Some images are missing from this tutorial.

Part4 Terrain.png and Visitor Visitor RC3

Open the Sat_lco.png from the source dir again.

With the magic wand tool from photoshop click somewhere in the blue of the sea.

Look at the tolerance setting in top bar, 32%, and then it will do some like this.

Hit the delete button, result please let it be like this .

Now with the lasso tool or some other tool you can clean out the little spots.

Try get a result some like this.

Well from now you really have to do the photoshop yourself, I can keep on going and going just about photoshop, but were not here to learn photoshop we are here to make an island for arma.

What I want to say is, just try to get from this last picture to this next picture, just use the tools, layers, fill color and the rest of the tools from Photoshop.

For your pleasure I have a download link for ya with this file:

ftp://ftp.fraghaus.com/arma/satpics/Sat_lco.rar

so Your dir looks like this now.

Now we copy this file (Sat_lco.png) to our Terrain dir and rename it terrainbefore.png

Now open up the terrainbefore.png in photoshop.

Again there's a lot of ways of doing this, its just how good you are with photoshop, the trick is to change the pic to grey scale.

We change the sea to black color

Tricky !! We select the island only and invert that:

This result is now ready just a bit of retouching.

OK good job, one more thing, resize, we need to resize the file now from 10240 x10240 pixels to 1024 x1024 pixels

Save the file as terrainafter.png in your terrain dir inside the source dir;

I’ll make this file downloadable for you.

ftp://ftp.fraghaus.com/arma/satpics/terrainafter.rar

New tool we need, its free so don’t worry, download Wilbur.

http://www.ridgecrest.ca.us/~jslayton/setup.exe

I have put it in my tools dir again, and extracted it there.

I have also made a shortcut on the desktop.

Now lets open up the terrainafter.png with this wilbur tool.

Should look like this about.

Nice tool hey, well you can do all kinds of stuff here, for now I’m not gone explain and do tricky stuff, we just use this Wilbur tool to save the terrainafter.png to terrain.png

When it asks you to save as 16 bit click yes

Next question click no, you don’t want to change the terrainafter file

So that’s done, good job, now its gone get interesting,

You may remove all from the terrain dir except the terrain.png just saved with wilbur.

Folder looks .

Again, its just a way of doing this, there's more ways and options.

We now need a new file in there, We need a terrain.pbl file ? ? oh boy what is that ?

Well its nothing more then a notepad file called terrain.pbl

Inside this file you write this :

class cfg
{
	PNGfilename = "terrain.png";
	squareSize = 10.000000;
	originX = 0;
	originY = 0;
	minHeight = -150;
	maxHeight = 900;
};

Here is the file for you.

ftp://ftp.fraghaus.com/arma/satpics/terrain.rar

I made the sea 150 meters deep and the hilltops 900 meters high, this is not realistic but in a later state we gone blur the island and then we need the height.

Dir should look like this now.

OK our first try of Visitor is coming up.

Start Visitor3

Open up the Terrain.pbl file in the terrain dir of our island dir, you have to choose the “file of type” in the bottom pick .PBL.

If you not see this check the little buttons on the top bar , you probably need to push some elevation button, just fool around with them.

But if you see this its maybe time to save the project.

Save the file to the SOURCE dir of our project

I gave it the easy name again, “antikythira.pew”

Back to Visitor and lets try buldozer.

We can’t use that, don’t panic, this is because we didn’t pay attention in WILBUR about the detail of the terrain, My plan is to use the blur tool from Visitor3 to get rid of all the spikes.

Close Buldozer by ALT-TAB out of it and close it on the bottom windows bar.(next pic)

Now we gone make sure the terrain is gone look a bit better.

In the right little window there is an option for terrain vertices, pick that.

In the menu bar now go to edit and pick select all.

When all selected on the right side again in the terrain vertices thingy there is an option for erosion, click that.

Don’t change any setting just click OK, lets do this “erosion> OK” 3 times over.

This is not the preferred way of doing this, you better had your terrain.png prepared before you imported it to visitor3, theres lots of tools to created terrain representations, this is just one way of showing and maybe teaching you whats going on with this MAP Making for Arma.

Ok after 3 times doing the erosion thing you should end up with something like this when you restart buldozer.

If so, close Buldozer again, ALT-TAB out and close, then save the project in visitor, end close all, we gone have small break.