How to; make a map_heights ....

[Red Spot]

.... without having to be a Photoshop expert ...


Hiya all,


Have been messing around for the past few weeks making my own map(s) for RTW but have been unable to master Photoshop (or grow artistic skills) in such way I was able to make a satisfying map_heights (they tended to look unpleasing to the eye in-game)

Now after lots of trial and mostly error I set out to find a method to make a pleasing to the eye map_heights without expert skills, I ended up royaly messing up my system thanks to google and certain unnamed (so called) tools...
BUT .... succes, after I first found EarthSculptor it actually ended up in the bin, nevertheless I now am promoting it ....


EarthSculptor ( www.earthsculptor.com )
is a tool that allows you to ... er .. sculpture .. er .. earth .. er ...
the important thing is that it allows you to import and export height-maps (square grayscale pictures)


Let me just show you by a simple example what I mean and see for yourself how easy and quickly you can build huge maps ...

-get the tool; www.earthsculptor.com

-I suggest you make a general outline of a map_heights in photoshop at it gives you beter "global" control and you need to edit what the sculptor exports anyway, like;



-now you need to do 2 things to get a patch of your map "sculptor-ready"
+you need to edit the sea to be like height 0 (RGB 0 0 0) (you dont need to convert it to greyscale)
+the sculptor converts any size map to a square map and you really want to prevent this as it makes your map ugly when you need to mold it back in shape later, so you want to make a selection of your map wich is square in shape
the editor can start out with a set out of fixed size square empty worlds, for the example I'll go with the one of 2049*2049pixels, now you may be wondering why I jump to telling you this, well because you really want to enlarge your map before you edit it in the sculptor, the sculptor is much more detailed and if used 1 on 1 you wouldnt be able to get high mountains (hard to explain with my poor english, but you'll find out what I mean if you dont enlarge ..;))

What I did for this example is take a patch of my map_heights thats 204*204 pixels, made the actual ground RGB 16 16 16 and the sea RGB 1 1 1, than enlarged the map to 2049*2049pixels setting the "nearest neighbour" option
ending up with just this dark patch of ground (upper right corner);



-I than start the sculptor and start a new map at 2049*2049pixels and just select a small texture setting (you dont need it and has no effect for what we're doing here)
-Than I import the large map I just made as heightmap and use the tools in a "generous fashion" (dont be afraid if your hill ended up like mountain, it looks just a tad bigger in the sculptor than in-game, specially after a bit of a "blend-session" :P)
export when you want to take a look at your map (or just save and look at the [map name].png picture there where you saved)
you can export your map to .tga but it will be 8bit grayscale


-I suggest the first thing you do after opening the grayscale-map in a tool like photoshop is to convert to it RGB-setting than rescale it back to its original size (dont forget the "nearest neigbour" setting)
-Take away all the RGB 0 0 0 bits, in my case thats all ocean so I just make it blue again and patch the new piece of map over where it came from


and just repeat the process for each patch of land you rather mold into shape in the sculptor than by painting pixels ....
(took me 3 weeks to get to this point in mapmaking, I did the above map in like an hour thanks to the sculptor.....)


This actually looks pleasing to the eye in-game and I havent even done map_features/climates/ground_types ...
(I'll post a screeny later today...)


G