Creating Textures

[vovi]

I started to create my own custom ground textures, but its proving harder than I thought. designing them is easy and fun but I just cant get them to join up seamlessly.

So far I've tried to blow up tt.paa from abel to 512x512 but the edges dont meet up anymore, and whatever I try I end up with a massive noticeable line between the cells.

Has anyone got any tips that I can try?

[Pilot]

I do the following and it seems to help me:

1) In a texture editor, select the left side of the texture (or the right, it doesn't matter)

2)Copy the selection you just selected

3)Paste the selection

4)Mirror the selection across the X axis

5)Place the mirrored section on the right edge (or left).

Do the same thing for the top and bottom edges, just be sure to mirror the selection about the Y axis, not the left.

I hope that helps!

-Student Pilot

[vovi]

I suppose,

I guess that means I can get the edges sorted out and then play around with the centre parts,

what program do you use?

[Pilot]

I use MGI Photosuite for two reasons:

1)It's a hell of a lot better than MS Paint

2)It's all I have other than MS Paint

[remcen]

my standard answer to texture threads: download the gimp.
it is free and has a "make seamless"-tool which does all that automatically.
download at www.gimp.org

[Pilot]

@remcen

Thank you!  I just downloaded gimp, and made my first transparent texture, which I can't do with MGI.  You have made my day!

[vovi]

it has to be said is is a very versatile program, good find remcen..


but...

...will it help me make texture transitions. That is what i'm stuck on now, i dont even know where to start.

[Planck]

Use Visitor, it makes landscape texture transitions automatically I think.


Planck

[vovi]

...

Use Visitor, it makes landscape texture transitions automatically I think.

I'm not sure but i think what visitor does it that it automatically inputs the transition paa's/pac's between two diffrent types of texture. It adds a transition file that already exists. I'm not sure if actually makes them though..

I think I'll end up asking recon, he made a whole set and they were very good.

[Planck]

No..........it creates them, trust me, I've done it before.

If the transitions don't exist in the folder it creates them



Planck

[vovi]

...mmm.....I dont know visitor very well, and from what I hear there is a loss of detail/resolution/colour quality  from this method.

Is there no other way?

[Planck]

There might be another way, but I don't know about it......discounting doing it all by hand that is.   ;D


Planck

[vovi]

have you experienced the loss of quality?

[Planck]

Not that I recall, the results looked ok, after all this is the program BIS used to make the original islands.

Do you have visitor installed?


Planck

[vovi]

No, but i suppose i'll have to install it.

I build islands with WRPTool so i cant import the wrp to visitor. So i'll have to make an island in visitor purely for the creation of the texture transitions

Could anyone give me a step by step to doing this?

[Planck]

If I recall correctly, you can load 4WVR .wrp files into Visitor.

I also seem to recall it as being temperamentral whilst trying.


Planck

[vovi]

can you? that would be helpful, i seem to remember visitor saving things as '.pew'

[Planck]

I think it exports to .wrp files also, .pew I suspect is a sort of project file whilst the island is being constructed.

I might have a bash at playing with it again to see what I can find out.

Might be a few days away though.


Planck

[vovi]

cheers for that, in the mean time i suppose i should download it and have a play myself. I suppose in theory i shouldnt need to download bulldozer because i only need visitor to make the transitions.

[Planck]

Hello vovi,

Well it seems I was wrong and my memory had failed me, Visitor doesn't load 4WVR.

However all is not lost, it will load OPRW.

I think I have it clear in my mind again as far as .wrp files go:


WrpEdit only loads and saves OPRW.
WrpTool, I think, will load both OPRW and 4WVR, but only saves 4WVR.
Visitor will not load 4WVR, but will load OPRW, but it only saves .wrp as 4WVR.


Anyway, it should all work ok if you load a OPRW .wrp into Visitor and use it to create your transitional textures.

You need to have your .wrp file in its own folder, together with its base textures.
When you save it from Visitor it will save the transitional textures into this folder.
Be aware that the OPRW .wrp file will be overwritten when you save and will then be a 4WVR .wrp file, so if you wish to keep the OPRW version, keep a copy safe somewhere.


When you start up Visitor, select NEW and then specify 256 X 256 as the terrain size.

Once that is done, you need to connect to Buldozer, otherwise you will not get the option to load any .wrp files.

Once Buldozer has finished loading.....be patient here......select Import World from the Project Menu and choose your OPRW .wrp file.

Buldozer will immediately crash out and will leave a small requester behind complaining that the terrain size was not ^2, this of course is complete rubbish and I don't know why it does this.

Anyway, just cancel that requester, connect to Buldozer again then select your terrain again, this time it should load ok. It always takes me 2 tries to get a .wrp file loaded it reminds me why I don't bother too much with Visitor.....it is clunky.


Best of luck.

If you like you can use the basic OPRW .wrp file from the link below, it is just a flat terrain, textured with the sand texture ps.paa and 1 object, a rock in the middle.
The reason for the rock is because I have found that Buldozer doesn't seem to like islands with no objects on them, so I added a rock, and it worked. It won't even load intro.wrp from the OFP\Worlds folder, but it will load eden.wrp.



Planck

[vovi]

Thanks guys for all your help.

GIMP RULES.

Topic Solved.