Stridor's Map Making Tutorial Part #2

[Stridor]

Now select "Groups" from the tool bar, press the Regroup button, this will now separate the wall mesh from the ground mesh. You should also give the new mesh a better name like "wall" and then press the rename button. It should look like the SS below.

[Stridor]

Ok the final mesh step is to clean up the rough edges of the river plane and the ragged bottom ends of the walls.

Select the river mesh in the Group panel view and press the hide button to toggle the river to be displayed again. Then press the Model tab and go into select mode. Ensure Select Options Vertex is selected. Now in the top View mode draw a selection box around the top two river plane vertices which are sticking above the ground mesh. Go into move and in move options ensure that only the Z axis is selected. Type 0 in the box here and also ensure that Absolute move mode has been chosen from the drop down list. Now press the move button and you should notice that the top of the river is now flush with the ground mesh. Next do exactly the same for the bottom 2 vertices of the river plane, except this time type 64 in the Z unit box and press move. Viola the bottom of the river plane is now flush with ground mesh.

Now that we have tidied up the river plane let's fix up the ragged bottom of the wall. Go back to select by vertex and draw a selection box around the bottom most vertices of the wall in the Right View window. Now in the menu bar go to Vertex->Flatten->Y. This will flatten out the bottom of the wall edge. You can leave it there if you so desire, but I personally like my wall edge to sit firmly on the Y axis zero point. To do this go back into move, select the Y axis only type 0 in the box, ensure absolute move mode has been selected and press Move. Nice. It should look like this:

[Stridor]

One last thing before texture mapping is to ensure that the river bed is below the water level in exactly the places where I want it to be (we touched on this above). To do this I hid the river, carefully selected each river square in face mode (you can do this by holding down shift when selecting faces to add to the selection or if you shift + right click and drag this removes a face from the selection). Then with the exact faces that I want selected, I redisplayed the river plane and then moved the river bed in a relative fashion on the Y axis by a small amount (-0.01) for each press of the move button. Slowly the desired parts of the river bed sunk under the waves. However the river crossing areas remained unaffected. See the screen shot.

[Stridor]

Alright now we are up to the texturing part. Before I get to that you must be thinking, wow how long does all this take?

Well most of your time will be spent in the NTG sculpting the terrain to your liking. This is the really creative bit, so the time you spend there is really up to you. I personally spent about one hour sculpting for this map. The next bit (this tutorial), the MS3D tweaking + exporting, are really just mechanical operations to tidy things up. Although they take a while to explain, I spent only about 15 minutes actually doing this stuff (including the texturing step).

The real time waster in all this is placing the placeables on the map in scenedit. This can take many hours!

Ok on to texture mapping. For more information see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texture_mapping.

Texturing in PCK *CAN* be done by placing one huge 1000x1000 texture on the ground mesh. There is however a big problem doing this. The first is that textures work best in video memory if they are sized as a power of 2, so you would need to use at least a 1024x1024 texture. As this would be ~ 1 pixel per meter this would make for really blurry terrain. So you would need something even greater, probably 65536x65536. Now whilst this is the way Id are going with their new MegaTexture technology for their latest Id tech engine, It places huge demands on video memory which most users (esp Grogs) won't have bucket loads of in their computers. So another strategy needs to be used. PCK uses a texture tiling method whereby a smaller texture is "tiled" on the surface of a mesh to reach the desired effect. The advantage here of course is that it uses hardly any video memory and is really quick to design and edit. The downside is that if it is not done right you will get what looks like your bathroom floor!

Anyhow, this makes texture mapping easy in PCK for the map meshes because all we need to do is essentially define some texture extents in MS3D, then define the tiling pattern in the scene.xml (which is the subject of the next tutorial) and our fries are done!

[Stridor]

Sorry but RL has been getting in the way lately. I will get back to this tut ASAP. Stay tuned however as we are going to be aiming toward this in the next few days.

EDIT: Ground textures have been borrowed from another map, they are only on the map for illustrative purposes only and are not final.

[Stridor]

Sorry about the delay.

Time for texturing. As I indicated earlier PCK uses small 512x512 texture "swatches" which then get tiled to make up the larger texture.

To do this in MS3D select the river mesh. You can do this from the "Groups" tab. In the SS below I have hid all the other meshes (terrain and wall) for a better view. Next go into the "Materials" tab. This is where we assign textures to meshes. Press the new button and MS3D will make a default material called "Material01" or some such. Press the rename button and give this new material a more descriptive name like "Water". Ok now press the topmost button marked "<none>" and select your texture from the load file dialog.

Textures for many of the game's maps can be found in <PCK>\Media\Terrain\Textures. Other textures are scattered around the individual level folders as well, so it pays to go looking. You can of course edit your own 512x512 .dds textures in your favorite paint editor if you don't like what you see. For the purposes of this tutorial I am going to use "kharkov_stream01.dds". Notice in the SS that windows explorer will show you an image of the png/jpg/bmp, but by default explorer won't display thumbnails of dds files. It is possible to download a utility to do this if you want that functionality. So I select the dds file and note the png (as shown) and press open. This will load the texture up into MS3D as our new material called "Water".

Incidentally the non-compressed (= non dds) versions of textures were supplied so that modders could make easy edits to them, the game itself doesn't, *on the whole*, use them because of their large video memory footprint.

Finally press the Assign button and your new texture will be applied to the select mesh which in this case is the River mesh.

[Stridor]

Now it is time to map the texture to the mesh.

From the menu bar select Window->Texture Coordinate Editor (TCE) ( = Ctrl+T). This will bring up the TCE. From the mesh selection box select the River mesh. Next ensure that "Top" is selected and press Remap. The TCE show look as it does in the SS. Essentially the TCE is mapping the top view of the river mesh to the entire water texture swatch. Updates to the main viewports only occur once you exit (click on the close window X) the dialog.

You should now see your river mesh has a nice "water" texture on it. If it doesn't right click on the 3D viewport and ensure that the "Textured" option view has been selected.

The important point in all this is defining the texture mapping extents. As these are the things that get saved in the direct X export to the game. The map scene xml which we will get to in the next tutorial allows you to redefine which textures actually get used (so it doesn't have to be kharkov_water01.dds) and how they are duplicated/tiled. The reason why we are doing it this way is to ensure that the extents are correct as well as to give you a rough guide on how the mesh will look in the game when it is finished.

[Stridor]

Now it is time to apply the texture to the terrain mesh. Repeat the above steps as for the river mesh, this time you can use your map.bmp as the texture to help check that everything on your map.bmp aligns to your mesh. If you have done it right is should look like this.

[Stridor]

To texture the walls of the map it is a slightly harder exercise as the walls, unlike the river and terrain meshes which are essentially planes which have been textured "top down", need to be textured from both the "left" and "front" projections.

To do this select you wall mesh and hide all the other meshes. The right click in one of the non 3D views and select Projection->Left. This will give you a view of the wall looking from the "Left View". Now as is shown in the SS, in the tools pane select "Select", Face and By Vertex. Make sure Ignore Backfaces is unselected.

Now draw a selection box around the mesh as shown. The idea is to select all the "Left wall" faces, and because backface selection is turned on we will also pick up all the "Right wall" faces.

EDIT: I should mention that I used the "kharkov_road02.dds" texture for the map walls.

[Stridor]

Now open up the TCE (Ctrl+T) and select Wall, Left projection and then press remap. It should look like this.

[Stridor]

Now all we need to do is to map the front & back views of the wall. To do this right click on the Left view projection and select front projection. Select the front and back walls as you did for the left and right walls above. Open the TCE, select wall, front and press remap. Exit out of the TCE and your map is now finally textured ready for exporting!

[Stridor]

There is just one last thing we need to do before we move on to part 3 and that will help prompt a discussion about the different map elements.

In PCK there are the unique map objects (meshes). The terrain, the walls, specific rivers, etc. These need to be edited or manipulated in MS3D as you have seen in this tutorial. Next there are the non-unique map objects which are shared between different maps and are edited / placed with the scenedit program. These are things like houses, trees, foxholes, etc.

So far we have defined a terrain mesh, river mesh and walls mesh. However one last specific map object remains and that is the bridge which must cross the river. Although you could make a bridge into a scenedit reusable placeable, each bridge is likely to be a little different (ie come in different sizes for crossing different bodies of water). For this reason it is a good idea to make the bridge a part of the map at the this stage.

There are a few ways to do this. You can use MS3D to make the bride to your exact style and specifications. This is really the subject for another tutorial about how to use MS3D to make your own map placeables. So what I will do for now is to "borrow" a bridge from a preexisting map which resembles the bridge crossing the Colo river from my childhood to an uncanny degree. This bridge is found in the Kharkov_L1B map directory and is called "L1B_terrainBRIDGE.x"

What you need to do now in MS3D is to save you current work as you need to setup a new file for the new bridge.

After saving your work from the Tools menu select Tools->Direct X Mesh Tools ...

Now click the open folder icon, find and select the L1B_terrainBRIDGE.x file. You can pan around the mesh and see it either as a wireframe or textured as is shown below. Click the insert ino scene button and you can now work with the bridge mesh in MS3D. As a side note you can do this with any of the in-game objects that you wish to modify.

Notice how far away the bridge mesh is from the origin point. A true placeable object is centered on the origin. This is because the bridge was embedded into the Kharkov_L1B map at it's current default coordinates.

[Stridor]

Now that you have your bridge mesh, you will need to merge your own map mesh back into the scene so they can all play nicely together.

To do this from the menu select File->Merge... Then open your MS3D scene that I told you to save earlier. The bridge is now merged with your terrain work. At this point you will notice of course that in order to incorporate the old bridge into your new work you are going to need to "Scale" it, "Rotate" it and "Move" it. All these tools have been covered previously so I won't go over them in detail again.

If you did it right you should have something which looks like this:

Note: The bridge ~ 50 meters wide from memory (and GE) and my bridge in the game reflects this.

[Stridor]

Finally to export!

Now MS3D doesn't allow exporting of individual meshes which is a bit of a PITA. To get around this, first save your work. Next delete all the meshes (you can do this from the "Group" tab) except the mesh you want to export in this case the bridge mesh.

Next from the menu select File->Export->Direct X (JT) ... type in a name of the direct X mesh you wish to export. As I am exporting the bridge I saved it as "colo_bridge" in the "<PCK>\Media\Colo_River" directory I made earlier. Ensure that you follow the DirectX settings as shown in the screen shot below. The magic scaling number is ~ 6.151575. This is because the map size is 1000 meters. We have 64 cells which we are using to cover that distance and the scale factor between inches to cm is 2.54 to 1. Don't ask just accept it. If you had a higher res mesh (say 80 cells) then you would use 1000/80/2.54 whatever that turns out to be.

Press ok and you are off.

You need to do this for each mesh. So reload your save and do the same procedure for the others the goal is to have the following direct X meshes ready to go in your map directory

colo_water.x
colo_terrain.x
colo_bridge.x
colo_wall.x

And *that*, Gentleman and Ladies, is the end of Tutorial #2!

[Stridor]

Just a final addendum to this tutorial which I inadvertently left out.

Due to differences in the coordinate systems of MS3D and PCK if you export your maps as I have described you will notice that whilst the in-game map will resemble what you have been working on in MS3D, it will however be mirrored North/South. If this doesn't bother you and you flip the map.bmp vertically then everything will be fine.

If it does bother you (as it does me) then you can fix the issue by doing a final mirror/move of all the meshes prior to export.

To do this first save your meshes as your final working version, this will be the the version. Then in the selection mode draw a selection box around *all* of the component meshes. Next from the menu select Tools->Mirror All.. Then select Front<->Back and press ok. This will mirror all the selected meshes N/S. Then with the meshes still selected select Move, relative, Z axis only 64 units and press move. This will move the meshes back so that they are back relative to the origin.

You can export from here as per my earlier instructions and the in-game map will look identical to the working version. You won't need to flip your map.bmp in this case.

I hope that clears it up.

Regards

S.

[Stridor]

And wouldn't you know it [:@] one hopefully last point I would like to make [;)]

Some of this will be covered in the next tutorial anyway, but logically should be discussed here.

PCK allows you to assign textures to meshes either directly linked in the directX export *or* linked in the map scene file xml post export. The later technique allows you to make changes easily to the texture mapping (tiling) without having to re-edit the model in MS3D so this is probably a better way to do things.

How it works is like this. PCK reads the map scene.xml file and then finds and loads the referenced direct X models. It then looks to see if the direct X models have texture links within them and if PCK can find those textures it loads them onto the model (ignoring the texture links in the scene xml). If it can't find those textures then it will use the ones defined in the scene.xml map file.

Ok so if you take the walls and river I did above, I used textures which PCK can find and use, so that means that I can't change those textures now outside of MS3D. So if you want to be able to play around with new texture mapping on an existing model with links in the scene.xml file it is important that you delete those materials (press the "None" button next to the texture name in the Materials tab) prior to export. The texture (UV) mapping will remain intact (ie. the work you did in TCE), but this will allow you to make changes to the texture in scenedit.