Some images are missing from this tutorial.

Part5 Mask_lco.png and texture works Visitor RC3

Maybe to tease a bit, open up the Sat_lco.png picture in Photoshop, and save the picture as a BMP picture into the source dir, I call mine BCK.BMP.

Start visitor3 and open up the project .PEW file, mines called “antikythira.pew”.

When opened up on the right side in the little popup window thingy in that list there is an option for Background Image Settings, choose that and click new image.

Fill out the stuff as I did in this picture, and the next closeup.

close up

If you do it right it should look like this now.

Save the project again.

Close Visitor and lets start making a Mask_lco.png.

Copy the Sat_lco.png and Paste it as Mask_lco.png in your source dir. Now open up the Mask_lco.png file and lets start making it look cool.

Create a new layer in the bottom right corner, then fill the layer with a solid color, Yellow in this case. And it needs to be an exact shade of yellow (255.255.0)

Shown in the next picture the whole layer yellow. The yellow represents sand, sand for the close up textures which we ripped from the sample map from bis earlier on in the tutorial. The stuff we placed in the data dir. XXPISEK.PAA files.

Don’t bother to much for now, we will get there.

Now click the little eye thingy on the yellow layer so you don’t see it anymore.

Now with the magic wand tool, and al the things you know of photoshop, try to create something like this as the third layer, and like I said the colors need to be precise, for green it is (0,255,0).

We need to do this a 4 times for 4 different textures. With 4 different colors

Sand = xxpisek = yellow 255,255,0

Gras = xxtravajih = Green 0,255,0

DirtGras = xxmesto2 = Blue 0,0,255

SandGrasPlant= xxpole1 = Brown 99,55,0

Xxmesto2 and xxpole1 were actually switched around, don’t worry I took care of it in the config file.

The texture files them self are just taken from the BIS sample map, but you could even make your own textures.

You could use more then 4 textures, but its not easy to explain that, so be safe and just stick to maximum 4 different textures !

We will get back to this soon, first you need to create some like this, its all made very quickly, so its not gone be that nice maybe in the end, but its all up to you, I’m just showing you a way.

Create couple layers, use 4 colors, remove the background layer, bla bla, just do it yourself .

After this, flatten the image and save it as mask_lco.png in your source dir.

Just to be sure, here is the download link for the Mask_lco.png:

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

Well that’s good work, almost there, but not without having a couple new files we need in our source dir.

We need some config file and a color bar picture as a reference for that config file.

The layer.cfg file is just notepad file with this inside:

class Layers
{
	class xxpisek
	{
		texture = "ca\antikythira\data\xxpisek_mco.paa";
		material="ca\antikythira\data\xxpisek.rvmat";
	};
 
	class xxtravajih
	{
		texture = "ca\antikythira\data\xxtravajih_mco.paa";
		material="ca\antikythira\data\xxtravajih.rvmat";
	};
 
	class xxmesto2
	{
		texture = "ca\antikythira\data\xxmesto2_mco.paa";
		material="ca\antikythira\data\xxmesto2.rvmat";
	};
 
	class xxpole1
	{
		texture = "ca\antikythira\data\xxpole1_mco.paa";
		material="ca\antikythira\data\xxpole1.rvmat";
	};
};
 
class Legend
{
	picture="ca\antikythira\source\mapLegend.png";
	class Colors
	{
		/// color names should correspond to surface layer names
		xxpisek[]={{255,255,0}};
		xxtravajih[]={{0,255,0}};
		xxmesto2[]={{99,55,0}};
		xxpole1[]={{0,0,255}};
	};
};

or here are the files:

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

This is the 2 files your still missing in your source dir.

Your dir should look like this now.

Ok now open up visitor and open your project .PEW file

When opened up go tools → project preferences

For the FOLDER TEXTURES you type: ca\antikythira\data

Next go tools → project parameters and click calculate.

This is the size of our sat_lco.png and Mask_lco.png pictures (10240)pixels

Click Apply proposed, then close,

now select base(active) from the Texture layers, then click edit

Choose 40 meter x 40 meter, this is the size of the texture parts in your data dir (I think) Click OK And click OK again to close the dialog.

Save the project, don’t close visitor.

Now if all went well, you can now start importing the sat and mask pictures

Pick text

Pick the Sat_lco.png

next pick layer.cfg

Next pick the Mask_lco.png

then this could happen it did for me but after few minutes all was normal again.

After it was ready I saved the project.

Inside the DATA dir Visitor3 has created a layers dir now with shitloads of files in it .

Go back into visitor

And now start Buldozer.

and after few minutes, can take some time !!!!! this should be the result . .

If you check your data dir after bulldozer has finished you will notice that bulldozer has converted all png to paa’s

The crap thing is that it did not change the names inside the RVMAT files, this is the first time I’m doing it this way, I don’t know if this is a problem yet, but if it is we have to change all RVMAT files manually, I don’t know if you noticed but its 715 files.

Well it seems we have to manually change all RVMAT files, just back from forum, and if we not change all names from PNG to PAA in the RVMAT files we might have problems later when we want to host the island on a dedicated server.

The main problem will be the big pictures of the locations you guys want to make.

Next week we gone use visitor to put plants, roads, rocks, buildings and all kinds of stuff.

Again all stuff discussed in these parts are just 1 way of doing things, also the way of retouching sat pictures can be done really precise if you take time for it, I already seen that we have some strange colors on the map, this is the lack of taking time to work on the pic in photoshop.