Any up to date mapmaking tutorials ?

Speaking of materials, do you place them on the terrain by hand or do you use another software to do it. I noticed on @Ouerbacker 's Crimson Valley that there was textures for the whole map, if I'm not mistaken ...

 

The autopaint function is your friend for map wide terrain textures. I generally paint in 5 degree
increments because sometimes it takes a really long time to paint the whole map all at once.
Usually 4 or 5 terrain materials painted at varying degrees, along with their groundcovers, can
produce breathtaking results.

A note about terrain materials: the groundmodel LUA is what tells what material to do something.
Rockydirt for instance is told by the GMLUA to emit dust and gravel particles. Asphalt is told
to produce skidmarks and smoke, so forth and so on. When a custom terrain material is produced
it will need to be manually inserted into the GMLUA slot that corresponds to what it is. The "note"
about this is the GMLUA will not retain the custom material when BeamNG is updated. Apparently
only stock BeamNG materials are retained after updates. It's a hassle I hope gets fixed because
wonderful maps like Dpitkin's Rally Forest Snow lose all their attributes because those custom
materials are lost after each update.

 

I believe that Ouerbacker and and the BeamNG staff are producing the large 0.5m resolution "Diffuse" texture (texture which sets color) using World Machine 2. In those cases all detail comes from the Macro and Detail textures. This seems to really help blending when moving from one ground texture to another!

They may be editing it after that using other software (hopefully Ouerbacker or @LJFHutch will chime in). I wonder if LJFHutch's blender-road-workflow might also produce something raster for this purpose? I'd also assume that at least some Photoshop or GIMP tuneup is done to the big diffuse after it comes out of World Machine or L3DT. We're all perfectionists after all.

Note that regardless of the actual image used for the diffuse texture texture BeamNG.drive will require that you have all your different groundmodel types painted as separate textures on the terrain. It can import and export maps of the areas painted with different textures as 8bit PNG.

I'm sure that I'm leaving out a lot of info, and there's plenty I don't know on top of that.

 

Sorry, I'm sick, so this might not make perfect sense.

"large 0.5m resolution" Most of the macros -correction- "diffuses" on current maps are 1 meter per pixel. Crimson, jri, and a few others use this. Green Valley and Blackhills use roughly 1.5meters per pixel. Desert Highway uses something much higher.

Trynelgren and ECA do not use this method, though. Each of the textures on these maps adds together to create the final color.

"This seems to really help blending when moving from one ground texture to another!" Usually, this helps blending. But sometimes it doesn't. A lot of it comes down to the macro and detail textures.

"In those cases all detail comes from the Macro and Detail textures." Yeah... Colors are much more important than one might think, though.

"I'd also assume that at least some Photoshop or GIMP tuneup is done to the big diffuse after it comes out of World Machine or L3DT"

Not always... The Crimson Macro has not been in Gimp yet. Of course, it's going there once I feel in the mood to work on that map again.

However, it should be noted that repeated editing in Gimp or Photoshop will occasionally degrade the quality of the image. Blackhills is a good example of this problem.Its macro started as a lovely 16bit 4096 image. Now, it is an 8 bit 4096 with color banding issues.

Actually, the moral of this story is to use tools that support the proper bit level.

"It can import and export maps of the areas painted with different textures as 8bit PNG" Yeah, this is true.

 

Thanks a lot for taking the time to explain

 

Good info and advice. I agree, the color can be a big deal. That's part of what's so exciting about this technique to me. I've closely scrutinized JRI and having the one big diffuse map (with many shades of color) is almost like having many different textures.

The only correction I need to make is your reference to the big color map texture as "Macro" - I'm confident that you mean to say "Diffuse"!

 

Yeah, that was a mix up on my part. Usually, I think of the diffuse as a macro for some funny reason.

Also, there is one other thing that I want to add. Theoretically, the detail and macro layers don't have to be what they are. The detail can function as a macro and vice versa. If the detail is used as a macro, a normal map can be applied on a large scale. This can make simple vertical drops actually look like cliffs and not mushy mush. Here's an example of this.

normals

no normals


Normals can really cover up a lot of texture problems.

 

That's an interesting effect (I personally think it looks a little weird, but not necessarily worse than the "mushy mush").

I think that the intended method for dealing with this sort of thing is the "Use Side Projection" checkbox in the Terrain Materials Editor. Take a look at Leap of Death for an example where this is implemented (this is the version I'm currently looking at). As you can see, there are two rock textures: "Rock" is side projected and used for cliffs, "Rock2" is projected in the normal way and used for more horizontal rock surfaces and transitions.

 

That was probably a pretty bad example. Trynelgren's and Crimson's versions of this method are much more refined.

Actually, the above map has both a side projected and normal projected rock.

 

One of Ouerbackers' maps taught me the reverse detail/macro trick, very nice for getting macro
textures the distance detail they need. Speaking of terrain macros, when I add a normal map
from World Machine to the normal slot on the material it does nothing. I'm not using a detail
texture (yet). I suppose the normal slot for terrain materials is for the detail only? Is that true
for ALL materials?

 

Bump ! (sorry)
So I'm creating my terrain and having a lot of fun. But there is a problem (again ). I closed the edges of the map by raising the terrain ; the problem is that it looks retarded and I see on your maps that you use different methods. How should I close the borders ?
Happy New Year by the way

 

It's not a bump if it's relevant to the subject!

There are several ways to do this but I'll say if you are using the editor tools go ahead
and have fun with it. Ideally you want terrain variety on both large and small scales.
Large scale you want valleys and mountains, small scale you want ravines or cliffs.
The whole premise of the map edges like this is to make the map continue believably
into the distantce (duh), and have primary map features follow into the distance.
Not sure where you stand with the terrain tools but with a little practice and some
fearlessness quite a few nice variations can be had.

 

You looked at other maps and see that they used different methods.. then why not use the methods you saw in those maps?

Moving on to being helpful... ;-) Lots of the maps are walled in with water. (JRI, Small Island, Cliff, parts of other maps). Some maps use a low-detail backdrop mesh and then wall the player in to the terrain itself using trees (Hirochi, ECA). I think Port uses half of the terrain for play area and half as backdrop, walled off by trees. The other side of Port's play area is walled in by water.

 

I'm currently sold as gold on mesh DT's.


Give Ouerbacker's tutorial a shot!

 

I experimented a lot in World Machine, followed a bunch of tutorials, and I got this. I'd like to import the texture in T3D but I have no idea on how to do it. I only know I have to make a new material, but I'm not even sure about that either

 

Can you post a screen of your node array?

To export: Build your map at the size you want (1024, 2048 etc.).
Go to device view, double click on the height node.
Select 'set to' and choose the file path you want to save to and press save.
Click on 'write output to disk', the map will build and save out to your file path.
Minimize World Machine and go to where you saved the heightmap.
Right click on it and copy it to the contents folder in BeamNG.
Open the level in BeamNG you intend on putting the heightmap into, open the editor.
Select 'add new heightmap', set the height and meters per pixel, import heightmap
from the contents folder. Your heightmap should be installed.

The next step is getting your macro from the bitmap output node when you're ready.

 

The heightmap is already in game, but I don't know how to put this macro on top of it

 

Okay, double click your bitmap output and do the same file path output as with the heightmap.
For now export as .png. Copy and paste from there to your terrain art folder.
Open BeamNG and your level with the new heightmap loaded. Open terrain painter and select
new layer. Rename the material 'yourleveldiffuse' and hit enter. Select the diffuse slot and Navigate to the terrain folder in your level and select the macro for the diffuse slot. Enter the map dimensions for it's size. SAVE.

From here on out it's all auto painting in 5 or 10 degree increments (my method), or the whole thing all.at once, doesn't matter. When your done you will have the macro covering the terrain.
Next step is to see how it all works together with the stock terrain materials, mess around
and have some fun!

 

Nice ! I have it in game now
... But the textures are awful. The macro is 2048x2048 and so is the map. Should I make a bigger image ?