Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Terrain Editor => Topic started by: bustr on April 03, 2017, 03:13:33 PM
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Can PS convert\save an 8bit grayscale to the raw format used as the height.raw file? I have CS2 and it opens the TE height.raw files.
I just need to draw a circle on a 4096x4096 bitmap and have it turn into an "18 sector diameter, 25k high ring 1\8 sector wide" when I import it back into the TE.
I'm testing an assumption from the 6 months building my first terrain.
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I managed to edit the raw height map using a free program called Krita, which can be found at: http://www.krita.org/
It was a bit of a caper to get it to work though:
To load the height file open Krita, hit "File/Open" and navigate to the folder the height map is in. In the open file window change the "All supported formats" filter to "All files". Click on your height map file and hit "Open". This brings up a "Choose Filter" window with a list of formats. In this list select "r16 heightmap" and hit "OK". This brings up a "Heightmap Import Options" window, set the size to "4096" and the button to "PC" and hit "OK".
When you are done editing it save the file as an r16 heightmap. This gives the file an "r16" suffix. Once this is edited manually to "raw" the TE loads the file successfully as a signed height map.
The only slight issue with the program is that it displays the file rotated 90 degrees to the right. This is no big deal though as it only takes a few seconds to rotate it left to match the TE orientation for editing and then back right again before saving.
IIRC I was able to create a height map in PSP, save it as a bmp, open it in Krita and then save it as an r16 file, edit the suffix to raw and open it in the TE. Like I said, a bit of a caper.
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Yes Photoshop can save out to raw. You just need to do few things to do so if you are doing it. I am on the road so will to try to write some up later but it is how I did nebrit and work on blades before ah make map so as was update for AH3 for doing historical terrains.
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About the 2nd month, having in the first month used a copy of the CBM to grid walk cutting the gross outlines for the land, then making almost 200 CBM to see what I was doing. I thought I remembered someone's conversation I read in here about how to use a grayscale bitmap and convert it. If that were possible, I could draw one "gross" copy and import it to create the "gross" terrain and tweak from there. I was never attempting to create something that looked like a 20x20 piece of the European continent. Just some place for people with limited time each evening to find and whack each other quickly.
I'll give Krita a look, and thank you.
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Yes Photoshop can save out to raw. You just need to do few things to do so if you are doing it. I am on the road so will to try to write some up later but it is how I did nebrit and work on blades before ah make map so as was update for AH3 for doing historical terrains.
Looking forward to it.
I started wondering what the Pac terrain set looks like from the TE perspective.
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Greebo,
The PSP bitmap, what bit did you save it as? 8, 16, 24, 32?
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It was over a year ago I did this so I can't remember the format now, but it was probably 24 bit. PSP can't save 32-bit bmps.
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In Kira I can "paint" with assistants which is the equivalent of tools menu in other art programs. Can I just build my 4096x4096 in Kira as a grayscale, then save in the r16 format?
And just in case, a 24bit bitmap, got it thank you.
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I am am on the road this week and then in Europe the rest of the month. What I remember off the top of my head is:
1) Stay in Grayscale
2) It should be 16 bit
3) It is an EXTREME pain to try to edit height elevations in raw.
It is best to basically just use it to set water and the land shapes. For a -signed- raw file I believe had the value of 254,254,254 (rgb) and land of 1 ft I think was 1,1,1 rgb. But I don't have my notes with me to say that 100% certainty. So I would say create a 4096x4096 8bit grey scale file. Do all my work in it and then change the image index to 16bit, flatten the layers, AND then remember to flip it vertically. For some reason the TE when imports the file has a different orientation. If you think of top of the image as North once in the TE imports the image it actually comes out as being South.
Sorry can't say more I don't have my notes with me and actually I let AH Make Map do most of my work now in this regard since I basically do historical maps.
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I imagine you can create a height map in Krita. Personally though I'd rather be creating than figuring out how to create so it was easier for me to make a height map in PSP, then export to and from Krita to get it in the correct format for the TE.
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I just want land and water defined without my having to go through 200+ CBM a few changes at a time working by braille. If the "height.raw" imported will cause the TE to produce the raw landscape, it is worth some gyrations since I can use the art program tools to quickly create a single master land element in grayscale.
Though ultimately you can use a CBM as a trace template by editing it in an art program with the land masses, then painting in the land with the 6mile diameter brush and connecting the dots. I would "sculpt" the land by hand anyway, and got very fast at it after building all of those fjords and mountain ranges by hand on my terrain. I think I sculpted and touched up about 50,000 miles of terrain by the time I got done. Some of it several times because Hitech wanted the white textured dolomite rock.
Having a master raw terrain file to create the land masses and then a master finished to scale project art file copied from the land mass file to use as my blueprint for object placement is the goal to cut out the middleman of 200+ CBM bmp files. I was always amazed at how I could think a tiny bit of land added or subtracted while looking at that area from 50,000ft above in the TE was overkill when I ran the build and tested the change offline. Online a 1mile x 1mile area is huge sitting in the middle of it in a tank or creating a sea passage between islands.
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Greebo,
Krita allowed me to create a project in grayscale 16bit integer/channel 4096x4096 from Krita internal selections in the project setup menu. Do you think that is what the r16 format will be that you used then changed .r16 to .raw for import into the TE? The latest version of Krita has a tools menu bar which gives me the tools I'm familiar with in Paint.Net where I created the AH3 gunsights.
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My bad, I can save in *.r16 Heightmap or *.r8 Heightmap "format". So Greebo, Krita allows you to make heightmap files for terrains in grayscale.
This is the format I chose for my current 4096x4096 .r16 project file, or is there a better format to import into the TE?
Model: Grayscale/alpha
Depth: 16bit interger/channel
gray built in (default)
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You'd probably need to direct those sort of questions at HT or Ghostdancer, my only interest in Krita was as a transfer medium between PSP and the TE and once I got that to work I didn't dig any further. At the time the idea was to test the AH3 TE by building a new MA terrain from scratch and I managed to build a new height map in PSP, transfer that to the TE, put fields on it and so on. After that I shelved the terrain and concentrated on modifying CraterMA to AH3 spec.
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The r16 is good but he difference between r16 and r8 is that in r8 (I assume is 8 bit) grayscale is that you have 256 shades of grey and white and black. In r16 (16 bit (gray scale) it displaces colors on screen as grey. So true red (255,0,0 rgb) will display as grey. So be careful doing your elevations in the raw file. Since the height map actually uses more than 256 color I believe.
In AH2 you would set a max elevation for the map and then each of the 254 colors in between black and white represented a step in feet. Basically divide the elevation by 254 to see what each color shift equaled to in feet. New AH3 doesn't work that way and I forget what exactly the the foot difference between each shift in color equals. I do remember I thought it was a pain so went in and did rough shapes in there and then in the TE fine tuned elevations.
Also shorelines will end up blockier in than in AH2 you will need to go work on splining the shorline once you import the raw file.
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I did some digging in the beta TE thread. The height.raw file is in 16-bit signed format. This gives around 32,767 land height variations going from black as 0 ft to mid grey as 32,767 ft. Then for ocean white represents 0 ft sea level going up to mid grey as 32,767 feet deep ocean floor. However I seem to recall the TE treats any negative value below 1K as 1K depth.
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So it is as I remembered Greebo which is why I used it to block out land and not really to do elevations since 32,767 land height variations is a bit much to do by hand. Especially since I was not sure what RGB value evaluated to what height for the full range.
For example 255,0,0 equals what? Or 253,12,1 equals what?
This is why when I did it intially I used to block out the shorelines and then did just rough elevation work of creating mountain ranges. But even then sometimes I ended up missing something and you would have a mountain spike happen looking like the tower of the eye of Mordor in the terrain. Couple people ran across these odd spikes over in blksea and blkseaw.
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This sounds like I can accomplish my assumption. You can rapidly make shore lines with a 6mile dia. brush and the smoothing tool. The raise\lower mound tool I can cut and shape a world in my sleep after my first terrain. I needed exactly a way to quickly prototype my raw land like when you glue together blocks of wood, then put them in a lathe to create a bowl. This will eliminate a large amount of time spent using the CBM map as a cutting template. I bet I can use the height.raw from my terrain and a color picker tool to create my gross elevation building blocks since I know the terrain elevations after spending so much time with it.
I cannot believe Krita is a free art and animation program that also does height maps. It has some gradient tools that look like I can set two colors on a shape then have it fill the shape in that gradient if I set a center point and it will effectively create a topographical layering of the gradient between the two colors.
Now I have to learn another art program just to see if I can create topographical gray scale gradients. If the program has 8 and 16 bit heightmap formats, then the gradient tools will probably accomplish topographical gradients. I'm not attempting to recreate any place in the real world so my free hand skills will work for the rest once I import it back into the TE.
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I just installed ImagJ to look at the height.raw heightmap file from my bowlma project. It can import and export in 8 and 16 bit raw format. I had to set the import to Little-endian byte order so white was the 28,000ft elevations and funny, black is showing negative depths under the water. Now I see if I can create a 16bit grayscale png file and export it to 16bit raw for the terrain editor. I suspect the TE will see "black" as sea level, I hope.
I started reading other game's terrain creation forums, and creating a grayscale heightmap file, then converting to raw is pretty standard. Some only use a png format grayscale heightmap. But then, their land area is much smaller than the AH MA. It's getting interesting digging into this, and hopefully the 16bit raw file export from ImagJ will be compatible with the TE when I generate my test file. I can always do the export from Krita as an .r16 and change the extension as Greebo described.
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Buzzsaw might have been created with black and white as colors and a spiral gradient tool. Converted to 16bit raw and imported into the TE as a heigth.raw if you were in a hurry, and knew you could manually touch up after that inside the TE.
I've been experimenting with a color tool called a gradient contour filler. Now if my island edges are at zero elevation or black, and I sample my heightmap for gray color at places I know are certain elevations from looking in the TE. I can set my two colors to run the gradient contour fill. Then do manual touch up or modifications inside the TE after I import the raw contour elevations. I just have to use layers so I can eventually change the water level to black after I manipulate the land masses. This is all speculation until I can import my 4096x4096 black and white file into ImageJ and export as a 16bit raw file.
Here is an island I'm playing with to learn the tool I found. Who knows what will happen, but, so far it's better than nothing and I don't feel like buying a third party terrain program when I'm only making fantasy islands.
(https://s20.postimg.org/yy46pj37x/contour.jpg)
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This is getting good, better gradient contour lines, looks like when I super zoom in on the "height.raw" from my terrain bowlma. Now I really hope I can create a 4096x4096 heightmap and get it converted to raw and back into the TE.
(https://s20.postimg.org/hyv8a9s0d/contour2.jpg)
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Nice stuff so far. :aok
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Hitech,
Thank you for verifying what ghostdancer posted for me. He said the files are 16bit.
I hope you know I have absolutely no clue what I'm doing here, I'm just guessing, then pushing buttons in art programs to see if anything blows up. And reading other game forums discussions about heightmap files for their terrains. Other game's players seem to talk more about them than we do here for creating the raw land masses in their terrains. Still, our arenas are ginormous but, if this works, I can see how I could have eliminated many hours of mind numbing work by creating the raw land masses in an art program as a 2D map first.
Well back to pushing buttons and seeing what breaks....... :O
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I have avoided learning GIMP, now so I can create 16bit PNG grayscale files and have a gradient fill option, I'm downloading GIMP.
I will still have to convert it through Krita into 16bit raw unsigned. Seems Paint.Net is an RBG only application but, it does do a great two color gradient contour fill on shapes. There is always a catch to this. I know "now" I could make a CBM of an empty 20x20 arena and paint my land areas onto that as line drawings. Then drag the terrain tool a click at a time re-positioning the CBM every few strokes. I would rather do it once on a 4096x4096 grayscale PNG file in an art program.
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Also take a look at l3dt for creating the base height maps. It works well with our height map exports.
http://www.bundysoft.com/L3DT/downloads/
HiTech
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Trying to wrap my mind around this stuff, but I need to create a small strip of land, smaller than the TE brush allows, an island so to speak, with a uniform height of about 100 feet. Is this possible using one of these techniques?
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Well the smallest bit of land you can make with this method is 1 pixel. In a map you have 4096 x 4096 pixels which equates to 512 x 512 miles. Convert you those to feet and you get 2,703,360 feet by 2,703,360 feet.
So if my numbers are right basically ever pixel on the height map represents 660 ft. So that is the smallest bit of land you can make via the heightmap.raw file.
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Trying to wrap my mind around this stuff, but I need to create a small strip of land, smaller than the TE brush allows, an island so to speak, with a uniform height of about 100 feet. Is this possible using one of these techniques?
I succeeded in using the black and white screen capture jpeg contoured island and generating a terrain by importing a heightmap. Hitech has suggested I look at L3DT. The screen shot below shows what happened when I copy and pasted the island picture above directly into the grayscal PNG file I then converted to RAW and imported into the TE.
The top of the island which I created on a 512x512 project sheet in the screen capture is 25,000ft high, so it appears I needed to set my contoured gradient fill to gradient at the single pixel level, or the closest possible. In the end you wouldn't have a smooth land mass but, one generated with micro steps defining the topography. That was going to be my next testing hurdle with my gradient tool. I need to get a reply from Hitech on what hight ratio to use in L3DT for a 4096x4096 project.
Yes Pinky(bustr), that is the corner of a 25,000ft wall and 25,000ft 6 mile diameter cylinder.
(https://s20.postimg.org/yy98mn9jh/contour3.jpg)
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Trying to wrap my mind around this stuff, but I need to create a small strip of land, smaller than the TE brush allows, an island so to speak, with a uniform height of about 100 feet. Is this possible using one of these techniques?
Set brush to alt, click beginning and end of your land strip. This makes 2 islands.
Now use the plow tool to make the strip between the two ilands.
HiTech
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So I just tested reducing the height of the land mass. I created a gradient contour fill jpeg, pasted it into the PNG grayscale heightmap file and converted to raw format. I kept the gradient closer to black and still ended up with the center of the island at 8000ft. And the smaller the land mass, the more noise around the edge's as you can see. But the topographic shape is much smoother. You can see how the center 25k 6 mile diameter cylinder was displaced when I imported the heightmap file.
It appears you cannot import a heightmap to create one tiny thing, you have to build the complete terrain as the heightmap and just happen to have your very tiny strip of land in it. Before I added the island in the center, there was a center cylinder, the square wall, four posts and the giant island. I pasted the new island into the source PNG file, then converted that to RAW. When I ran the import, all of the terrain features were recreated along with a new center of the terrain.
I'm beginning to see the advantages to L3DT. Though, I suspect I can still create a 20x20 terrain once I work out the altitude scaling.
(https://s20.postimg.org/sz3v1yia5/contour8.jpg)
(https://s20.postimg.org/6km6lqfil/contour6.jpg)
(https://s20.postimg.org/4hbre2fpp/contour7.jpg)
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L3DT hasn't sent me my temp license so I can test the Pro version for 90 days.
Leave me alone with nothing to do...heheheheh.
I decided to run a Gaussian blur tool on the PNG file and I got the center island down to 3k at it's highest elevation and the wall\cylinders\big island down to 12k and nicely smoothed. Granted L3DT throws in some runoff texturing and rock structure. Still, this is not bad for a hand worked terrain when you first start out.
(https://s20.postimg.org/fkqs5xbm5/contour10.jpg)
(https://s20.postimg.org/z1bhsg6q5/contour9.jpg)
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I managed to edit the raw height map using a free program called Krita, which can be found at: http://www.krita.org/
It was a bit of a caper to get it to work though:
To load the height file open Krita, hit "File/Open" and navigate to the folder the height map is in. In the open file window change the "All supported formats" filter to "All files". Click on your height map file and hit "Open". This brings up a "Choose Filter" window with a list of formats. In this list select "r16 heightmap" and hit "OK". This brings up a "Heightmap Import Options" window, set the size to "4096" and the button to "PC" and hit "OK".
When you are done editing it save the file as an r16 heightmap. This gives the file an "r16" suffix. Once this is edited manually to "raw" the TE loads the file successfully as a signed height map.
The only slight issue with the program is that it displays the file rotated 90 degrees to the right. This is no big deal though as it only takes a few seconds to rotate it left to match the TE orientation for editing and then back right again before saving.
IIRC I was able to create a height map in PSP, save it as a bmp, open it in Krita and then save it as an r16 file, edit the suffix to raw and open it in the TE. Like I said, a bit of a caper.
Hmm, I can't seem to change the filter to "all files" That choice isn't available.
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Set brush to alt, click beginning and end of your land strip. This makes 2 islands.
Now use the plow tool to make the strip between the two ilands.
HiTech
What I did is build a Japanese dumcv, and I need a small strip of land underneath it to get the mission editor to spawn the flights at the height of the CV deck.
I don't think it's possible to set a uniform strip of land that is small enough without a ridiculously large cv object to cover it, so I think I'll go with another idea.
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Ah, if you do not have "land" then you get an airspawn even if you set the entry object to the custom object's physical height. Can you incorporate the landing pad object "landzone" just at the level of the deck and set a fighter spawn onto that?
I'm building a hardstand convergence testing terrain. I've got all but 10 fighters left to go. I have three spawn directions left on my third small field object for fighter spawns. I'm placing them so the plane in question spawns with their main gear over a down slope which levels the plane. Then you can bring up the offline target and test your convergence out to max range and in between sitting static and leveled.
It's been interesting what you see concerning motor kanon and LoS for the gunsight..... ;)
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Ah, if you do not have "land" then you get an airspawn even if you set the entry object to the custom object's physical height. Can you incorporate the landing pad object "landzone" just at the level of the deck and set a fighter spawn onto that?
I'm building a hardstand convergence testing terrain. I've got all but 10 fighters left to go. I have three spawn directions left on my third small field object for fighter spawns. I'm placing them so the plane in question spawns with their main gear over a down slope which levels the plane. Then you can bring up the offline target and test your convergence out to max range and in between sitting static and leveled.
It's been interesting what you see concerning motor kanon and LoS for the gunsight..... ;)
I wanted a take off sequence but the ME won't spawn above ground level unless it's an air spawn, That is what I am using to simulate it, but that introduces it's own issues. In AH2, I built a flat Japanese carrier deck and put it on top of a flat island. The CV deck was way oversized to cover the land. It worked OK, because it was just a few second visual, but I was looking to improve it in AH3.
You have to think out of the box to have a carrier mission, since the ME has to spawn at a fixed point, you need to have a static object.
That may change some day, as I noticed Hitech added a briefing room to the CV.
In order to have a takeoff segment, I would need a rectangular box of land about the size of the CV deck and place the static CV object over it, then set a headwind to help the take off, but it's not a deal breaker as the airspawn workaround will suffice.