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[farang65]

Hi There,

I've recently seen agracier's small Cuba map which is relatively flat country.

The fields look great if the land is covered in fields

My question is this

Does anyone have any tips, ideas, suggestion for a very flat land area and flat land islands etc of how to texture them to make the area look good.

I've always had enjoyed seeing mountainous areas or hilly areas which are also a bit easier on the eye as well but I made a map today and all land areas are very flat.

The map_h was even difficult to make out as there were not many grays like your use to.

Texturing flat land I'm sure has to be the hardest job of texturing to make it look good.

Just another side project to the main SA admin project.

Cheers Kirby

[agracier]

I've found a few halfway decent ways of texturing flat land.

First off, make sure you have a set of textures for the area you wish to texturize that blend together fairly well. This is also something that can be done in many ways, but let's postulate that you have the set you need.

What i then do is select areas of land and use a 'filler' texture that covers everything in that area. Call it the basic texture for that area, or a primer or whatever. Just be certain it covers all the are.

Then i often select the same area, use a different texture and RGB value and start making random selections of pixels. You can do this by generating noise and using either the noise as the texture spread you wish to use, or use the difference or whatever. The noise generation can be very dense or very sparse. That is up to you.

You can also generate 'blots' of random RGB areas by using a 'blots' filter :
http://www.grafnet.com.pl/photoshop-filters-description.php?kolekcja=filtry/Mehdi&filtr=Blots_2.jpg

This you can alter to your hearts wish by adding more random noise and so on.

If you use one filler texture and then 1 or 2 random placed textures on the same area, then you can usually get a decently spread set of textures that don't seem computer generated.

__________

Another good trick to assigning cultivated fields textures is to choose the river system, expand the selection by whatever number of pixels you wish (3, 4 or 5 is a good number). Create a new layer with that selection, fill it with an RGB value for your texture and then once again generate noise, or blots or go through the selection with a very sparsely set eraser brush and go for a set of pixels that are random, but still follow the contours of the rivers - which is usually a good bet since crops need water ...

__________

I also often use the map_h to select specific areas with a magic lasso tool. Set the tolerance fairly low - 0, 1, 2) and then start to select areas that you think are either valleys or else mountain tops, this depending what sort of textures you wish to place. You can usually get a good feel for the terrain features by looking carefully at the gray values on map_h ... this way you can select river valleys even though they steadily climb in height as they go upriver ...
_________

There is also a 'select height' too in one of the utility packs, that generates height maps in white on black, depending upon which low/high values you give in meters. For instance you can generate endless maps with height values of say between 5 and 10meters, or 25 and 75 meters, or 101-133 meters etc etc ...

These are then a good base to choose areas to texturize. You needn't use all the height areas generated such, maybe just a selection will be useful along with a selection from another set of height parameters ...

[farang65]

Well,

Thank you very much for this wealth of information.

Texturing flat lands or flat islands has always baffled me because it never looked good after you tried the normal ways.

I'm more of a gimp man myself I have seen that rgb random tool but have never tried it.

I guess I'll have to learn more on those tools you mentioned.

I've tried putting in a noise filter to an area but I must have done something wrong as I'd get the whole map with the noise filter. I tried that some time ago must have been doing it wrong.

I like the filter texture idea just have to get a decent set of textures as you say.

Thanks again Agracier

For anyone else out there that has any suggestions feel free to ad it

Cheers Kirby

[viking4570]

In Gimp - use the >filters>noise>rgb noise tool to spread random pixels within a set range across a selected area.  This is what I used on my Crete and El Alamein maps.  El Alamein in particular is a vast flat desert area. You must have textures that fit together as a palette.  cheers - viking

[agracier]

I've tried putting in a noise filter to an area but I must have done something wrong as I'd get the whole map with the noise filter. I tried that some time ago must have been doing it wrong.

I like the filter texture idea just have to get a decent set of textures as you say.

When you put random noise, you should best do it within an active selection. That way the rest of the image, the non-active part, will not be subjected to the random noise command.

And a little tip on random noise. It's often better for instance, to use a 10% random noise command 5 times on the same selection, rather than use a 50% random noise once. That way the noise is even more random and you can play around with using the noise, or leaving out the noise and using the larger resulting area.

And actually, having a good set of textures is more than half the work. I don't know if you make your own textures, but if you do and use Google Earth as a source, then I've found it's always best to make about at least a dozen textures from within the same area, so that the color scheme and ground textures and features are within the same range. Most textures won't be usable, but from 12 to choose from you should be able to get a set of 3 or 4 that fit well together. Otherwise you'll have to do a lot of image manipulating, adjusting color balance/saturation/hue and what not all. The less you have to manipulate a texture the better I've found ...

That does mean that a good number of textures to choose from helps out a lot. I've some 2000 in 1024pix and about the same number in 512pix. And even with those numbers, I often still have to go looking for other textures on GE in order to get the right type ...

[Pursuivant]

As a tiny suggestion, consider that the more rural areas of Cuba have/had small areas of fields interspersed with areas of woods. Nothing breaks up flat territory like woodlands. Example of what I'm thinking of here:

  http://www.virginiawestern.edu/faculty/vwhansd/HIS122/Images/CubaMissiles.gif

[agracier]

As a tiny suggestion, consider that the more rural areas of Cuba have/had small areas of fields interspersed with areas of woods. Nothing breaks up flat territory like woodlands.

That's quite right, though you also have to be careful not to get too many single pixel (or holes of a single pixel) woodland pixels in a map_t. A single pixel, or a 2 or 4 or any square of (woods) pixels tends to look too geometric, and then you're back where you started - trying to make a landscape look truly random.

[agracier]

Another tip on how to get irregularly spread textures on a map.

I did this on the Cuba map for instance. You'll see that the FMB map is a satellite image overlay, resized to fit more or less over land/water and rivers as they are in the game. Normally you use the color .bmp made from a Microdem DEM as basis for the FMB map, but those images are usually very unimaginative, so the use of other map data is better to make an FMB map with.

In any case, on this Cuba FMB map, I started selecting fields and other terrain features that are visible, selecting them with various degrees of RGB tolerance with a magic wand tool, and then using the resulting selections as layers for RGB values in map_t and assigning these to, for instance a fields texture.

You have to experiment a bit with the selections made from the FMB overlay, varying tolerances to a wide degree, perhaps afterwards deleting selections, or adding other selections.

But this method has the advantage of being independent of height selections and giving results that are more random than can be obtained by other methods ... it works well on flat terrain especially. On mountainous areas it is less suited because you might very odd texture configurations criss-crossing height contours.

[farang65]

Hi Agracier,

Well I'm not so much up on layer creation as you are. For me I've been ok with a rivers layer for Mymap_c, map_h and map_T as you suggested doing in another thread.

I'll have to learn a bit more on making layers.

Using the sat image is a great idea especially for randomizing in map_T.

as an example you'd select say 5 decent selections from the sat image.

produce a layer for each selection using file name for load.ini
Merge the five layers on to map_T background, layer1,layer2,layer3,layer4,layer5 and flatten the image.
then assign each layer(texture) to lowlands 1,3 midlands 0,2,and 3 (example)
in the load.ini
For layer production is photoshop better than Gimp?

I have CS4

Cheers Kirby

[agracier]

Well I'm not so much up on layer creation as you are. For me I've been ok with a rivers layer for Mymap_c, map_h and map_T as you suggested doing in another thread.
I'll have to learn a bit more on making layers.

For layer production is photoshop better than Gimp?

If you create a separate layer for each RGB slot, then you can play around with these layers and create different looking map_t and therefore landscapes with very little effort. You can edit them each separately if needed and easily remove/add single pixels for instance.

A great feature of working in layers is also that you can turn off all layers except the one you're working on, and so more easily see what you're doing, or keep 2, 3 or whatever number of layers on, and others off - all in the interests of working more easily.

For instance let's say you have 5 RGB slots for fields textures on a map. To see their placement, you can turn off all layers except the 5 fields layers and so easily see how the fields are placed and dispersed around the map area ... because there is no way that the eye can discern the difference between for instance RGB 12 or RGB 15 - and certainly not when scattered among other almost similar RGB values ...

You can also change their order of importance, by placing certain layers higher than others, so that with flattening, different pixel structures emerge. It also makes it easier to use open slots and assign them textures that you forgot about using initially.

And you can create as many guide layers as you wish, layers that contain info for making other layers, but which will not appear on maps h or t, because you simply turn them off before flattening the map_t/h file. This is useful for airfield flattening for instance, or for smoothing terrain for railway layers or leveling terrain around river banks... or drawing roads or placing fields near rivers and so on ...

As for graphics programs - I've been using paint Shop Pro 7 for years and years now, I can't remember not using it and it suffices for all my needs except for saving into the correct type of tga encoding. For that, I use GIMP, which is also useful and not that hard to use, though it's a bit more 'geeky' if you know what I mean, doing things differently for the sake of being different ... ha ha.

I've also modded Paint Shop Pro with the 4 gib extra memory mod, since it's still a 32 bit program. Works even better now.

But of course you should use the program you know best. I know Photoshop has an incredible amount of possibilities. I just can't bring myself to learn all the idiosyncratic ins and outs of yet a new program ...