How to; make a map_heights ....

[WImPyTjeH]

yeah its a bit tricky to get going ...

fog you can disable (and you really would want to), than I suggest using the "grid" option, you'll also need to stay zoomed in pretty much so to get a "global impression" you'll have to look a saved picture or load it in-game ..

as a help with water you can always activate water in the sculpter (klick the water button and than on the menu check the "enable" option) now you freely set the hight of your water wich makes it a lot easier to edit beaches/etc
(you could even paint your map and again use that as a guide in making a map_groundtypes)

anyway the thing thats pretty critical is to make sure you set your water at height 0 and your ground at roughly 12 or above, this allows you to see the edges of land good enough to work with them, later on you can just select anything "color 0 0 0" and make it sea again in photoshop


I suggest just playing with the sculptor and its preview-map and learn to use its relativly small selection of tools as they can help you a lot (yet all you "need" are the terraform-tools)


one more note about water;
the way I did water is I kept an eye on the outline I made when in the sculptor but freely used "erode" and "blend" where I wanted nice low level beaches
later on when I exported the map these regions (as well as my entire desert area) became height 0, as did all my bits of sea
now in photoshop I cut the entire height 0 and height 1 from this exported map, than put it as a second layer on top of the original map_heights (the general outline, wich does have blue water) and that general outline will than make my desert and beaches at height 1 (why I also removed height 1 from the exported map)
this way I made nice smooth ramps to a beach and than have the beach as a smooth relativly flat piece of land, like;

from the oposite site;



Let me know and I could post a bit more detailed, perhaps picture-based, tutorial about the sculptor...
a screeny from within the sculptor after enabling water and quickly assigning a texture for the ground;



ps;dont save your map with textures and water (dont know how to disable textures yet) as without textures you get a "1" printed on each square wich if you view it properly makes you face North, get a point of refrence first than go where you want ..

Edit;
you might find it usefull to know that each square is 12*12pixels so in order to quickly find a specific area you could always get a position in photoshop and count the squares to get there in the sculpter
/edit


G

Thanks

With this excellent program, I was able to draw the first (unofficial) Tamriel height map (as far as I know - and I've spent houres looking for one)

I owe you

W

[Red Spot]

graag gedaan ..;)


G

[WImPyTjeH]

graag gedaan ..;)


G

LoL Ook Nederlands

I don't think that my team members will complain if I post this quick screeny while building it in EaSc.


(The island you see below is the Imperial Isle)

Some peaks still need to be added but it's finally paying off

W

[Red Spot]

yep ..;)

anyway thanks for that screeny as it tells me it not the beta-status but probably a bad installation, as the sculptor doesnt show textures on the buttons/icons on my system(was kinda hard to get going)

probably thanks to all the scrap I installed on my path to this tool, they royally messed up my install (good thing I use images/clones ...)


ps; dont forget to try and change the "height" settings in the descr_terrain file, it may just give you a much better feeling about what you made (the vanilla settings give you a relativly flat map ...)


G

[WImPyTjeH]

yep ..;)

anyway thanks for that screeny as it tells me it not the beta-status but probably a bad installation, as the sculptor doesnt show textures on the buttons/icons on my system(was kinda hard to get going)

probably thanks to all the scrap I installed on my path to this tool, they royally messed up my install (good thing I use images/clones ...)


ps; dont forget to try and change the "height" settings in the descr_terrain file, it may just give you a much better feeling about what you made (the vanilla settings give you a relativly flat map ...)


G

Will do

Do you know a way to see the entire map, because like you can see on the screen, you can only see about 100-200 pixels away (which sucks)

I hate the fact that those ugly "things" are not just grass textures or something like that.

W

[Red Spot]

afaik you have to stay zoomed in pretty, but imo you can zoom out just enough to get an impression of an area, to edit a bit I find myself zooming in quite a bit anyway to be able to achieve certain detail ...

(I constantly kept exporting my map and used XnView on the side for a say radar-view ..)


G

[Red Spot]

did a bit of trial and error to see if there is a way to zoom out further ..

well you can, under fog increase the value "far" (but be carefull as the sculptor becomes much slower as zoomdistance increases ...)

hope its of use ;)


G