Trying something different again. New mappers: Do you find that it's difficult to figure out various concepts like textures, meshes, prefabs... well, just about anything? I've started and abandoned so many maps because I couldn't get them the way I want. So I'm posting this thread about my learning process, hoping it will help other new mappers, and hoping to get some advice from more experienced mappers along the way. The Base Map I started with Gridmap 2.0 because it has a little of everything. I stripped it down, deleting all resource instances, prefabs, AI, ground planes, everything but the terrain and the basic level info. I flattened the terrain using the Set Height tool using a round brush with minimal softness and max pressure. I played around with Raise Height and Really Smooth until I had a small set of rolling hills. Terrain Painting and Masking Noob tip: If you want steep slopes to be rocky and flat surfaces to be grassy, or some other combination, use the slope mask to paint only the angle of terrain you want with a particular material. That's easy, but here's what makes it easier: To make sure you get the value between your terrain angles consistent, drag one value toward the other. That is, if you've painted grass onto a range from 0 to 30 degrees, and you're moving on to 30 to 40 for dirt, drag the min up as high as it will go; it's constrained so it won't go higher than the current max value. Then drag the max value up to the next transition. I didn't start taking screenshots until long after this was done, so the screenshot has newer features in it, but this is part of the resulting terrain: Mud Bog: Shallow, dark water feature Next I decided to add a mud bog. I used the Lower Height tool, but had trouble getting the pressure/softness settings just right. Eventually I used Set Height with low pressure and high softness, then added some chaos by rapidly swiping Raise Height with very low pressure. I ended up with a shallow bog with lots of terrain peeking out in flat islands. I used a slope mask to paint mud where it was flat and dirt where it was a little steeper. The water feature required more trial and error. Adding the Water Block was easy. You can edit the size by directly entering numbers in the inspector. But I ended up with clear bluish water that looked completely wrong. Noob tip: If you're trying to change the height of a feature by dragging the 3D gizmo, but it keeps snapping back to where it started, turn off the Terrain Snap tool (the magnet over the mountain button). It took me far too long to figure that out. Eventually, I got dark, muddy water by finding a mud_depthcolor_ramp, changing base and specular colors, fog values, reflection... too many to remember, so here's the inspector panel after the fact: The result: a shallow mud hole perfect for splashing around in. You'll notice there aren't any plants. I haven't begun to figure out forest tools yet. The Mesa I didn't do anything special to create the next feature, just raised the terrain, used Set Height at different levels, smoothed the cliff edges with a low-pressure brush, painted with slope masks, and added a sandy scar with a small, clear pond at the bottom. It looks cooler with a dramatic light filter. The Dunes... or not Try as I might, I could not make the next feature I wanted: a set of sand dunes. Anyone who has made desert terrains from scratch: Do you use an extreme softness curve, or is there another trick? Here's the softness curve I've been using: Noob tip: Adjusting the curve below the straight diagonal line makes the brush sharper in the middle. For example, Raise Height will be closer to a cone. Adjusting it above the line makes it more like a mesa. Really Badlands After failing with dunes, I went extreme on the Paint Noise tool and created some super rugged karst-like mountains. If you only use the noise tool, you'll end up with vertical irregularities all the way down to your terrain plain, causing weird visual artifacts. I used Really Smooth to get rid of the errors, then used the same kind of paint sceme as before. I wanted to add snow, but hadn't started importing terrain textures yet. That's all for the terrain areas. My next project was adding roads. This post is getting pretty long, so I'll add that to a reply. Current map can be downloaded from my Google Drive here. Note: I forgot a step when I zipped the map. The WarpGrid.zip file doesn't have a /levels folder, so you'll have to create /WarpGrid/levels/ folders, unzip the file in there, then re-zip it (unless you want to use it unzipped, but it doubles the disk size). I'll fix it on the next update, but I've run into a snag with disappearing roads after editing the items.level.json in the /main/MissionGroup/roads/ folder. Feature request: Please add the ability to enter values in the coordinate display for roads and brushes, rather than monkeying around with tiny mouse movements.
Time to take a break from the map. I've run into a speed bump on my highway, so I'll talk about how I built my first road. I used a tip from @bob.blunderton. I laid a mesh road along the path where my road would go, then used the Align with Mesh (up) tool to raise the terrain up to the top of the mesh. After removing the mesh road, I had a flat surface with rough vertical sides. I put the mesh road back, used the Smooth Slope tool to create banks sloping down to the surrounding terrain, and added a couple of ditches where the road was at or near the level of the ground. Then I used a slope mask to paint asphalt onto the flat surface and dirt onto the banks. Finally, I added a decal road on top, borrowing one from Los Injurus county (Nevada_lanedroad). Just one problem. I've got a lot of asphalt sticking out on both sides of the road. I've left it like that for now, but I'll probably re-sculpt the terrain a bit and add gravel on both sides of the asphalt. I just need a good gravel texture, but I think I know where to find one or two. Next time: the highway.
Had a weird problem tonight, and I'm wondering if anyone else has encountered this: I was laying a decal road over an elevated strip of terrain (already painted with asphalt). The decal road continues pas the point where my Hopper is stopped, but it seems to go underground. What can make a decal disappear?
This is unfortunately a bug with decal roads, where they just stop showing up at certain lengths. Its a shame, but there is a button to split decal roads in the toolbar. Using that multiple times on a very long road should create seamless roads, but they will be separate items. IDK what the effects on AI are due to this (you may or may not be adding ai), but it should work.
Thanks, that did the trick. I don't plan to have AI on this world, but you never know what I'll get up to when I get bored with my initial plans.
I use road_invisible decal roads with drivability to 1. You can do them as long as you want, so you get a continuous road for the AI to drive on, decal road didn't get displayed at a specific length but for this case it's irrelevant. The easiest way is to Copy your existing road and make an AI Road out of it. Only if you want AI at some time Another thing I found very useful. When you draw your Roads with Mesh Roads, you can set the BreankAngle to near zero (Default 3, edgy). You get very smooth roads with this. But be careful, in DecalRoad Editing Moad and BreakAngle set to 0 can be very performance intensive.
I've "finished" another feature. The quotation marks are because nothing on this map will ever really be finished, just polished to the point where I'm ready to move on to the next project. As of tonight, I have a divided highway running from one side of the map to the other. This is how I started: I decided to make the road surface perfectly level, not following the elevation contours. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem possible to type node coordinates into the text fields in the inspector, so I used the 3D gizmo on each node to make them as consistent as possible. I played around with the X-Y coordinates to smooth out the curves. I used Set Height to lower the terrain in the hilly area, creating a right-of-way for the road. I used Smooth with low pressure to tame the edges a bit, leaving them almost vertical, then painted a dirt texture using a slope mask. I had already picked a highway texture and sized the mesh guide so I had room for two decal roads and a median strip in between: The green strip is a decal road I created to function as a median. Here's where I ran into problems. I had intended to place the median strip in the middle, then overlap the decal road as much as necessary to account for width variations around curves. Unfortunately, the grass texture kept bleeding through the road, not matter how I set the render priority or zBias. I never did solve that problem, because the second problem made it a moot point. I was going to shut off for a while, so I exited the editor and drove my Hopper around a bit, like I usually do. I stopped on the highway decal, and my Hopper looked bigger than a semi. Oops. I completely neglected to check the size of the decal. A quick Google search gave me the dimensions of a Jeep Wrangler and of a standard highway lane. I eyed the proportions and decided that 16 was a reasonable width. Now, of course, the texture was ridiculously short. Another Google search for the length of a broken line, use the Hopper for proportion, and a texture length of 22 seemed right. Dividing the Highway The new decal size made my highway far too wide for a single carriageway, so I raised up the mesh (which I had lowered under the terrain rather than deleting it), moved it over, and sculpted another path through the hills. Then came the sculpting work. Raise terrain to mesh, refine by setting the height, smooth the edges, paint the flat top with asphalt: I ran into one more problem when placing the decal road on the road bed. (See Thursday's post.) After solving that, I used the smooth tool with a larger low-pressure brush to give the gravel shoulders (part of the decal) a slight slope. After that, I painted the banks of the road bed with grass, then painted a dirt texture under the shoulders, sticking out a little at the edge of the grass. I had used a slope mask when painting the last two textures to make sure I didn't over-paint the asphalt, but that left a narrow, intermittent strip of unpainted terrain in the gully between the carriageways. The solution was obvious. Rather than change my slope mask and complete the uniform texture, I ran a brush along the bottom with a narrow, flat slope mask, painting mud. It made sense because you'd expect water to pool in that location. The final result: Here's the current version.
I'm very thankful for your Idea of using the track_editor_grid as mesh top_Material. After Hours of creating Roads, I couldn't see the red balls on the warning material. So this saved my life ^^.
Okay, so I must be missing something really obvious. I'm trying to add something to the map. A building, a container, some kind of mesh object or prefab. I've looked through everything in the toolbar... ...but I can't figure out how to add an object! Someone please point out the obvious!
Not on Beam rn, but i think if you click the window tab, then asset browser you'll find all the assets either in your level or the game files. You can then drag them in.
(Smack my head) THANKS! I knew it had to be something simple. I now have a 10 meter cube sitting on top of a hill: Not a huge victory, but it's the first major step toward filling in detail. Note: This isn't the map I used to start this thread. It's a Gaea terrain import on another map. But this one is also a WIP sandbox, so I'll include progress on both maps here. Next step: Clear out the Gridmap assets I don't plan to use and gather a bunch of assets from my favorite source. (Thanks to @bob.blunderton for making yours available to all!)
New problem: Importing assets with the materials originally mapped to them. I'm trying to import a jersey barrier for the end of my highway, but I can't seem to get the material mapped properly. Here are my steps so far: 1. Locate the model I want in C:\...\west_coast_usa\art\shapes\objects\jerseybarrier_3m.cdae and .dae 2. Copy both files into \levels\Warpgrid\art\shapes\objects. 3. Verify that these files aren't referenced in any config file in the source \shapes folder. 4. Start game and locate jerseybarrier in the asset tree. The barrier rendered with the warning material. Next steps: 5. Open the jersey barrier in the shape editor and see that concrete_plain is mapped to it. 6. Go back to the WCA folder and locate the material, which is in ...\art\shapes\roads, and described in the main.matierals.json file in that folder. 7. Create \art\shapes\roads in my WarpGrid folder, and copy the concrete_plain_d, _n, and _s.dds files into it. 8. Create a main.materials.json file containing just concrete_plain. 9. Start game, locate barrier... and it still shows up as warning material. The shape "editor" seems to be just a shape browser, with no way to change anything about the shape. When I click the material, it takes me to the material editor, which shows the new material correctly configured. But it won't map onto the barrier. Edit: Found the solution. 10. Exit game, clear cache, restart game. Can we please get a material handling system that updates fixed errors without clearing the cache? It's a major interruption in workflow, and I'm sure the devs aren't immune to it!
