[?] How do you make your terrain?

[Desertfox]

I cant seem to make a good terrain So im wondering! How did you guys / how do you make your terrain? Do you use a program then sculpt it? Do you do it all custom? Do you just use a program?

[IronTaxi]

actually im a little strange i think as i custom sculpt it all...i dont know i just like the feel of it..

I usually do a rough terrain..let call it 1st gen terrain...

then after placing all the primary statics i do a 2nd gen..adding some natural looking features and stuff.. that might be it for non primary areas.. I usually do a 3rd or 4th passs on all the key areas adding ditches adn erosion features or just general dips and dives...

[r3st]

terragen or l3dt, depending on what i am making.

[jedermann]

I did it once the following way. You can get GPS data of whole USA for free resolved 10m or 30m(cant remember excactly, it was half a year ago) of accuracy. The data has the same format you can import in terragen, so you can tweak a little and export it to binary format BF2 editor needs. You have to scale it in height though or interpolate the missing resolution. I guess Photoshop would do the job here. There was also a texture tool around to do the mapping automatically based on slopes. It worked like a charm. You can also look at http://www.turbosquid.com for free 3D models. I found some good, game optimized, medieval houses for free there. Creating the simplified collision model wasn't to hard.

It was possible to preview the whole GPS data in Internet Explorer, so it was pretty easy to find an area that fits your needs. America is big, you can find any terrain you can think of.

I hope that helps. I myself stopped mapping, because even getting a nice terrain in one day partially populated with over and undergrowth, it is still a lot of work left. And without the guarantee having it in the mod it is kind of wasted time. The most annoying thing was still testing the map and the BF2 Editor crashing over and over again.

[jedermann]

Here is a good viewer for finding the region you want
http://seamless.usgs.gov/website/seamless/viewer.php

But I was unable to find the links to the map data. It was well separated in resolution and longitude/latitude with a directory structure interface. I can remember now that I also used 3dem to cut a part out of those maps and export it to terragen. One of those original map files was about 5-10 megs in size.

[Rhino]

photoshop mostly.

[V3N0N_br]

I go to Google Earth, find a good location, print screen it, paste on photoshop, on the "heightmapprimary.raw" file inside your map's folder. (printscreen the surrounding areas of the main location if you have to fill more pixels on the image corresponding to your map size)
Then, make it B&W, apply some filters if there are too many contrasted areas... make it more smooth... and you're set.

[77SiCaRiO77]

Rhino']photoshop mostly.

how do you use photoshop? its any tutorial here?

[V3N0N_br]

Can't remember any tut right now...
But if you look into http://www.bf2editor.org you'll probably find.

As far as I can tell, you'll do your terrain using only B&W (black and white), and the darker a spot is, the higher. The wither, the lower. So, depending on wich default height you'll want to obtain, you'll have to measure the color tone.

[Rhino]

ye basicly what venon said, its a grayscale image and the white areas are higher ground and the black areas are lower ground. I would only recommened any one too it thou if they know what they are doing and have dome some maps using the bf2 editor to do there terrain etc before

[r3st]

http://bfeditor.org/

not bf2editor

[Desertfox]

Rhino']ye basicly what venon said, its a grayscale image and the white areas are higher ground and the black areas are lower ground. I would only recommened any one too it thou if they know what they are doing and have dome some maps using the bf2 editor to do there terrain etc before

Can you show us a example of what the OGT one looks like?