a 4K photo from google earth.

Can you please make a good tutorial on how to get the best quality heightmap and sat image?

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  • 1 month later...
  • 4 weeks later...

Defo needs bridges to connect the islands, looking at the image you provided it would make one hell of winter map, similar style to namalsk with the wind sound effect etc .....

 

Arma 3 winter maps are rare to none! 

 

edit! just read OP again ! no chance of winter map here then, It will ahh be another greek island for arma 3.

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