Thygrrr's box of Cool Tools™

This is a spinoff from my "1st map" thread here. Not much to see there, I'm still busy sorting out a good workflow between my tools and the Map Editor.




Thanks for the friendly feedback! (why didn't you post it in the thread so everybody can share?)

Anyway, I synthesized the heightfield using Terragen, which is a terrain generator, free for personal use. I imported it after some re-scaling attempts, then smoothed and edited it here and there to add the river beds and some of the isles. Terragen has been used to create maps and tilesets for Total Annihilation by various community mappers.
Official site: http://www.planetside.co.uk/
Nice gallery: http://www.nightqueen.de/photogallery.php?album_id=2 ... I believe this picture would be an awesome supcom landscape - and not to mention this one (both made solely using Terragen).

An alternative Terrain Generator I've had good results with in the past (not yet for SupCom) is L3DT, which takes a wholly different approach to heightfield synthesis than Terragen, but has some neat functions for specific features like craters and peaks. Takes a while to wrap your head around the lengthy step-by-step process, but is certainly worth it. (thanks for muf_dvr for mentioning it)
Official Site: http://www.bundysoft.com/L3DT/
A map I quickly hacked together with it: pic1 and pic2

I also use XnView for smaller graphics processing jobs (edge detect, etc) amd fast image viewing. It can save and open .DDS files, so it's really useful in the SupCom context.
Official site: http://xnview.org

Alternatively, I use Irfan View, which is similar, slightly less powerful in some areas (and slightly more powerful in others). It's faster as a viewer, but less robust UI-wise, and some of its colour reduction routines aren't as accurate and slightly affect the brightness of the image (bad when you're working with advanced heightmaps or bitmaps with areas that need to be 100% accurately shaded).
Official site: http://www.irfanview.com

For more complex, non-texture graphics work (like, logos and icons), I use Paint.NET and the awesome GIMP. Both are free and very powerful - Paint.NET is a good pixel graphics program, and the GIMP is a free alternative to Photoshop.
Official sites: http://www.getpaint.net/ and http://www.gimp.org

Last, but not least, I enjoy using Texture Maker (formerly known as i-Tex) for textures, maps, and height/bump maps. It's great for everything from generation to processing, editing, refinement and generation of derived data, such as bump- and normal maps. It's an absolutely awesome program I can't even start to describe. I own a professional license and am very, very, very happy with it.
Official site: www.texturemaker.com
Great examples of what it does: here and here and here and here and here

Texture Maker is perfectly suited to import, edit and export all sorts of maps that the SupCom Map Editor imports, edits and exports itself. Terragen is less flexible in some places, but it has strong focus on terrain synthesis, a lot better than Texture Maker in some aspects - and definitely more "purist", if all you want is a raw initial heightfield that really feels like a landscape. Of course you can combine them to get the best of both worlds!

P.S.: Be warned - some of these tools mentioned here are incredibly powerful, which unfortunately means they have a very steep learning curve.

EDIT by CoreComm: Sticked for great justice!

Nice, I will definitely take a look at some of these.

And one more, http://www.bundysoft.com/L3DT/
If you email the developer and ask nice he will give you a temp key for the pro version of his terrain renderer.

Ah, thanks, I've used L3DT in the past for another project. I found it a bit unintuitive, but it has really neat features, like adding volcanic craters. etc. Added to the list!

I think L3DT Standard Edition is pretty good for creating landscapes already, though... the pro version's Indie license is very affordable, though (USD 34 if you make less than USD 250,000 revenue a year).

Terragen comes in at USD 99 if you want to generate terrains bigger than 513x513 (which would be 10kmx10km in SupCom, if I'm not mistaken). You can always scale and re-sharpen your exported heightfields in an image processing software though, depending on your skill.

The Texture Maker Basic License is also quite affordable (USD 29.95) and has most of the every-day usage features in it. http://www.texturemaker.com/help/misc/features.htm

This thread should be "stickied".
Btw, Terragen was widely used for making TA maps, nice to see someone remembering this tool. A good site for plugins/converters for Terragen: http://www.terrasource.net/

that picture would of that terrain would make an absouletely sweet map

you wouldn't happen to know a good converter for aerial pics to heightmaps

No, it's very hard to convert aerial pics to heightmaps (satisfactorily). That's actually one of the key fields in astronomical/satellite image processing sciences. Such tools exist, but I couldn't name one if my life depended on it. Also, your mileage may vary depending on whether you own a supercomputer or not.

Does anybody know if it is at all possible to import heightmaps into modelling applications like Maya?

It's definitely possible, though you might need an intermediary plugin or another software like Bryce that can export heightfields as 3D models.

Terragen's animation system interfaces with Maya through a software package called MATG.
Official Site: http://matg.keysnclicks.com/

You can find other Terragen integration tools here:
http://www.planetside.co.uk/terragen/re ... ntegration

How can I export raw from terragen? It doesn't seem to have a 16bit raw IBM type (only motorola and intel)

It seems I remember one of those two types working. They were just named different. If you try both, one should work. I don't remember well since that was April when I was last messing with Terragen.

Use intel. That's the right byte order.

I wonder why they ever do that. It's either Big Endian (Motorola, PowerPC, many others) or Little Endian (Ibm, Intel, many others). Calling it anything other than Little/Big Endianness is misleading.

Vielen Dank Thygrrr werd ich mir alles ma anschaun )

hmm; you might add WorldMachine to your list. Worldmachine can be obtained from here:

http://www.world-machine.com

The basic edition is free;
there are two backdraws:: the basic edition allows only terrains with 512x512 in Size and it is a rather complex program.
The advantage is that you have more control over your terrain.

http://forum.gaspowered.com/viewtopic.php?t=16190

::edit:: cheap but it should show the point

that screen shows some sort of field test/proof of concept for a 1on1 map; i'm currently working on.

Oh and a decent idea would be to include wether your tools can handle those RAW files created by the map editor, cause it seems that GIMP and Paint.net can't open these.[/url]

you all have no idea how helpful this thread is!!


thanks!


milk

http://www.cajomi.de/GeoControl/GeoControl.html

Awesome heightmapping tool. The upcoming version 2 is looking to be kickass. The only problem is that the creator's English isn't the best.

well i try that demo out; to bad the full version costs 60 bucks

Very cool stuff Thygrr. I will be checking back when it's map making time again, atleast for me.

I'm looking forward to all the cool collections of textures people will be making and hopefully sharing. I only wonder if the 5 layer limit will ever be bypassed or somehow improved on to make more realistic looking maps.

I'm considering abusing one of the strata as a light map, actually. I think it's sad we don't have a lightmap layer...

Probably because the game uses a dynamic lighting model.

anyone wouldn't to happen to know a a free program which allows to edit raw files with paintshop kinda tools like cut paste move etc

i dont suppose use can use Vue 5 for supcom? im only learning vue and i know little to nothing about supcom mapping but...

if you able to export your complete scene as a heightmap, you can. otherwise you could (ab)use vue Esprit to create a mountain or a canyon for your map (from what i remind of the version 2.x, you could export a generated "terrain object" ) and do the rest with something else (PhotoShop)

Yeah, but the mountains don't cast accurate shadows onto the terrait, it seems. All it does is dot product bump mapping and simple diffuse and specular lighting.

I was thinking about using a stratum as a light- or shadowmap or however you want to call it too. You'd have to precompute the areas that are covered by shadows of the map and use it as a mask for a stratum with a simple black texture.

It could look odd though, since no shadows will be casted on units of course.