Battlefield Modding Tutorials BFMODS

Behold my latest work of art: Hidden Village....converted from the Gamecube version of Zelda: The Twilight Princess.

This is a small village map set hidden in a mountain area in Hyrule. I converted the mesh and made it a map in my Mario Kart mod.

I have now applied what I now know with light-mapping to this map.

Still got some areas that are too dark (I still can't seem to fix this, I need some tips on how to fix this!), but I'll show you what it looks like now. I turned off fog so the distant mountain mesh stuff would appear properly. Due to the tiny size of this map, this shouldn't present any gameplay issues.

Now for the images: (click to enlarge)





The interior shadows I'll increase a bit but darkness issues aside I think it's the best lighted map I have ever made/seen in BF1942. 8)

The darkness problems is not the result of the light-mapping. It's something with the 3DSMax lighting settings I haven't found a fix for. This map looked like crap last time I tried to light-map it. This was when it was one big mesh. Now that it's been separated into more then 16 objects, it looks a MILLION times better!

Hard to believe I learned how to do this just yesterday!

This map will be featured in the final version of my Mario kart mod. That mod has 6 or so other levels converted straight from the Gamecube console game: Super Mario Kart Double Dash and even has one working vehicle.

UPDATE:

Fixed the darkness issues. Much better now!

Here's some updated screenshots:





Much better. You should be able to see your way around the dark alleys now.

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I have cameras in your head!

Very impressive.

Wish you were doing a WW2 mod instead of Super Mario because this lighting effect would look great on some Western Europe Night Maps.


GJ

The main thing holding me back from doing full scale maps (intead of doing one bulding at a time which would take forever), is that I lack the tools needed to import all the objects in a map (and in the correct place), and the tool to import the terrain. So right now I can only really do a few buildings here and there. It still takes me awhile just to get the sun direction right. A tool to convert BF42's light directiion vector to 3DSMax cooridents would help out a lot!

Also the above map is 16 objects tops and I don't have to re-position them due to the way I chopped up the mesh.

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I have cameras in your head!

hell. If I could do everything in max I would. if you could basically turn max into a mapping tool I'd actually be able to map. (since since my computer somehow can't run bc OR E42 correctly, 3dsmax would be the perfect for mapping. I wonder If I could make a terrain object in 3dsmax, export it as a hight map and then I could use that same terrain mesh for mapping and placing objects, if only I could set up the X/y/z properly. hmm I need to look into this.

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The best part is that your not limited to a max of 512x512 sized lightmaps! I could go as high as I want. (I tried a lightmap 2048x2048 once. Worked good. But if all the objects had this sized map it would surely lag unless you got 1GB+ of video ram lol)

For a few buildings I'll do 1024x1024 (the M2 meshes will be using 256x256 sized lightmaps. I will post updated pics of the El Alamein night map buildings as I'm redoing them now.

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I have cameras in your head!

You can import terrain...you even can import the objects. Well, in a way. The tool imports the staticobjects.con and places small boxes in the accurate positions, one only has to "File/replace" them with the original objects.

Just use the ancient Rexman 3dsmax scripts for stuff like that. They were used by fine mappers to create the first lightmapped custom maps long before Battlecraft had it...they even grant the same advantages that count for OLMs...e.g. terrain illuminated by (static, of course) street lights or search lights and all that stuff.

Here's a link from the Interstate82 mod:
http://is82.com/dlm.php?item=410

Just extract the contents to your 3dsmax/scripts folder and then run them in the editor. Detailed readme is also in the rar.

One thing you have to keep in mind:
If you import the heightmap as a terrain object (which allows 3dsmax terrain lightmap rendering among others things), you have to scale the terrain object up by 1000 percent to make it "fitting". Only then all your imported staticobjects will be in the correct coordinates.

EDIT: Credits for all this go to fo0k, one of the "old gurus" who taught me how to do all this seven months ago as it was necessary to use the rexman tools for some specific HD maps I was doing back then as the BF LM generator wen't FUBAR with the HD maps.

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Kampagne XI - Vereinte Achsenmächte


xFire: wgpsenshi

thank you so much. everytime I've tried to find this the link was dead. I've tried it out and you've made my day senshi, once again!

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Thanks for that! I was looking all over for that too! (cause I only had the 2002 version and that didn''t have what I needed)

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I have cameras in your head!