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Advanced (Terrain - Textures - Decolayers - Visibility - Lighting)

By: DooFi

The following unedited tutorial including all screenshots was made by DooFi. Thanks DooFi.
This is a great addition to the RC Mod Site.

TERRAIN

To create a terrain, we need some empty space. Select a texture of your choice

(it won't be seen in your final map) and substract a cube like this one:

Now go to the Actor Class

Browser and select 'Zone Info'. You'll find it under 'Info'.

Place it in the middle of your room and edit the properties so that it looks like the picture:

I set the IconScale to 20, because I wanted the ZoneInfo to appear a little bit bigger than other actors. Now I can notice it even when I zoomed out to see the whole room. You do not need to do that, but in my opinion it's a nice feature to keep the overview. Now click on the 'Terrain Editing' Button

. You will notice there is no Hheightmap info, but a black rectangle. Click 'New' to create one.

You can leave the options as they are. If you want to use more than one heightmaps you can change the name to 'TerrainHeightmap01', but this will not be mentioned in this tutorial ;). It is important not to change the Package, because 'MyLevel' means, that it will be saved in the *.ctm file of your map! If you create a new package, gamers have to download it, too, when they want to play the map! I think downloading one file is more comfortable than downloading two ones ;).
Click OK to continue. Congratulations, you have created a terrain! There is only one Problem: The terrain has not got a texture xD. Open the texture browser

to select a texture. Of course you should not choose a texture from Packages like 'AssaultShip_Textures' or 'CoreShip_Textures' ;). Choose a grass texture from one of the Kashyyyk packages or a sand texture from one of the Arena packages. You can also import your own images but be shure that they are seamless!
Switch to 'Layers', select the first slot so that it gets a green border, when you found a fitting image and click 'New' to create a new texture layer.

Change the name to 'Alphalayer01' or another name, because you will add some more layers later. rebuild to see your results.

You will not see anything in the 3D-view because your room is not lightened (<- correct verbform?!). So click here

to see something like this:

Switch to the camera mode again by clicking

and select

. It's the TerrainInfo. Click on it with the right mouse button and select 'Move To Origin'

to place the TerrainInfo in the center of your map. You can move it over the Z-axis to get more space for buildings or whatever on top of the terrain. Select the TerrainInfo and click on the blue arrow in the Front or Side View and drag it.
Now rebuild again.

This is what you will see (I set IconScale of the TerrainInfo to 25):

TEXTURES

I think it does not look very nice, does it? Click 'Terrain Editing'

and select your AlphaLayer (not the HeightMap) The green border will appear. Now select the Tex-Scale-tool.

Now hold [CTRL] and drag the cursor over the terrain holding a mouse button. When holding the right mouse button, the terrain texture will be scaled over the x axis and when holding the left mouse button the y axis will be scaled. After scaling the textures they will not look as tiled as before. It's a pity that you cannot hold both buttons to scale the texture proportional, but I've found out a way to do it: Go to the TerrainInfo properties > TerrainInfo and look at this:

you can set UScale and VScale to a value of your choice! Do not enter too large values because it can happen that the texture gets pixelated (<- does this word exist?! ;) ). The texture looks still tiled, there are not as many squares as before, but it is still tiled. Add more AlphaLayers scale and rotate them different and scribble around with the 'Painting' tool. By setting the inner radius much smaller than the outer radius, the different textures will not blend into each other too hard. If you are not happy with the transitions, use the 'Smoothing' tool for smoothing them. The steeper hills and mountains are, the more rocky is the texture. To create hills, select the heightmap and 'paint' heights (Left Mouse Button) and depths (Right Mouse Button) holding [CTRL]. I've played around with the painting tool and some textures and this is the result:

DECOLAYERS

Now you want to place bushes on your terrain, don't you? No Problem: It is a little bit harder than adding textures, but you will get it for sure :D. What you will create now is called 'DecoLayer'. At first you need a so called 'densitymap'. For creating a densitymap you have to use a little trick: Create a new AlphaLayer but call it 'DensityMap01', so that you can distinquish between Alphalayers and densitymaps.

After creating the Layer it appears in the list of texture layers, but you do not want to use it for placing textures, so you can delete it.

Once you deleted it from the list of texture layers, it will not be displayed any longer, but it still exists in the 'myLevel' package! Now go to this package in the texture browser

and select the densitymap.

Then select a static mesh, too.

I chose 'LowerKashyyyk_PR -> Trees -> Bushy_bush'. Do not choose trees, because decolayers do not have any collision! Trees must be placed one by one. After selecting the densitymap and the bush switch to 'Decorations' and click 'New'.

Now you have to set the densitymap and the static mesh manually. Therefore right-click on the layer and click 'Set Density Texture from Current' and 'Set Static Mesh from Current'. Because you want to see your decoration, set 'Display?' to 'true'.

Before you can use the Decolayer, you have to adjust a property of the TerrainInfo manually: Go to the TerrainInfo properties by doubleclicking

Navigate to 'TerrainInfo -> DecoLayers -> FadeoutRadius' and edit the two options 'Max' and 'Min'. Just try out some different values till its pleasing you.

Now you can use the painting tool to 'paint' the static mesh on your terrain. You can also use the 'noise' tool to place your bushes more randomly.

VISIBILITY

Let me show you another handy tool: The Visibility tool!

The visibility tool simply cuts holes into terrain. With the left mousebutton you make the terrain visible and with the right mousebutton you make holes in it.

The visibility tool also cuts holes into the collision of the terrain, so you can fall through your holes! You can use the visibility tool to create caves for example:

LIGHTING

Your terrain map is completely black. Let's create lights to illuminate it! We will use 'Sunlights'. You find them in the Actor Class Browser

under '*Light -> *Sunlight'. Select it and place it into one of your maps coers.
Before you can see the sunlight, you have to add a skybox. For some reason there cannot be sunlight without a skybox o_0.
How to make a Skybox is said here
The one from my example map is copied from DM_Canyon.ctm and modified.

Go to the sunlight's properties and edit 'LightColor -> LightBrightness, LightHue and LightSaturation'. You can edit 'Display -> IconScale' as well to scale its icon so that you can find it easier. IconScale does not influence the lighting of the map, it only scales the Icon (which cannot be seen in the game)! You do not need to edit 'Lighting -> LightRadius' even though it is displayed around the icon.

You can see the little arrow of the sunlight.

Rotate it as seen at the picture (I drew them in, of course):

Then add another sunlight into the opposite coer, move it a little bit lower (duplicate the old one so that it has the same properties) and rotate it like that:

The angle has to be a little bit smaller than the other one's.
Edit the properties of the second sunlight. Go to 'LightColor -> LightBrightness' and set it to 100 or 150. If your map is set at night, you can set 'LightBrightness' of the first sunlight to 150 and the second to 100 or even smaller.

I think this tutorial has finished! Congratulations!
The only thing you have to do now is adding playerstarts, rebuilding, saving the map and playing it! If you want you can add some houses or a lake or flagpoints and weapons and a limitation (you can go to the edge of the map and look into the skybox yet ;) ) and so on, of course ;).

You can download this tutorial map called DM_terraintut2 in the filefront back-up store here.

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Expanding your Textures

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